My Father Was Not a Douche Bag

My father was a conservative Republican, and he worked selling real estate for 40 years, but he was almost nothing like the pack of swinging Richards that I have the misfortune to have cast my lot with. I work at a futures brokerage house in Chicago, which is probably a lot like working in the real estate industry in California during the boom times of the 1950’s through the 70’s, when my dad enjoyed his salad days, except that it is not the 1950’s, and to be a right wing free-marketeer today is nothing like what it meant to be a conservative like my Dad.

My desk is at one end of “the war room”, as the floor full of traders staring at computer screens is called. Guys point and click millions of dollars back and forth, buying soybeans here, selling T-bonds there. I used to work on the floor of the Board of Trade, an entirely different kind of place, with enough weirdos and ne'er-do-wells to distract from the essential dog-chasing-its-tail aspect of the entire enterprise. But it’s the computer age, and the trading floor is about to be horse-and-buggied out of existence, and so about a year ago my company pulled me off the trading floor to supervise an internet radio network, which consists mostly of broadcasts by a bunch of appointed talking heads, bloviating about the market. For 10 hours a day, I sit at my desk on the 20th floor of the CBOE building, typing market headlines and listening to the aforementioned blowhards.

Working here has given me an entirely different attitude towards humor. Every so often, our entire section of the war room begins laughing long and loud, even if nothing is very funny. Someone will recite a few lines from “Reservoir Dogs”, done with the exaggerated Brooklyn accent Midwestern guys affect when pretending to be a movie gangster, and the entire room will break up at the mere mention of Mr. Pink, recognition taking the place of humor as a reason to laugh. I have developed a theory to explain this, that laughter is a need of the organism, like exercise or a good bowel movement, and that crowded offices will periodically work themselves into group cackle even if they lack the proper stimuli. This also helps to explain the brief stardom of thoroughly unfunny guys like Carrot Top or Pauly Shore, whose popularity would raise existential questions about the human race until you realize that no one actually thinks these guys are funny, just that their goofiness gives folks something to laugh at, in the same way that no one actually likes pressed turkey dogs, but they sate the biological signal to eat.

It is hard to express the combination of boredom and dread I feel when one of these cackle fests gets started. Boredom, because something funny is almost never going on, and dread at having to listen to another bout of wrong-headed quips, biting my cheek to keep my contempt in check, to not tell the entire lot to fuck off, whether it be at the inevitable lampoon of Al Gore and the theory of global warming that gets launched during every unseasonably cold day, as if global warming meant that there would be no more temperature variation, or whether it involves listening to another tawdry account of suburban family life, from the husbands nagged to the nannies porked to the children reigning triumphant.

The biggest difference between my Dad’s type of conservatism and the early 21st-century variety might be that my Dad’s abiding humility is almost nowhere to be seen. Americans of his generation tended to be pretty humble guys, their first hand experience of poverty as kids during the Depression making them keenly aware of how lucky they were. But that humble American is now largely a thing of the past, at least amongst white collar business types, replaced by the Gonzo conservative, combining the humility of Hunter S. Thompson with the avarice of a robber baron. The war room is filled with guys who believe that they deserve their good fortune, and it seems all of suburbia these days is populated by men and women who believe that they are of superior stock, and this conceit is played out to a large degree in their kids, who are no longer taught to be seen but not heard, but rather to set off on life’s voyage with the proper arrogance of an anointed one, a made man, a son or daughter of wealth, brains, and beauty, whose athletic and academic accomplishments are proof that their parents are 95th percentile sort of people. You get a lot of talk in the war room that tries to prove that sort of thing in a faux humble, gosh my kids are so much smarter than their dumb father, kind of way, along with easy asides about the visit to the doctor who said that their boy will wind up 6’4” or that their girl will be tall enough to be a supermodel.

My Dad believed that America allowed him the opportunity to live a comfortable life, and he was grateful for that opportunity. He was the son of hard-line Methodists who never let alcohol or even a cup of coffee touch their lips, and while my dad didn’t adopt their strict aesthetic, that sense of subjugation was deeply ingrained, even when he grew up and became a poker playing, rum swilling heathen. Dad didn’t believe that he deserved credit for working hard or behaving decently; that’s just what people did; it was par for the course.

There was a time when being a conservative Republican implied a belief in fair play and in the civic contract with your fellow man. Back in my Dad’s day, being a conservative implied taking things cautiously, not sticking your neck out until you’ve had a chance to assess matters. A conservative was someone who had the wisdom of circumspection, who believed in tradition. A conservative was a man in the grey flannel suit, passing his days rather anonymously, bringing home the bacon, throwing the baseball around in the backyard with his son. Even a cowboy conservative, like Barry Goldwater, was kept in tow by a set of common sense ideas, such as the basic precept that neither a society nor an individual should live beyond its means.

Times have certainly changed. Nowadays, George W. stands astride the planet like a retard colossus, running up budget deficits, not even pretending to pay for the war he coaxed the country into launching, treating the notion of shared sacrifice that permeated American life prior to the 1960’s as a quaint anachronism, preferring to let the sons and daughters of Midwest farmers and Hispanic day laborers do all the heavy lifting, to fight our wars. For all of his pronouncements about being the compassionate conservative, George Bush is neither. Instead, he is the ultimate Baby Boomer, even more so than his predecessor in the President’s chair. He is a member of the generation who believes that they can do whatever they want, ignoring protocol to act on whim or passion, not bothering to think through the negative repercussions of their acts, whether that means doing illicit things with an intern and a cigar or the real obscenity of sending America’s children off to die in an ill-advised war.

My dad was 80 years old when Bush assumed office, and admittedly he had become a little emotionally unhinged when my mom died in 2005, but I’d never heard my father speak with such contempt for a public figure as he did when waxing over George W. Bush. My dad was a real conservative: he didn’t think that the President should be getting America involved in imperial adventures half way across the planet, he didn’t believe in running up huge budget deficits, he didn’t believe in the man’s Texas swagger. “Walk softly and carry a big stick,” Teddy Roosevelt famously said, which used to be a pretty accurate slogan for how men of my dad’s generation approached the world.

My dad was a good man. He was nice to all those around him, as much to the waitress serving his food as the real estate mogul looking to buy land. He never raised his voice at my mother, never used violence or intimidation against those less powerful than him. He just happened to believe in less taxes and smaller government, and he didn’t see why everyone else couldn’t act with the good sense and work ethic that motivated his own life.

There’s another, less comfortable fact that needs to be stated: my dad, and most of his genial, honest, hard working friends were white, Anglo Saxon Protestants whose families came from somewhere north of the Mason Dixon line. They were imbued with those Yankee/Midwestern notions of hard work and community. The idea of yelling in anger at a fellow driver or tossing a sandwich wrapper out onto the roadway would never even entire his mind. It was a conservatism based on a strong sense of working together with your fellow man to make the world better for everyone. However, that is no longer the profile of a conservative, most of whom increasingly hail from the old Confederacy, a place where the ruling class long ago learned to ignore the poverty in their midst, to consciously separate themselves from the black folks who shared their counties and towns.

Being a conservative has also melded with the attitudes of the children of the immigrants of the last century, the sons and daughters who clawed their way to achieving a chunk of the American dream, the Antonin Scalia kind of conservative, who looks at his inclusion into the country club as a kind of Social Darwinism, feeling a brotherhood with the rich and famous he now lunches with and a contempt towards those he left behind. From another prism, this manifests itself in the flintiness of a Giuliani, standing ready to guard his country like a street thug guarding Bensonhurst from the black folks up the street, bringing a primitive tribalism into the political arena, first in New York City and now potentially across the nation and the world.

My Dad was like none of these guys. I don’t think he ever got into a fight, because most fistfights are really exercises in pettiness, in proving you are the Alpha male on the block. But you could count on him in a pinch to protect the things that mattered, his country and his family, with stalwart intensity, when most of the cock-of-the-walks wilt into a shallow puffery. I could trust my Dad, totally and without reserve, to be both moral and strong.

My Dad’s principled kind of conservatism has become an anachronism, even the echo of which will soon disappear, replaced by the arrogant selfishness of the Baby Boomer: the Limbaugh, the Wolfowitz, George W; and more prosaically, with the Gonzo conservatism of the office where I work. If the parable of Lot was to be repeated, and God came looking for 5 honorable men in that wide spread of the trading room, I’m pretty sure that we would be found wanting, that we would all burn, and that anyone looking upon us would be turned into a pillar of salt. So to all the douche bags of the 20th floor, I hope that you and your superior children, with your self-satisfied struts and your creepy laughs, signifying nothing, slowly rot in your own private hells.

And to my Dad, bless his honorable soul, may you rest in peace.