Sunday, June 21, 2009

Thanks, Daddy

I’m so lucky my Dad is still around and getting ready to mark his 80th birthday next month.

Let me tell you just a couple of things about him.

He worked in the same bank from a time before I was born until after I became a parent, but I think he’d rather have been a woodworker. He’s so careful with his carpentry projects that you’d think he was making each piece for royalty, and sometimes it’s just a house for a sparrow family. I think he loves every second of the process while he’s working; he doesn’t just love the satisfaction of having made something.

He can make anything. When I was eight or nine he made me a tiny kite of balsa wood and tissue paper, not bigger than an index card. We had to fly it with thread instead of string, and I remember him explaining to me that the tail had to be made of quarter-inch strips of cloth, everything in scale. The idea of balance among parts of a thing really struck me, and stuck with me. It was beautiful. It flew in almost no wind.

Daddy’s always reading, always had a great library. I read Huxley’s The Doors of Perception as a teenager, and Jane Eyre as a pre-teen because they were in his library. I was able to take the Pygmalion script to My Fair Lady when I was 10 because it was on the shelf at home. I’ve liked literary adaptations ever since.

He’s funny, and a horrible tease.

He’s realistic, and I think he tried to teach me to be. I’m not sure it worked. When I was maybe six or seven I asked him if a family could be so hungry that one person would start to chew a piece of meat, then pass it along to another family member while there was still some flavor in it. Daddy informed me that if the first chewer were that hungry, there would be no passing along.

Happy Fathers Day, Daddy. Many more.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Further adventures in the land of let’s pretend

I went off on a ramble about pretending a few weeks ago in commenting on Bill Moyer’s interview with David Simon.

The Holocaust Museum shooting this week made me think about pretending from a different angle—from the vantage point of conservatives who deny the evidence of systemic failures all around us. A thread runs through the thinking of a lot of political conservatives:

- The angry lone nut shooter isn’t influenced by the angry right mob
- Bernie Madoff is a bad apple; there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Wall Street
- Abu Ghraib minders were just bad apples

Systems failure is way too scary to contemplate. If patterns seem to emerge, the safest course of action is to look away so you can pretend it isn’t there. 

The Tea Partiers aren’t revolutionaries. Everything is just fine, or it would be if we could cycle back to 80s Reagan ideas, and deal with those pesky bad apples one on one.