Holiday arguments at the family gathering

Interesting article in Salon by Wil Wheaton, known to most of us as Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  He has his own blog, too.  (I know what you're thinking, "Doesn't everybody?")

His Salon piece is The real war on Christmas 12/22/05. But it's not specifically about the FOXists' huffing and puffing about the phony "war on Christmas".  It's about how his parents went from being affluent, laid-back liberal types when he was a kid to be hardline rightwingers, in part through the influence of Republican hate radio.

His family was getting ready to celebrate Christmas dinner early, when the Tookie Williams execution came up.  His father wound up pretty much loosing it, to read Wil's version:

"Well," I said, "I don't believe in the death penalty, so ..."

You know those optical illusion drawings, where you're looking at a smiling man, then suddenly he's become a werewolf? Faster than you could say "Fox News," my dad was screaming at me, Bill O'Reilly-style.

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! He killed four ..." - he stabbed at the air with four fingers on his left hand - "four people in cold blood and deserves! to! die!"

... While my dad continued to scream about biblical vengeance, I went into shock. Just minutes earlier, we'd stood together outside on the deck and laughed with each other as he congratulated me for a great finish I'd had the previous day at a poker tournament in Las Vegas. In fact, I'd cut my trip short, specifically so I wouldn't miss the family Christmas.

What a difference five minutes makes. While he screamed at me, I wanted to ask, "Who are you, and what have you done with the man who raised me to be tolerant, patient, peaceful and charitable?" Instead, I said, as calmly as I could, "Dad, I just don't believe in the death penalty. It is unevenly applied to poor people, and clearly doesn't work as a deterrent."

"It doesn't work as a deterrent because they allow these scum to stay alive for 25 years before they give them what they deserve!" I hadn't seen my dad this angry since I was asophomore in high school and my friends and I woke up my mom after midnight one night because we got a little worked up in a Nintendo game of "Blades of Steel."  ...

He violently shook his head at me and drew a deep breath. "The victims' families get to watch that animal die! If they don't get to watch him die, how can they get the closure they deserve?" Before I could reply, and he could launch into another round of talking points, I was unintentionally saved by my brother, who called our dad to come outside and help him with the turkey on the barbecue.

He turned quickly, and stormed out of the room, followed by my sister.

Now, as a general rule, I don't think it's really desirable to publicly describe contemporary family arguments in print - or even on blogs - in no small part because nobody really cares but the people involved and it bores everyone else.  But in this case, Wil's story isn't boring.  And it made me think about how political polemics trickle down to the living room.

Wil's take on that question in this case goes like this:

The thing is, though, I know better than to bring up politics with my dad. Ever since he started listening to talk radio for hours out of the day, he's slowly lost his ability to objectively look at the facts and draw his own conclusions. If Rush, Hannity, Dennis Prager or O'Reilly say it, my dad believes it as surely as he believes anything. Thanks to this abdication of rational thinking, both of my parents completely bought into the Swift Boat liars, still believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, and recently decided to move to Montana, which my mother described as "the real America" to me and my siblings. When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor, my mom's impression of him, having worked with him as a model in the 1960s, mysteriously transformed from "a steroid-shooting lech" to "a total gentleman, who was always taking his supplements, which were injected in those days."

Wil gives his story a happy ending, with the family having a happy and emotionally positive Christmas dinner and he and Dad making up and declaring their mutual love for each other.  Which makes it kind of a classic Christmas story.  The psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, Freud's friend and biographer, once wrote, "Psychologically [Christmas] represents the ideal of resolving all family discord in a happy reunion, and to this it owes its perennial attraction".

But I think Wil may be letting his father off too lightly in that article.  What he describes is verbally abusive, bullying behavior and a reaction seemingly all out of proportion to the situation.  It's possible to discuss issues about which people have strong feelings without resorting to this kind of thing.

I guess as time goes on, I get less and less generous about this way of acting.  I had an encounter in a business situation this past year where someone had a very similar reaction and started yelling and trying to browbeat me over an issue (not a political one).  I wound up just getting up and saying, "This is totally inappropriate and you're not going to deal with me in this way," and walked out.  Blowhard bullying behavior is just that, and I'm not inclined to put up with it.

But Wil's article made me think of the ways in which today's Republican celebrities, like O'Reilly and junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh and Crazy Annie Coulter, invite people to turn political stereotypes - often dishonest caricatures - into personal hostility.  And when the President himself calls Limbaugh a "national tresure", it tends to add to the dope fiend's credibility among loyal Republicans.

And when you've got the President himself saying in speech after speech that critics of his disastrous Iraq War policies are giving aid and comfort to The Terrorists - traitors, in other words - how can someone coming from that point of view even hope to have a civil conversation with someone on that issue who's not already drunk on the war Kool-Aid?

I mean, if someone tells you to your face you're a traitor, any appropriate response would have to include at least a couple of profanities and instructions on where to stick the insult.  Actually, a punch in the face would be an appropriate response, though I recommend not employing that one.  You could probably beat an assault charge by arguing that those were "fighting words", but why go to that hassle if you don't have to?

The truth is today's Republican Party has gone off the tracks in many ways.  And while they would say they are simply responding to alleged extremism on "the left", there is no remotely comparable level of demonization of ordinary Republicans on the part of Democrats.  Yes, we're critical of actual instances of treason, like Scooter Libby outing Valerie Plame as political retaliation against her husband, and like the even more serious leaking of signals intelligence to Iran.  But I haven't seen or heard even the most stridently critic of the Plame outing suggest that anyone who tries to defend Libby's actions are themselves traitors for doing so.

But that kind of charge has now become routine from the Presidential level all the way through the Republican Noise Machine.  And of course some of it winds up dripping into living rooms and crawling into family dinners.

I wish I had some kind of "can't we all get along?" suggestions.  Maybe if some of those allegedly "moderate" Republicans would publicly tell Bush and O'Reilly and Mr. OxyContin to shut the hell up with some of that kind of talk, that would be a start.

But I certainly can't recommend letting people think that call you a traitor (or some other crazy thing from the drughead fantasies of Rush Limbaugh) is normal or acceptable behavior.  Nothing good comes of that.

Oh, and back to Wil's father for a minute, I seriously doubt that attending an execution gives any of the victims' families any real emotional "closure".  And the kind of unrestrained "angry white people" rage that today's Republican Party promotes never gets any "closure".  They can always imagine traitors and scary black people and dangerous immigrants are coming to get them.