I write today’s post from Washington, Iowa where my wife and I are visiting her extended family. Julia (maiden name Miksch) was raised on a farm in Grace Hill, a small Moravian community outside of Washington, and her three siblings have all remained in the state. Our two sons are flying in, Darien and his wife Betsy from Manhattan, Toby from the University of California at Davis. Thanksgiving this year is an opportunity for the clan to come together.
I confess that I have some trepidation about the gathering. Almost inevitably the older of Julia’s brothers will start baiting us about politics. The arrival of his liberal older sister from the east invariably triggers something within, and before we know it we are being told that Barack Obama is socialist. He couches his comments in jocularity but I always hear an edge.
I sometimes imagine us having the fight that occurs in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This one destroys the Christmas dinner as the company splits between Ireland’s conservative religious heritage and Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, recently deceased. Here’s an excerpt:
–God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion
before the world.
Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with
a crash.
–Very well then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for
Ireland!
–John! John! cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve.
Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled
up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the
air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside
a cobweb.
–No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God In Ireland.
Away with God!
–Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost
spitting in his face.
Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again,
talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of
his dark flaming eyes, repeating:
–Away with God, I say!
Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting
her napkin-ring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest
against the foot of an easy-chair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and
followed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently
and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage:
–Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!
The door slammed behind her.
Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on
his hands with a sob of pain.
–Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!
He sobbed loudly and bitterly.
Stephen, raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes
were full of tears.
The irony in this passage, of course, is that the group is gathering to celebrate the birth of the god of peace and love. In our case, ultimately Midwestern civility will prevail (no small thing) and we will deflect the conversation into other channels.
The interesting thing is that, as much as I disagree with him, I know that my brother-in-law is the man you want passing by when your car has broken down. He works tirelessly for the health of his community, and when his hometown of Cedar Rapids was flooded, he threw himself into the clean-up. Like many Americans, his views don’t seem to square with his actual behavior.
Sometimes I have a sense that ideological politics is like an invasive plant species, something that, while it doesn’t altogether push out native growth, nevertheless puts it under siege.
I imagine responding to Charlie’s baiting with something like the following: “Even in these tough economic times, we have so much in this country to be thankful for that we shouldn’t be letting political rhetoric divide us. Let’s cut through ideological posturing and frustrated rants and figure out how we can ‘step beyond the face of fear,’ to quote my colleague Lucille Clifton. Americans are often at their best when they come together to pragmatically solve communal problems so let’s get pragmatic.”
Of course, conversations never go as one anticipates. I’ll report tomorrow on what happens.
