the rix mix

I remember when I called my dad a "tory." It wasn't because of any one issue, but was my youthful assessment of his overall attitudes. Usually when he got angry his eyes would bug due to an overactive thyroid condition, you could easily imagine steam coming out of his ears. But his response was different; I had cut him to the quick. This Revolutionary War re-enactor, member of Lamb's Artillery attached to Morgan's Rifles in the Continental Army; a supervisor employed by the National Park Service at Washington's Headquarters in Morristown, looked hurt & sad. He understood exactly was I was saying; that temperamentally he would have sided with British power. I'd hit a nerve. I could not imagine Dad pledging his life, fortune (if he'd had one) & sacred honor to a revolutionary cause. But I also believe he would have been a Unionist (if not an abolitionist) during the Civil War. That conflict would have been an affront to his belief in orderly & cautious change. He was not in sympathy with radical revolutionary aims & claims, left or right. As conservative as he was - even bigoted within the walls of his home, as much as he despised anti-war demonstrators & hippies, he never sounded like a fascist, & I never called him one. He lived long enough to see Reagan elected, but he definitely did not come from the religious right base of the GOP.

Contrast this with the rabid Bush/Republican apologists. They rationalize the worst ineptitudes, idiocies, war-mongering, & assaults on the Constitution by the presidential junta; worse than that, they consider them always the correct actions. It takes no great leap to imagine them as Germans supporting Der Fuhrer as he & his Nazis cranked up the levels of terrible lunacy year by year, notch by notch until it was OK that one's Jewish neighbors lost their freedoms & livelihoods & ultimately their lives; as the mentally & physically handicapped were categorized as imperfectly Aryan, therefore expendable; they would have heil'd Hitler's radio speeches while Germany's treasure was poured into a military-industrial machine obviously designed for aggression. All the while quoting Christian scripture.

Thinking about this because every-so-often I chat on the phone with a super dittohead, have to steer the talk away from anything even slightly political, & regret how the Republican ascendency in 1994 & the vicious unending attacks on Bill Clinton brought her views into the "mainstream." It still astonishes & upsets me that someone I used to love being around considers presidential peccadillos, queer marriage, & "liberal media" to be worse than Iraq, New Orleans, or any of the other tragic debacles & incompetencies of the GWB era.

Labels: George W. Bush, growing up