copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved
When I was a child, I loved to sit in my father's lap. I would put my head against his chest so I could listen to him talk. His voice sounded different coming through his body; it seemed both close and far away. I wonder if I thought it was his inner voice.
My Dad talked a lot and was an aggressive talker. Maybe listening to his voice through his chest softened it a little.
As the decades have gone by, my Dad and I have drifted apart. He has become more and more bullying. He has physically assaulted me. He has made it clear that the price of his aquaintance is complete aquiescance to his ideas and to his psychological domination. He has also become a member of the right wing religious army, Catholic version (although he never, to my knowledge, ever goes to Church).
It's not just me that my Dad has estranged. He has also estranged my three brothers. And one of my uncles told me - a few years back - that he did the same to all of HIS brothers, which I believe, since we hardly knew them growing up, or had much contact with them. So far as I know, I'm the only one my Dad has punched. I don't know what made me so 'special'.
My father could be unbelievably supportive too. When I returned from college, he let me stay at home for several years, paying only a percentage of my - minimal - income as room and board, so that I could paint. Those were crucial years in my development as an artist, and they would have been impossible without Dad. He took this picture of me painting:
copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved
Here's the picture I'm working on in the photo:
copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved
I used to sit in front of the bathroom mirror, painting portraits of myself over and over. One couldn't find a cheaper, more available and more patient model than oneself! But I wonder if I was trying to 'see' in myself what I had once 'heard' in my Dad: an inner voice.
When I was young, my father was intensely religious, but progressive politically AND religiously. He strongly supported the Civil Rights and antiwar movement and he admired people like Martin Luther King and Daniel Berrigan. He had wanted to become a priest himself and had gone to Catholic Seminary in the early fifties, but found the faith there too "dry" (to borrow a term from evangelican protestantism).
This drawing, although I think it was done by me at the behest of my Mom, represents the kind of 'liberal' religion my Dad seemed to have back then:
copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved
What changed him? What made my Dad become what I would call a right wing religious bigot and fanatic? I haven't talked to him in a couple of years, but last I knew, the only things he ever wanted to talk about were abortion and homosexuality, and in the vilest terms. Again, when I was young, social justice and peace were his preoccupations, at least as I recall. Now, as far as I can tell, my Dad is as strident a hawk as you could want!! He seems to have gone on a journey similar to the neocons, in some ways, from militant 'liberalism' to militant 'conservatism' (or to what I would call virulent right wing bigotry). As for social justice, I can't recall the last time my Dad said anything about social justice. Like so many right wingers today, for him, it's all about what he calls "personal responsibility", but which sounds to me more like fascistic lockstep.
What changed my Dad so drastically? My guess is that it started with the assasinations of the sixties, especially the assasination of King, and the resulting riots. I think these events created a lot of trauma in people, which only worked itself out over years, resulting in extreme and irrational political change for some. That's my pet theory, anyway. Yet, as late as the mid-seventies, my Dad was a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party and opponent of Richard Nixon. I made a little cartoon of Nixon that was published in the neighborhood newspaper. He loved it.
I think Dad was disappointed by the cultural changes of the seventies and eighties, the 'me' decades. I think this echoed an even deeper disappointment he felt in his career, his vocation. When father left the Seminary, he got drafted into the army. When he got out of the army, he studied sociology and became a professor of sociology. That didn't work out (there was a little controversey about the grades he gave to some football players), so he became a social worker in the Welfare Department. He worked out of an office connected to a huge public housing developement. I suspect he loved the work at first, because he felt it was really a way to help people. But over the years, he became more and more intensely aware of the flaws in the system, which I think he felt ended up being more about patronage than about helping people. Housing projects got built, which was great, but they weren't maintained as viable communities, either physically or socially. People were given foodstamps and other forms of assistance that helped diminish the direst poverty, but little was done to help people develope their capabilities and resources, so that they could leave poverty behind. His coworkers didn't seem to care about their clients, caseloads were ridiculous, and management only concerned itself with paperwork.
If you asked my Dad what changed him, I'm sure he would tell you that he hadn't changed at all, or that it was abortion, or that it was homosexuality and the "culture of death". The last time I talked to him, these were certainly the things he ranted about. But I don't believe that those were the real reasons. As far as I can tell, he doesn't know the first thing about homosexuality, beyond the common rw stereotypes (eg. all homosexuals are promiscuous). Abortion? He knows very well that the Clinton administration brought abortion rates down. "Culture of death"? Give me a break. He's turned from peacenik to chicken/hawk (yeah, he was in the army, but not in wartime - for him it was just a bad camping trip!)!
My father wanted his family, at least, to be very religious.
But he was oddly ambivalent about it, perhaps because his own faith was more ambivalent than he ever let on. He didn't like to go to Church much. When I was younger, we went every Sunday, but disillusionment set in for him, as it had in the Seminary. Ironically, the priests he seemed the most disappointed with, at that time, were priests that he would probably praise now! For example, there was an Old School priest who had gotten used to serving the Mass in Latin in pre-Vatican 2 days, and who made no effort to be understood by the Congregation when he served Mass after Vatican 2, even though Latin was no longer allowed. My Dad used to mock that old gentleman. Now, I suspect, he wouldn't go to a Mass if it wasn't a Latin Mass.
Later, in the early seventies, we had a young priest come to our parish who did crazy things, like preaching about the importance of environmentalism (about it being important to show our appreciation of the world-God-had-made). My Dad really liked him and was angry, as I recall, when he got booted out of the parish, apparently at the connivance of the older priest. Nowadays, it's the young environmentalist that I'm sure my father would disdain!
But, truthfully, we didn't pray much at home or do much Bible reading. Most of what we did do at home revolved around Easter and Christmas, both occasions that my parents did up grandly, with decorations and special goodies and thoughtful gifts. I can barely stand Easter and Christmas today, because I am painfully reminded of how beautiful they used to be. My Mom would set up the most beautiful Christmas Morning table you can imagine! She would cover the Christmas table with wrapping papers and only the MOST EXQUISITE would do! Then she would place cake plates in a row down the center of the table, six or seven of them, each of them used only for that special purpose. She baked the same assortment of fruitcakes and other cakes every year. The highlight of this march of the cakes was always the Stollen, a light and airy German fruitcake, dusted with snowlike powdered sugar. Colored plates and glasses, and beeswax candles and plates of cookies, all used just at Christmas, completed the picture.
But all that wasn't what made Christmas special for me, though it helped. The best part was Christmas eve. We would go to Midnight Mass as a family, and then when we got home, we would drink some cocoa and eat some buns, and then we would sing the Gospel story, all together, in Gregorian Chant style, followed by Christamas Carols, sung together. My Father had a beautiful voice, and he KNEW how to chant-sing! His warm, rich, tenor voice would open up like a flowing river when he sang religious songs, ESPECIALLY when he sang that Gospel. THAT, to me, was and is, religion; not the endless ranting about the "culture of death" that he indulges in now. I wonder if he even sings anymore? He lives with my sister and her children. I know that my sister feels the same way about religion and politics as he does. Maybe that sense of shared belief has rekindled his faith in a beautiful way.
But I wonder. I asked him once why we should believe in God (not because I don't believe in God, but because I wanted to hear his answer). He told me it was because human beings could not be good without the idea of God. He told me this long before I had ever heard of radio commentator Thom Hartmann, but it squares well with the difference Hartmann defines between 'liberals' and 'conservatives'. The latter, according to Hartmann, believe that human beings are inherently so bad, that without fear to keep them in line (be it fear of God, fear of the State, fear of the Corporation, fear of Mom and Dad, fear of all those things), they cannot be good.
Such an explanation of God, given to me by my Dad, makes me wonder if he EVER really had faith. It's a description of God as a kind of psychological/sociological trick. That and my Dad punching me one day, because I dared to openly express disagreement with him, are probably the two things that shocked me out of trying to live up to my Dad's ideals. I should, in a sense be grateful, for those traumas. He forced me to find my own path (and then, later, of course, was furious that I had my own path).
But when I'm in doubt about my own faith, one of the things that keeps me going is remembering the many supportive things my father has done for me, the way he believed in me as an artist when my self-confidence was flagging, and - above all - the way he sang. My Dad is not the only person who has been sucked into the dark vortex of right wing religous/social/political extremism. Arguably, that vortex is trying to suck-in the whole country. I don't know what the solution is; what the way forward is; what the way to heal is. But I do remember my Dad's beautiful singing and that gives me hope.
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