Sea Wife - Amity Gaige Page 0,34

deformed? I don’t think he philosophically approved of families, but he was too sentimental to swear one off.

His most-often cited ideological source was his father, a man who had been the traditional and undisputed head of the family until he died in a car accident when Michael was fifteen, at which point his mother panicked and stayed in bed for a couple of years. No one had ever prepared her for a life alone.

What bothered me most was Michael’s loyalty to it, this vision of life that even he recognized was quaint and obsolete. Things had changed, the world changes. Car manufacturing moved to Mexico. We elected a black man president. Change is constant. How else to read the kicking and screaming except as a collective white-male temper trantrum?

Unlike a lot of people, Michael understood history. He knew a lot about it. He’d been the kind of kid who enjoyed reading books about wars and knew the names of every general. He’d wanted to major in history, but in a sacrificial memorial gesture to his dad, who’d wanted him to be a good provider, he majored in economics. And yet, despite his education, despite his knowledge of historical context, he just seemed inexorably drawn back there, to some ambered past. Not because he thought it was better or right, but just because it was his.

I knew he was conservative in his economics. Frankly, I was sure his theories on that score were right. Economics bores me; I’ll never understand. But from his point of view, Americans were growing less and less capable of austerity, and self-reliance, and he’d developed this disgust about it all. During the Yes-We-Can years, I had more hope than he did. Me, Nancy Negative. My hope disgusted him too, on some level. My hope was just a symptom of liberal ascendance. He believed that politicians would manipulate my hope in order to take away people’s liberties, and that people were stupid enough to be complicit. He was naturally an upbeat person, but the changing tide made him very dark.

Slowly, over the years, without ever really talking to me about it, he developed this sense of persecution. In Connecticut, no one understood Ashtabula, Ohio. No one appreciated its values and its lessons and its past. No one even knew where it was. Michael didn’t give a damn about the NRA, he didn’t care if someone wanted to change their gender midlife. But he hated liberal “groupthink.” He felt like he’d be written off by friends or coworkers if he had the slightest discrepant opinion.

So he dug his heels in, and inched farther and farther away, until suddenly we were standing on opposite sides of an enormous breach.

Liberals love change. Therefore, if you resist any change, you are simply a Neanderthal, & at that point the liberal power structure is just waiting for you to die. What about the possibility that you are a skeptical person who needs to hear a convincing argument before putting your traditions on the line? My God, I remember hearing Bill Clinton talk about NAFTA and me thinking this doesn’t smell good. I was 17 years old! I was not even a grown man yet and I saw it coming.

Did I stand up and say any of this during college? No. I was such a pushover at Kenyon. I’d do anything, say anything, whatever was being said or done. Mom said Dad would have been so proud of me getting into a college like that, etc.

I thought the point of college was to take part in inquiry, but I soon became aware that I was supposed to sit there and soak up The Truth. The Truth as decided by some old dudes dressed completely in corduroy. I mean head-to-toe corduroy. How can you act all countercultural when you live in one of those colossal houses on Wiggin St. & you have what amounts to employment for life?

A couple pseudo-conservatives hung around the Econ Department. Otherwise, agreement was total. I got so angry about it later. I’d been made to swallow ideas that worked against my self-interest. Juliet acts surprised. Why does that matter, she wants to know. It matters because fighting for my self-interest is what makes me a rational being. It’s everything.

I understand that