Where have all the grownups gone? Part 3, Children

And what were the children doing, all the while? That's the most important question, isn't it?

To recap, the larger question I am exploring in this series is how to explain the massive cultural shift in America that became visible during the 1960's. I have taken, as one particular thread in that tapestry, the changing expectations and representations of adulthood. My answer is that our social and cultural expectations stopped short, because a generation of parents neglected to explain them to their children; and that the reason they failed to pass on these inherited values is that they were shocked into silence by the Second World War. In Part One I posed the question, and explained why the War is the only explanation that fits the timeline. In Part Two, I used two classic movies (The Best Years of Our Lives and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) to show how the War affected the men who fought in it, and how their reintegration into civilian society suffered accordingly. The remaining question is, What was it like to be raised as a child of such men? Let's look at that now.

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Rebel Without a Cause is a movie about fatherlessness, or about the damage done by failed or absent fathers. The three main characters—Jim Stark, Judy (no surname given), and "Plato" Crawford—all suffer in that respect. 

• Jim's father (Frank) is weak, and is chronically pushed around by his wife (Carol, Jim's mother) and his own mother (just called Mrs. Stark).
• Judy's father is cold and stern, and pushes away any affection from his daughter while still lavishing affection on her younger brother. (It is strongly implied that his coldness is a defense to keep his daughter at arm's length now that she is sexually attractive.)
• Plato's father abandoned the family when Plato was a toddler, and Plato's mother is frequently absent. Plato is raised by the housekeeper.
• There is exactly one character who acts the way a good father ought to act: Police Inspector Ray Fremick, who focuses on juvenile crime and who tries to steer these three in the right direction when he meets them. But of course for him it's a job; and at one point when Jim desperately needs him, he's tied up with another case.

Comparing this context briefly with the two movies we considered in Part Two, there are certain basic consistencies. Nobody mentions the War. But Jim, Judy, and Plato are all teenagers; if the movie is set in present time (1955) then it's possible that these characters should have been born somewhere in the years between, let's say 1938-1942. Their fathers—at any rate, Jim's and Judy's—might have been young men* before the War, who shipped out leaving wives and infants behind.** We are explicitly told that Plato's father abandoned the family, so perhaps he was in business and already beyond draft age; it hardly matters, because he is simply not there. One interesting touch is that Tom Rath (in Grey Flannel Suit) is offered an impressive promotion that would require him to work and travel all the time, at the cost of never coming home. He turns it down so that he can spend time with his family. If he had accepted it, his children might have grown up something like Plato.

What do these children do, in the absence of any parental attention or direction? They get into all manner of trouble. But what's heartbreaking is to realize what they want, which is a simple and ordered family life: the kind of family lives they might have had in reality if Jim's father had been strong, if Judy's father had been loving, and if Plato's father had been there. The three of them spend a lot of time wandering around together, or staying out late at night—again, because no one is supervising them. And they end up creating a kind of replacement family unit of their own: Jim as father, Judy as mother, and Plato as child. 

It doesn't last. It all goes badly wrong. And it was never a terribly detailed "family" anyway—more a hint, or a gesture, or a wish than anything solid. But the game they play with each other is, in its evanescent and vestigial way, just what Joan Didion said a decade later about the games at Haight-Ashbury: "the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum."*** 

As I said, nobody in Rebel ever mentions the War. But the fathers in this movie are shut off from their children—inaccessible in any meaningful way even when they are physically present. If their inaccessibility wasn't caused by the War, it could have been. I bet dollars to donuts that Al and Homer and Fred from The Best Years, and Tom from Gray Flannel Suit, end up just as inaccessible to their own children.

And, as we can see, it's a hell of a way to grow up.

The Graduate (1967)

And so we come to The Graduate, these days possibly the most famous film of the four. It was released in December, 1967. Only a few months before was the Summer of Love, the exact time that Joan Didion wrote about in the passage I quoted in Part One (or immediately above). In terms of the question I have been pursuing, this is Ground Zero, The Thing To Be Explained. Everything else builds up to this.  

I'm not going to summarize the plot. Odds are high that everyone reading this knows the story of Benjamin Braddock and Mrs. Robinson and her daughter Elaine. But I want to look at the fathers in this story, and at what they taught their children.

Ben is a little younger than the main characters of Rebel. If he is a college graduate in 1967, then he was likely born in the first couple of years after the War ended. Could his father, Mr. Braddock—and Braddock's business partner, Mr. Robinson—have fought in the War, and then built a thriving law practice in the twenty years after, while Ben was growing up? Sure, maybe. It's entirely possible. And it would be consistent with the story I am telling, because all we ever hear from these men is superficial.

Mr. Braddock is proud of Ben's successes in college because … success is good, and Ben's successes reflect well on him. He buys Ben a deep sea diving outfit that Ben will obviously never use or want because … it shows off that he can afford it, I guess. He wants Ben to "take stock of himself" and go get a good job because … well, that's what you do after college. Isn't it? Nowhere in all this is there any kind of explanation that reaches beyond the action itself. 

• He might have said that Ben's successes in a particular activity in college (pre-med, pre-law, journalism, debate, even football) were good because they would prepare him to take on that activity as an adult. 
• He might have bought Ben a graduation present that Ben would have liked, or that he could have used pragmatically in his young adulthood.
• He might have said that Ben needs to get a job because the world is a hard and dangerous place, and the possibility is ever-present for poverty and ruin. 
• Or he might have acknowledged that he has been fortunate enough to provide Ben and his mother a comfortable living, but Ben now has a duty to the family (and his own family-to-be!) to go out and do likewise. 

But he doesn't. He probably doesn't even know why he finds important the things he finds important. He has obviously never reflected on them, and he doesn't remember what he was taught back when he was a boy. He remembers that certain things are important, but not why. He has forgotten the melody that ties the words together.

Mr. Robinson is just as shallow. He urges Ben to "sow a few wild oats" without ever thinking what that might mean in reality. Then when he discovers Ben's affair with his wife, he divorces her. Why? That's what you do, I guess. It's not that Mrs. Robinson is wracked with lovesickness over losing Ben, and it's not that he thinks Ben will try to steal Mrs. Robinson. Ben says as much. There is certainly no risk that Mrs. Robinson will bear a child to Ben. Nor is it that Mr. Robinson thinks of sex as a high and sacred thing that has to be restricted to marriage, or he wouldn't have encouraged Ben to sow some wild oats. (More pointedly, he and his then-girlfriend wouldn't have conceived Elaine in the back seat of a Ford, so that they then had to get married.) Again, all the reasons that might drive his actions are missing. But he remembers that "this is what you are supposed to do."

What does this mean for how Ben and Elaine were raised? They were taught isolated things, with no context. They were taught "this is what you do" but with no reasons. They learned the words, but not the music. Or, to quote Didion again, their parents "had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game [they] happened to be playing."**** Their parents were inaccessible to them in all but the most superficial ways while they grew up, and so all they learned—all they were taught—were superficialities.

And Ben says as much. When he takes Elaine out for a hamburger, he tries to explain to her how confused he feels. And he expresses it perfectly. “It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.” 

That's it. That's it exactly. A few of the rules are still remembered, as a kind of cargo-cult left over from the pre-war period. But they hang in the air. None of the social or cultural infrastructure that supported them remained. And without that infrastructure, without the thousands of implicit assumptions that supported the whole pre-war way of life, none of the rules made any sense. 

When the rules make no sense, they are easy to ignore and to sweep away. And something else takes their place. Grownups are replaced by old dudes.

And so the Sixties left us with a brand new world.

__________

* Or at any rate not old men.  

** In fairness, Frank Stark (Jim's father) wouldn't have been young when the War broke out. The part was played by Jim Backus, who was born in 1913 and therefore was 42 when he made Rebel. But by that same math he was only 28 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and there must have been soldiers as old as 28. So it is not impossible that Jim's dad could have been a veteran, even though nothing is said about it.  

*** Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, 1981), p.127.  

**** Ibid.           

           

Where have all the grownups gone? Part 2, Parents

In Part One, I argued that the sharp cultural discontinuity which became visible during the Sixties was caused by a generation of parents not talking to their children, and in particular not teaching them all the behaviors and expectations that had formerly made up the fabric of society. And I further suggested that the reason a whole generation of parents fell silent is that they were traumatized by the Second World War. But how did that really happen in practice? I hear you ask. Sure, it's a clever idea. But anyone can come up with a clever idea, and this one sounds almost too clever by half. Are you trying to say that one morning in 1946 all the adults in the country became Trappists?

No, of course not. But it's a fair question, and one that I think it is easier to answer by showing than by telling. Fortunately, there are movies which do exactly that.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

The Best Years of Our Lives follows three recently-discharged servicemen as they try to reintegrate into civilian life in the fictional Midwestern town of Boone City. Al Stephenson is a bank executive who served in the infantry, rising to the rank of sergeant. Homer Parrish is a high-school athlete who served in the Navy and lost his hands; the Navy replaced them with hooks. Fred Derry is a drugstore soda jerk who proved to be a talented bombardier in the Army Air Corps; consequently he was commissioned as an officer with an officer's pay.

All three have trouble re-entering civilian society. The war has changed them, and they no longer fit where they fit before. What is more, no one in civilian society understands them at all: nether what they went through during the war, nor who they are now. 

• Al, the banker, approves a loan to a man with no collateral, and is chastised by his superior at the bank. Al explains that he was used to putting his life and those of his men in the hands of others, and so developed a pretty keen sense of who deserves trust and who doesn't. He assures his superior that this man is good for the loan, and the matter is settled … but not really, of course.
• Homer left a sweetheart back home when he shipped out, and now he can't believe that she still wants to marry him when he no longer has hands.
• Fred suffers from PTSD flashbacks at night, and the only job he can find is his old job at the drugstore. But that pays less than a third what he made as a bombardier. Also his wife (whom he married on a fling just before shipping out) is disappointed in him and wants the freedom she had during the war, while she could spend his pay without having him underfoot. 

The movie is masterfully made. The characters are real and believable; the situations are honest. If you haven't seen it yet, do. But what is important in this context is to see the massive gulf between the servicemen and civilian society. On the one hand, the civilians flatly cannot understand the minds of the servicemen. For their part, the servicemen understand civilian life in a manner of speaking, because they used to live there too; but they have no respect for it. They can't take it seriously. After what they have been through, the things that civilian society finds important look petty and artificial and childish. 

But they can't say this openly, of course. They might not even articulate to themselves that this is why they are so ill at ease. But ill at ease they certainly are, all of them. And while the movie gives us hope that they will each find a way forward, it gives us no reason to think that anyone will understand them any better in the future. 

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was made ten years after The Best Years of Our Lives. The protagonist is Tom Rath, but he might as well be Al or Homer or Fred. His experience of the War was at least as bad as theirs.

Tom Rath lives in suburban Connecticut. He has a house, a wife, and three children. His income isn't large enough, and he is trying to advance in his career. He never talks about the War unless asked directly, and sometimes not even then. It's as if he has put that whole experience in a box in the attic, where he never has to look at it.

Except that he, too, suffers from PTSD flashbacks, and not just at night. We see him one morning taking the train into work, when some loud noise on the tracks startles him and suddenly he is in the middle of a memory of battle. He remembers the 17 men he killed. He remembers the death of his best friend. In fact, we see clearly in the scene that Tom himself was (by accident) responsible for his friend's death; and yet in his conscious mind Tom never seems to recognize this.

In one sense we don't see the same overt incomprehension from the civilian world that we see in The Best Years, because Tom Rath never tries to be understood. He never opens the box. Except once. While he was fighting in Italy, when he never knew whether the next day might be his last, he had an affair with an Italian girl. Through a remarkable series of coincidences, he discovers that she is still alive, that she had a son by him, and that she badly needs money. He tells his wife about the affair, because he wants to send the girl some money to get by. And his wife is furious. She cannot understand how he could do such a thing. She judges him entirely by the standards of respectable peacetime behavior. And she runs off into the night. 

In the end Tom and his wife are reconciled. And there are many more subplots. This is a long movie, and a lot happens. But the key for my purposes is to look at the character of Tom Rath himself. The classic pose from the movie, as in the picture here, shows him standing stock still at parade rest: suit immaculate, hat on, jacket buttoned. It is easy to imagine that this is what Al and Homer and Fred from The Best Years will look like in ten years' time. They and Tom will take care of business; they will do what has to be done. When confronted with the myriad subtle rules that form the fabric of civilian society, they will comply with the ones that aren't too much trouble; they might quietly ignore the ones they find particularly stupid. But they won't accept any of it uncritically, nor are they likely to reflect critically—on their experience or on society itself. They will do their duty and keep the rest of it tightly buttoned up. Closed in a box in the attic.

That's how the War trained a generation of men to live silently. In Part 3, I'll talk about how this silence affected their growing children.    

         

Where have all the grownups gone? Part 1, The End of the World

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time ago.

Where have all the flowers gone?

The girls have picked them every one.

Oh, When will you ever learn?

Oh, When will you ever learn?

—"Where have all the flowers gone?" by Pete Seeger

For the last forty years, at least, I have heard people grumble that "we"—our culture, our society, our country, or some other large group too big for any single one of us to be personally responsible for them—just don't have grownups any more, the way we used to. I can't tell you for sure where I first heard the complaint: the first source that I remember was an essay by Joseph Epstein, writing as "Aristides" in The American Scholar, in the autumn of 1986:

"Act your age," mothers would say to their children when I was a boy. [Epstein was born in 1937.] "Be a man," fathers would exhort their sons. "Aw, grow up," older sisters and teenage girlfriends would exclaim. In fact, growing up didn't seem like a bad idea. A goodly number of grown-ups walked the streets in those days. Think only of the movies. Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, James Cagney—these were men who appeared on screen in suits and ties, hats, black shoes. Grown-ups. Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford—these are men who, at the same age as Robinson, Bogart & Co., one thinks of as characteristically in jeans, sneakers or boots, loose collars. Graduate students. One could make a similar comparison of actresses. Compare Bette Davis and Jane Fonda, Ingrid Bergman and Meryl Streep. All are fine actresses, but the former are women, the latter girls who continue to grow older. Nowadays there aren't so many grown-ups—just a lot of older dudes. It is, apparently, what the culture calls for just now. I happen to be writing this in a short-sleeve rugby shirt, chino pants, and tasseled loafers. I'm an older dude myself.* 

Now, 1986 was a long time ago but the point has not faded away. I have read it again and again, over time, most recently this January in an article by Katherine Boyle for The Free Press.** She used more recent examples than Epstein did, instancing Sam Bankman-Fried*** instead of Harrison Ford, and contrasting "the tens of millions of Americans that are, like me, millennials or members of the generation just younger, Gen Z, [who] have been treated as hapless children our entire lives," with a putative Boomer gerontocracy that refuses to relinquish the reins of adulthood to anyone else. But it's the same basic complaint. People who should be old enough to act like adults (when you count out their ages on a calendar) nonetheless act like children, present themselves as children, and are treated as children. 

(Here's yet another piece making the exact same point, this time incidentally in support of a larger discussion of the war in Ukraine.)

It's important to recognize that this is not just traditional generational griping. This is not just one more time that the Old Folks start grumbling about how "kids nowadays" don't show the proper respect. Boyle identifies herself as a millennial; her profile on LinkedIn does not list a single job experience earlier than 2010. From the other side of the divide Epstein, after explaining that he was raised with a clear ethic of adulthood, concedes that at the time of writing he was dressed down just like the actors he pegged as "graduate students." The point is, rather, that people in their twenties or thirties or forties carry themselves differently—act and are acted upon differently—than people of those ages used to do, and that the change has been abrupt enough to catch our attention.

Another way to visualize this shift is to reflect that Abraham Lincoln entered the White House when he was 52; Franklin Roosevelt, when he was 51. Notwithstanding all the changes in our country between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both men entered upon their responsibilities with a certain, simple adult gravitas. When Bill Clinton was 52, he was impeached by the House of Representatives; and while opinions may differ about the political or moral merits of the impeachment, I don't remember anyone accusing Clinton of much gravitas at the time.

Or perhaps it's enough to watch grown adults singing "I don't want to grow up; I'm a Toys-R-Us kid!" in a commercial from the 1990's. Thirty seconds on YouTube can summarize many pages of social commentary.

So what changed?

That's really the question I want to address here. That something did change, I take as given: my examples are meant not to prove anything, but just to show or indicate what kind of change I am talking about. But the cause? That's more elusive.

Usually when people write about this change they blame the Sixties. But what does that mean? Yes, this country experienced a Kulturkampf during the 1960's; and yes, many of the changes that I am describing became visible then. But when we blame "the Sixties" for these changes, what specific elements do we identify as causes?

• Music?
• Drugs?
• Television?
• Birth control?
• Political protest?
• An unpopular war?
• The Civil Rights movement?
• Or shall we join Allan Bloom in blaming imported German philosophy?

You can make an argument for any of these, I suppose. Probably, as you go down the list, for each point in turn you can find someone who has argued that it is The Real Cause That Made Everything Change. But to me they all look like symptoms. 

• Yes, Sixties youth listened to a certain kind of music that their parents didn't care for; but there had been musical fads before (jazz and big band in the twentieth century, or Romantic music in the nineteenth) and they never turned grownups into children.
• Yes, some people took drugs. But honestly, there weren't that many people who took a lot of them. And why should pot or acid change social expectations more profoundly than bourbon or corn silk?
• America has had a long history of political protests, including opposition to unpopular wars. (Remember that in 1812, New England was a hotbed of opposition to "Mr. Madison's War.") Whatever other effects they had, and sometimes those effects were sweeping, none of them were like this.
• We have even experienced waves of new philosophies that leapt out of the ivory towers to spark the popular imagination: Transcendentalism, New Thought, and Pragmatism to name only three. Again, the results were nothing like this. 

In fact, the longer I look at it the more I think that the social change which became visible in the Sixties was sui generis. We have had social changes before, but none like this. Somewhere along the line, an old world ended and a new world was born.

How does a world end? In many ways. But the simplest way for a world to end is through silence. Social attitudes are passed on from parents to children, after all, largely through speech. Parents and other adults talk to children, communicating directly and indirectly what is acceptable and what is not. But this means that if adults ever stop talking to their children, the continuity of cultural transmission is broken. All it takes is one generation of silence to break the chain. What's more, the break need not take place in all families. As long as it happens in enough families to generate a critical mass, a new world can be born and the others will be carried along by the tide.

This is exactly Joan Didion's diagnosis of what lay behind the Haight-Ashbury scene in the summer of 1967.

We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.****

Fine, so for two decades parents somehow forgot to tell their children how to live their lives. That still doesn't answer Why? What trauma could have been so bad that it stunned an entire generation of parents into silence? What event could have been so destructive that it constituted The End of the World?

There is only one possible answer in that time frame, only one gash across our history so destructive and so traumatic that it could have had anything like this effect. The End of the World has to have been the Second World War.

In Parts Two and Three, I will sketch out the concrete steps by which this change took place, by paying close attention to four classic movies that tell the story. 

__________

* Joseph Epstein (credited as Aristides), "An Older Dude," The American Scholar, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Autumn 1986), pp.439.    

** Katherine Boyle, "It’s Time to Get Serious," The Free Press, January 17, 2023, https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious. (URL captured on Sunday, August 6, 2023.) 

*** In fairness, Bankman-Fried would not even be born until six years after Epstein published his article.      

**** Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, 1981), p.127.               

          

When people think you're a creep

My father has a bit of a problem in social groups, because he makes out-of-line suggestive comments to women and pats them when he shouldn't.  He doesn't do this all the time, of course, but it's a behavior that people notice, especially when (like his in-laws, my mother's family) they see him over and over.  And I think it has cost him some friends over the years.

I'm always a little cautious about bringing the subject up, because ... well, hell, he's still my father and I love him in spite of his faults.  But sometimes he brings it up himself, usually when one of my aunts or cousins has finally had enough and tells him off; then afterwards he asks me about it because he genuinely doesn't understand that he did anything wrong.  "Hosea, what on earth was she so upset about? She couldn't possibly have minded anything I said, could she?"  And I try to find some tactful way of saying, "Well yes, in fact, you're lucky she just yelled at you instead of slapping your face or suing you."

Often I try to talk about how times have changed from when he was a young man in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  I tell him that back then, you could say those sorts of things and get away with them.  (I don't really know if that's true, but "Mad Men" has convinced me that the bar for what you could say in public was a lot lower back then.)  He listens and nods appreciatively while I talk about the huge social changes since then, but he doesn't change his behavior.  (In the back of my head I have thought to characterize it another way -- viz., that he acts like his social cues were frozen at about the age of fifteen. But I don't say that out loud, for reasons I have already mentioned above.)

But a few months ago, while I was looking for something else on the Web, I stumbled across a link that seemed just perfect.  It was to an advice column where two different people had written independently asking how to handle guys in their respective social circles who behaved a lot like my dad.  I should add that most of what they describe is more extreme than the things my dad has done when I've been around to witness him personally.  But there is a close "family resemblance" between the behaviors that I thought might help him understand what people were getting at.  So I forwarded him the link, which is this here:

http://captainawkward.com/2012/08/07/322-323-my-friend-group-has-a-case-of-the-creepy-dude-how-do-we-clear-that-up/

I framed my e-mail in terms of social change, but the point was to get him to follow the link.  Well he did, and his reply was uncharacteristically brief:

Was I that bad?

I wasn't quite sure how to answer that.  What I strongly suspected, though, is that he would try to steer the conversation in the direction of arguing, "The accusations are false: I never did any of those bad things."  And I wanted to get him to see that in interpersonal relationships, that question isn't particularly useful.  So I wrote:

I have no idea.  I wasn’t there.  All I know is that often things look very different from one person’s point of view than they do from another.  So you should really be asking two different questions: …

Was I really that bad?Answer: I don’t know, because I wasn’t there.
Did I really look that bad to these other people?Answer: I don’t know because I didn’t ask them.
But what is absolutely, fundamentally critical is to see that these are totally different questions, which means that it is entirely possible for the answer to the first one to be No and the second one to be Yes (or vice versa, of course) … and that this mis-match between the answers does not necessarily involve any bad faith or lying or hypocrisy or dishonesty on anybody’s part.  It really, truly is possible for appearances to be genuinely, honestly that different, depending on whose eyes you are looking through.

It’s weird but true.

For that reason I am always very reluctant to speak for somebody else or to tell you what somebody else’s opinion probably was.

On the other hand – for exactly the same reason – if someone complains to me about my doing something bad that I know for a fact I didn’t do, I work very hard not to get mad but to remind myself, “Somehow he misunderstood something that I did so that it looked that way to him. So even though I know I didn’t do what he says I did, it is up to me to figure out what I can do to correct his misapprehension. Why is it up to me, when he’s the one that is wrong? Just because if I don’t do it, there’s damned sure nobody else on the planet that’s gonna do it for me. So it really doesn’t matter if it’s fair or unfair … it’s still up to me to take his report as accurately representing what he thinks he saw and therefore to do what I can to help him see the truth next time.”  It’s not easy and it’s not fair, but personally I have never found any other option that works.

Just for what it’s worth.  Your mileage may vary.

His next answer was almost as short as his last one.  For my father, this is really saying something.  If he's not going on at length (kind of the way I do), you can guess he is uncomfortable.

So either I:

a) join a twelve-step program so I can "make amends" to all who say I've wronged them;

b) move to a new town and start over;

c) become a stand-up comic and get paid for saying outrageous shit;

d) [fill in suggestion here].

Sorry, Dad, but that's a bullshit answer and you knew it was when you wrote it.  You're not taking the discussion seriously; you're just trying to look oppressed.  No, of course I didn't say that.  What I wrote instead was:

Or none of the above.  It’s a free country.

(b) is too much trouble.  (c) is appealling, but a lot of work and even then the odds against striking fame and fortune are huge.  And (a) is an exaggeration designed to make the whole conversation look absurd.  But heck, even that is more work than you need to go to.  Just delete this e-mail and don’t answer it, and look at all the trouble you’ve saved yourself.  As I say, it’s a free country.

All that I am suggesting here is that it is better to understand what is going on than it is to be shoved around by events that make no sense to you.  It’s better to understand the people you are with so that you can interact with them on purpose and get the reactions you are looking for, rather than acting at random and having them react in ways that baffle you.  It’s better to see what is coming than to be blindsided.  That’s all.

Also, understanding someone else means understanding him (or her) on his own terms, from his own point of view.  Saying, “Well yeah, I understand that Fred is a malicious asshole who has been conspiring against me for no reason since Day One,” is not really understanding Fred; it is, rather, a refusal to understand him.  You can do that if you want, of course, but personally I don’t find it very satisfying.

If you do get to the point of understanding the other fellow on his own terms, then after that you can do pretty much whatever you feel like.  Maybe this means changing nothing at all … but in that case it will be with full knowledge of what it looks like to the other guy, so you have to decide if you are comfortable with looking like that.  Or maybe it means handling it the way you’d handle it if you accidentally trod on someone’s toe … call him up informally and say “Ooops, I had no idea I was stepping on your toe. Ouch, I bet that hurts. Hope you’re all right and all that.”  Or maybe … gosh, I dunno.  You’re a creative guy; use your imagination.  But when you ask somebody else (like me) to tell you what to do about it – even in a joking form by listing choices (a), (b), (c), and (d) – that implicitly means playing a role and asking which script you should use.  Don’t do that.  Don’t play a part.  Don’t act.  Rather, if you get to the point where you really can see things from the other guy’s point of view, then do what you really, honestly – in real life, not by putting on a character – feel the most comfortable (or least uncomfortable) doing.  If you forget about all the couldas-wouldas-shouldas, if you stop thinking about what other people want you to pretend to be, if you silence all the noise in your mind that distracts you on a daily basis and keeps you from focussing … you might surprise yourself with what you come up with.

In any event, do what you want.  My only advice is that sometimes you might have to think about it a while to be able to see what it is you really want.

I truly meant the part about "Do what you want."  I do think -- and this may be the only line in the whole post that has any obvious resonance with classical thought -- that there is something universal about our knowledge of what is good.  If my dad -- if any of us -- can just cut the crap for a minute, the odds are very good that what he (or we) really wants to do will actually line up with what is right.

Of course, "cutting the crap" is a lot harder than it sounds.  But it really is the main thing.

Don't explain -- just apologize!

Oh, I'm sorry I interrupted you. I just didn't want us to get involved in some long pointless discussion that went nowhere."

"I'm sorry if that joke offended you. I didn't think you were one of those hyper-sensitive people that have no sense of humor."

"Oh no, I'm so sorry about spilling all that soup on your brand-new dress, but I had no idea how hot the bowl was and when Fred handed it to me he just thrust it at me like, 'Here, take your soup!' and so I grabbed it to get out of the way but it just scalded my hand, and besides my wrist has never been the same since I fell on it three weeks ago because you know I have these dizzy spells ...."

"Sorry you didn't appreciate that pat on the ass. I didn't realize you were a lesbian."

Translation (in all four cases): I'm not sorry.

Apologizing is a painful thing to do, especially when we know we are in the wrong. But that's why it is so important. That's why it works.  If I've hurt somebody and I want him to get over being mad at me, I apologize precisely because it is a little humiliating. It's my way of telling him, "Look, I feel so bad about what I did that I hurt too. And I'll gladly abase myself (at least a little bit), and put up with the suffering that it causes, if it can reconcile us." The way he knows that I mean it when I say I'm sorry -- the way he knows that I'm not just parrotting the words -- is that if I do it right it costs me something. It makes me hurt. And I wouldn't make myself hurt unless I meant it.

But of course I don't want to hurt. Nobody does. And so at the same time that my better self is admitting to fault and apologizing for it, there's another little voice in my head that will do anything possible to deflect the blame. Part of me will gladly admit to having been a shit if that will reconcile me to my friend; another part of me compulsively wants to prevent anybody from getting the idea that I was being a shit. So while one part of me magnanimously apologizes, this other little voice quickly slips in an explanation or excuse that somehow it really wasn't my fault.

It's almost overpowering, this desire to deflect blame. It takes all my conscious awareness and deliberate self-control to make myself shut up after saying the words "I'm sorry," ... to make myself stand silent rather than launch into a dozen different explanations of what I was really trying to do and who really jostled my arm at just the wrong moment and how it really wasn't my fault after all. Because that's what I want to say.

But saying it voids the apology. If it wasn't really my fault, then my apology is just hot air. And if -- as it usually turns out -- my friend can see damned well that it really was my fault all along, the explanation does nothing at all except to let him know, "I'm not willing to feel bad over what I did to you. Too bad for you and all that, but it's not my problem. Take a hike."

And a lot of the time that's worse than the original hurt.

The bottom line is easy to spell out, but oh so hard to do. If you screw up and hurt somebody, don't make it worse than it already is. Don't rub salt in the wound. Don't explain. Just apologize. And then shut up.

Remember, I never said it was easy.