i don't wanna be a dead man walking

daggers being phallic have pretty much always been a thing! like in romeo and juliet, where, after juliet finds romeo dead, juliet picks up romeo's dagger and says "o, happy dagger, this is thy sheath" and later capulet says

"O wife, look how our daughter bleeds! This dagger hath mista’en, for, lo, his house Is empty on the back of Montague, And it mis-sheathèd in my daughter’s bosom."

which has an in-your-face sexual interpretation (romeo's "dagger" being "mis-sheathed" inside juliet, said by the man who opposes their relationship on the basis of house) in addition to its actual plot relevance

or macbeth's whole deal with daggers and masculinity where lady macbeth basically says using his dagger against duncan would make him a man. ("When you durst do it, then you were a man; and to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man"). pair that with how phalluses were often associated with masculinity, and you can see the connection

it's not just a shakespearean concept alone. not at all, but i find those examples particularly apt because... you know

(in fact i'm kind of of the mind that the Act 2 Scene 1 dagger soliloquy in Macbeth definitely inspired the dagger verse in mama)

but even past that... just look at the visual storytelling of LLTBP. especially in the finale of both the US and LATAM tours: the proximity/intimacy between gerard and the clerk, the garish wielding of the dagger before it penetrates the victim, euphoric faces made by victim and perpetrator, a hug or kiss thrown in for funsies, followed by spurts of blood (bodily fluid) until the act is finished? (see this for like... the best example)

baby that's my daggerpenis and my bloodcum.

so if we work backwards (from the blood finale sex scene), if we assume other instances of the dagger's appearance also represents a phallus...

medical provider: I can perform that service. what is your name?

[Transcript:

And he was as good as his word. Two days before the Hammersmith Apollo show that opened The World Contamination Tour, you would have found Gerard in a luxury London department store buying everything in sight. "I fucking shopped my ass off," he told me enthusiastically. "I found this store called Selfridges. I had never been there. Dude, I lost my goddamn mind in there."

I asked him how much he spent, and he began to look sheepish. The rest of the band fell about laughing.

"I would say..." started Gerard, then began counting up purchases on his fingers. "Well, I got this jacket, I got that thing, I got that... I actually can't fucking say. It would be embarrassing! People would think I'm a dick. They'd go, 'This guy's a fucking sellout.' That's how much I spent."

The first photo is from 1956. It shows a Black woman watching members of the Ku Klux Klan (a terrorist, racist, far-right organization focused on white supremacy) walking along a sidewalk in Montgomery, Alabama (USA). I couldn't find the photo's author, but most sources state that it was taken in 1956.

The second photo shows members of the Patriot Front group (a white supremacist and nationalist group, formed in 2017, that openly advocates what they call "American Fascism") traveling on the subway during the 250th anniversary of the U.S. independence in Washington D.C., while a Black woman watches them. The photo is by photographer Cheney Orr, taken on July 4, 2026, 70 years after the first photo.

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."