With each passing year since his death, I gain a greater appreciation for my grandfather. In his manner and his mentality, he was incredibly dated, but as I watch the country fall apart something about him assumes new relevance. There was something simple and yet timeless about him.
He came from humble origins. His father was a preacher in rural Minnesota. He used to speak of hitching up horses to the sleigh in the dead of winter so his father could go preach at one of his parishes or give someone their last rites. Great Grandpa wanted my grandpa to follow in his footsteps and become a man of the cloth. However, being terribly rebellious, my grandpa insisted on becoming a chemist.
They were too poor to send him to college, but his father’s (and my) alma mater, Luther College, gave him jobs in the cafeteria and the school farm (now the site of luxurious senior housing), enabling him to work his way through school. He never forgot it. In his final days, he talked about three things: his family, his God, and Luther College. He was unable to talk about any of them without crying.
After a school, he married a nice local girl. They moved to Chicago and he started working for a chemical manufacturer. After World War II broke out, he tried to enlist. The Army, however, decided that a chemist was a terrible thing to waste and sent him to work at a munitions plant in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Women used to yell at him on the street, because they thought he was a draft dodger. The pain of those interactions clearly never faded, and as an incredibly proud man it was clear he never stopped being bitter about the fact that he was not allowed to “serve” and consequently would never hold “veteran” status.
After V-Day he spent a bit more time as a chemist, before taking a job as a salesman for 3-M. The family moved around from Minnesota to Georgia to Jersey and back again. He hit a road block at middle management, but was able to retire to Texas with a shiny Cadillac, which was not too shabby for the country boy from Albert Lea, Minnesota.
I never really watched the man live, but for fifteen years or so I watched him die. It was almost more enlightening. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in his late seventies, but managed to live to see 92. (On his death bed, he was still convinced he would make it to 100). Alzheimer’s is a hell of a disease, because it kills you so slowly. Your lungs do not collapse and your liver does not fail; it chips away at the self piece by piece. Ultimately, all we really are is a story. Alzheimer’s redacts us, line by line. I say that watching it was enlightening, simply because you are able to closely examine each fragment of self as it falls away. There would be visits when he just told one story over and over. A month later, he would only be able to remember a few lines. A few months after that, the story was gone and a chapter disappeared. Observing the repetition, you began to understand what the story meant to him and gave insight into how he saw himself.
Listening to these stories, there were two themes that emerged: faith and gratitude. The man had worked diligently and tirelessly all his life, but much of his success was due to people giving him a chance at key moments. He would then toil to ensure that they did not come to regret it. He sincerely believed that if he just worked hard, he could acquire a better station in life. He worked and his work mattered. Today, this belief seems so dated or, better said, contextualized. That is to say, it was not simply the belief of someone in the Fifties, but specifically of a white male in the Fifties. Now, even white males do not share that faith.
This cynicism is only partly the result of their character faults, although that certainly plays a role as well. Recent events in national politics, do nothing but lend credence to this pessimism. Everywhere one looks, one sees evidence that the whims and will of the affluent play a far greater role in determining one’s fate than individual grit and determination. This elite cadre occupies a parallel universe in which incompetence is rewarded and 2008-11 was a period of unprecedented prosperity, prosperity underwritten of course by you and I. Now, with the recession “over,” all that prevents our recovery is the unwillingness of this ungrateful refuse heap to spend some goddamn money and stimulate the economy.
The most maddening and disheartening reality, though, is the disproportionate influence they wield in the governance of our nation. Democratic consent now occupies a secondary tier in the legislative approval process. The elite must decide who and what they will fund before those options can be put for the American electorate. It comes as no surprise, then, that for the middle class, American democracy has been reduced to a choice about to which cart the yoke upon their neck will be hitched.
This is far from unprecedented in our history. At the turn of the previous century, our government—the Senate, especially—was in every way for sale. Barons of every industry pulled the strings as the marionettes limply danced. It was only the collapse of the economy and the rise of a populist tidal wave that finally reined in this perverse nepotism. Today, unfortunately, our most prominent populist movement fights just as hard as the establishment for the well being of the elite. Our elected officials owe their positions to their corporate patrons, our bureaucracy is run by former—and future—employees of the industries they police, and all across America there are soccer moms and Nascar dads, with houses worth less than their mortgages, fighting to stop regulation that would keep the Financial Crisis from happening again.
What’s interesting about my grandfather (and me by extension as his admirer) is that he was very much a conservative. It was, however, a very Scandinavian and Midwestern conservatism, in that there was nothing particularly grandiose about it. Unlike myself, he was opposed to gay marriage (I assume) as a conservative Christian, but he did not spend much time talking about it. As time wore on, he began to question the efficacy of the War in Iraq. His focus seemed far more centered on leaving the fruits of individual initiative unmolested.
There is something in many a Midwesterner that causes them to have rather basic aspirations. We harbor an inclination to romanticize the notion of escaping the world and cultivating some small plot of land. Many of our fellow Americans take this as being indicative of how simple and narrow minded we are. I would respond by asking what is so wrong with aspiring to live well and take simple pleasure in the fruits of honest labor. How often have grand ambitions for god or ill left the world a more broken place? More than a few, so far as I can tell.
To give you a sense of this ideology, I will share an anecdote I once read in a textbook on African American history. It was explaining that slavery never took off among the Northern Europeans of the Middle Colonies the way it did elsewhere. This, the scholar explained, was less the result of a moral opposition to slavery as it was of a sincere belief that, if they wanted things done right, they had to do it themselves. I smile each time I think of this, as it captures so perfectly the spirit of my people. It is not as quixotic or admirable as Abolitionism, but it is worth noting that if every colonist had done the same, there would have been no slavery in America.
Unfortunately, this individualistic and traditional conservatism survives more in the mythology than the substance of the modern Conservative Movement. Today, were I to plow a humble plot of land, a third of my profits would go to sheltering the imbeciles on Wall Street from the Free Market consequences of their moronic and reckless behavior. (Still, the poor must not be given food stamps, lest they learn to depend on the dole). Upon the return of those funds, they would promptly be whisked off to fund the building of a bridge in Kandahar that the Taliban would promptly blow up for the eightieth time, in this macabre charade that results when the antics of Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner meet Islamic extremism.
The ideology of my grandfather rests upon the notion that, if I ask nothing of the world, the world should ask nothing of me. That has now become an impossible dream. The World is no longer knocking at the door; it has let itself in, turned on the television, and helped itself to chips and dip. Any attempt to withdraw from the world results either in barbarians being given even more license to ravage our countryside or provokes a crisis in which other states threaten to follow suit, instructing us in the definition of the word “interdependence.” Most Americans would like to break ties with China. Similarly, I would like to “break ties” with Wells Fargo, the proprietor of my credit card debt and student loan, but it has been slow going.
It is tempting therefore to deem my grandfather’s schema irrelevant. While there is a need to be realistic about which principles still apply, I think we need to hold on to the essence of his beliefs. It is folly to believe that corporate welfare will not yield the same ambivalence and sloth as social welfare. (I qualify that statement by acknowledging that there are many hardworking recipients of welfare, but I think there is a grave danger of learned entitlement when the system is abused). Our government needs to remember the fundamental truth articulated by William Jennings Bryant a century ago that the owner of the mine is just as much a businessman as the laborer who descends into the shaft to extract its bounty. There is dignity in work, but there is no point to working if work does not matter. The profit motive refers to one’s own profits, not those of the feudal lord with his boot on your neck.
