More than 50 years ago, when I took a political science course, we were told and shown that the best indicator of someone’s political party was what both of their parents were.
Then came the Civil Rights Act and the Vietnam War. The war party under JFK and Johnson became the antiwar party. The party that built the Jim Crow laws and championed segregation in the South suddenly switched and supported the Civil Rights act, so the entire South shifted to Republicans, and the Nixon Southern Strategy kicked into gear.
The ’60s were political chaos accentuated by assassinations, race riots and growing people power in the form of mass demonstrations that would dwarf the civil rights marches of the ’50s and easily that of the Klu Klux Klan’s 1925 30,000-man march in the capital.
There was no unity of thought in my house. Mom, when she was there, was apolitical in a New Yorker sort of way with a concern for the common folk but not into politics, though she always voted mostly for liberal mainstream candidates.
Dear ol’ Dad, technically my stepdad, was an anti-political guy who could not stand ‘the system’ and protested by not voting. As a scientist he harked on competition as being wasteful of the scarce resources of trained minds in the face of massive unknowns of the workings of the universe around us.
He wanted to see solved all the mysteries of the causal relationships of everything from left-handedness in sea turtles to the warping of the time-space continuum in gravitational tornadoes. Knowledge, the truth and facts were everything. Working always at your best not because of rewards (the corrupting influence of capitalism, as he would say) but because to not do your best was a betrayal of your fellow humans.
When I pointed out that for a Jewish agnostic (sometimes atheist) he sounded a lot like he had the Protestant work ethic down-pat with its declaration of the sinfulness of sloth, mediocrity and underachieving, I was then subjected to lectures on the variations of Christian dogma along with a strongly suggested guide to further knowledge in his typically loud demonstrative way as he would shuttle back and forth from the bedroom to the living room to lay another round of five-minute rapid one-way lectures on the subject.
It was never wise to use a broad label such as Christianity or communism around him; the world was detailed, having distinct aspects separate within all things. I remember trying to turn the tables on him, when I dissected his collective views by going over the political spectrum from Bakunin anarchistic socialists to Marx to Lenin through Trotsky and Mao and using the same Battleship Row technique of rolling into his bedroom to unload a salvo on a point, then leave and finally coming to the conclusion that the best description was that he was a Stalinist.
The “conversation” did not end well, but as a 12-year-old I survived, though my hearing was impaired for a few hours. I never won an argument with my dad.
As a brilliant renaissance man, fluent in five languages and learning Chinese when he died in 1972, he never had common sense. The mystery of cooking TV dinners was beyond him, and he would simply toss them on the gas stove and turn the fire on, resulting in a heated meal, sort of.
Of course, the edges where the potatoes and those green food things were always were cold. I was 11 before I learned that TV-dinner mashed potatoes were supposed to be hot. Yet in every critical stage of the brief 18 years we had, when my mom left, when the world was suddenly unbearably beyond my dealings, he was not only there, but miraculously he made every right decision by me.
Never the touchy-feely sort of fellow and from the era where men just did not tell their sons that they loved them, he is still missed. And yes, Dad, you were a Cotton Mather sort with Stalinist tendencies who never learned to cook, but I still miss you.
Edi Birsan is the mayor of Concord.