Fathers Day
June 20th, 2011
I went with my dad to a fish diner in Banning. I should have known it would be tough to get decent fish in Banning. The place was full of real Americans, men who looked like they had worked all their lives at shitty jobs, with vacant looks on their faces, and women who looked either, bored, defeated or trapped, their children who were misshapen, oversized or mongoloid. This was the American dream. My dad started singing some kind of patriotic song from that James Cagney movie "Yankee Doodle Dandy", the song was Grand Old Flag, when we passed one of those giant American flags as we drove down the I-10. As usual I said it was just another flag, and on some levels that is true, but on others, such as when I am in Europe, I feel pretty patriotic, right after someone makes some unjustified comment about the US based on some stereotype. But I get pissed off when people say they don't like the French, usually people who have never been over there expressing opinions that some right wing pundits expressed on TV or on talk radio.
But I was thinking about the radio show I had heard earlier today where Education mills were being exposed as rip-offs of the students and the tax payers. They lobby Congress to get very loose standards, con students into paying for overpriced loans and get educations that don't prepare the students for jobs. I have a theory that the more something is promoted, the worse it must be. These for profit schools are advertised on TV all the time. They play on people's legitimate desires to better themselves and get out of dead end jobs. Most jobs suck. Some of the only ways to improve conditions is through legislation or organizing a union or workers council that forces the ownership to improve conditions, or takes over from the capitalist and imposes workers control. That is what the dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to be about or at least that is how I understand it.
My dad and I disagree about a lot. He thinks Jesus is lord, I find that hard to believe. We more or less agree on politics, he used to be a teamster and he doesn't like the way the right wing radio talk jocks put down the unions. But he likes sports, and spends an hour talking about the Northern Irish guy who won the American Masters golf tournament. He is no dummy, he even bragged to me about all the A's he got in junior high school. He also complained about the music in the restaurant. He has sensitive ears and he seemed to not be in the mood for company, or at least not the company of his less than perfect son. We talked about my sister and her son who makes more money than all of us combined working on missile systems in New Mexico and Germany. There is no talk of the politics of that, after all, he is making money and that by definition is good in my dad's eyes. It's a reasonably American attitude, with capitalism breaking down, with people becoming more irrational as they seek answers that don't force them to take responsibility and work on taking charge of reality. People who have a certain amount of material comfort, no matter how minimal, will tend to cling to that security blanket of satisfaction, watching the tube in silence.
But not my dad, he reads Plato, and cheap fiction, he seems to like Michael Crichton, and was impressed with his movies and the book he wrote about global warming. Perhaps he was right, perhaps my dad is omniscient. Perhaps, but why does he cling to that Jesus thing? I gave him a book on the Dali Lama and the second Wall Street movie. His trailer smelled of old man. He listens to the radio at home and because he is cheap, as my mother would say, he watches TV at the community center where they have cable. As he put it, he spends most of his time there.
He didn't think it was a good idea that I take Viagra. He claims to be beyond sexual desire. I find that hard to believe, my dad was a total horn dog. Last year he was bragging about all the women he had sex with as a cowboy with the rodeos, that was one of the benefits, the local girls in the small towns where they held their rodeos would pick up the cowboys and have sex with them while the husbands were, well I don't know where they were, probably at work. But now he was against me having sex, saying I had other things to think about. He didn't say what.
My dad is pretty intense, he invested in the stock market and now has some money, and likes to brag, a little bit, but not too much, he doesn't want me or anyone to know exactly how much he has. I think he is paranoid I will try to take it. I don't know why he thinks that. Maybe it is because my mom thinks he owes her money, but then she lives across the country. Well it was father's day. Man I was glad to be headed home. I love my dad, at a distance.
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