My father’s soul left his body 18 years ago, in October of 1999.
Frederick H. Blankenhorn was a World War II veteran, a small businessman, and he gave me many, many gifts.
He was incredibly intelligent. He filled my room with books. He gave me my first typewriter, the greatest gift I’ve ever gotten because my handwriting sucks.
My dad married my mom in 1951 and was still with her on the day he died. He provided for his family, first with a TV repair shop, later with a locksmith shop. He raised four kids, and none has suffered a divorce. None of us has gotten the U.S. into a war in Iraq based on lies.
My dad could be funny, he was incredibly charming to strangers, and he had a sense of adventure. He worked very hard, and made lemons out of life’s lemonade, buying the lock shop through the Small Business Administration after he fell through a false roof, breaking his once beautiful body.
Oh. He was also a monster.
When the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, after a host of women started recounting their stories with the hashtag #metoo, I had to think about my dad again. He had first come to mind a few months before, when I visited a friend named Dave Vitoff and found that the best time of his life, Massapequa High School in the early 1970s, working with me on journalism, was the worst time of mine.
There was nothing unusual about my dad’s monstrosity. He was a sexist, a racist who would call himself a “true Aryan” when he got drunk. He was deathly afraid that I or my sister was gay, which is why he got me magazines about baseball. He hit me. He mentally abused my mom, exacerbating her Depression-era fear of poverty. He cheated on her.
My siblings have their own stories, which I am not free to tell. They consider me fortunate to have gotten what Bruce Springsteen got from his parents. They left him when he graduated high school, they went to California and didn’t look back. Lucky Bruce. Lucky me. (I got into Rice University, while Bruce got a graduate degree from the school of Hard Rock.)
Leave it to say that my siblings and I all have pictures of my dad in our homes, but since his passing we have tried to expunge him from our hearts. We don’t talk about him, despite all the good things he did and was. We try not to think about him.
The backwash of my father’s monstrosity nearly capsized me. I was horrible to my wife in the first years of our relationship. I had modeled bad behavior, and was withdrawn, demanding around my kids when they were young. It took decades and lots of therapy to fix me, if only a little, and that only started after my wife threatened to leave me.
But that’s not the point of this piece.
The point of this piece is that my dad wasn’t unique, wasn’t even that unusual. We all have lesser angels in our nature, which come out and play sometimes. Some of us win the battle, others lose it, most of us win a few and lose a few. We are all broken. Shine a light on us and you will see the cracks.
The U.S. is a product of what was called the “Scottish Enlightenment.” Our founding documents were inspired by the idea that people are basically good. If people aren’t basically good, democracy can’t work. Our capitalist system also assumes that people will be good to one another. Adam Smith wrote that financial success would incline rich people toward the common good. The jury’s still out on that.
Every generation, the jury seems out on democracy, too. The jury was out on democracy in the 1960s, with the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam. It was out in the 1950s with McCarthyism, in the 1940s with Hitler, in the 1930s with fascism, communism and the Great Depression. My dad grew up around monsters. The Greatest Generation beat most of them, and fought others to a standstill.
Our time is not as unprecedented as we pretend it to be. There have always been monsters among us. Go to James Madison’s Montpelier some time. Monster!
It is the dark that keeps the monsters alive. Monsters hide in the dark, in the silence. In our collective silence concerning these lesser angels of our nature.
We know there is a monster inside all of us. We got the lesson when Trump was elected. Almost half of white folks still support the monster. They support him because they believe he protects them from other monsters, those they imagine live in the rest of us.
I am certain that my dad, if he were alive and hearty today, in the 97th year of his age, would love him some Trump. But most Trump supporters keep their reasoning on the down-low. Some don’t even tell pollsters about their lesser angels, the ones that fear “the other” and believe only a monster can protect them.
So, the battle is joined.
I should say here that, looking back on my life, I have done a lot of work to kill the monster within me. I am proud of that. My wife is still with me, and we’re happy. The kids are in graduate school, and both have good values. They want to make a positive difference in the world, and are willing to work hard so that happens. They seem to like their dad, too.
It’s a struggle we all face, and it’s not just one for the private sphere. As Barack Obama said, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.”
If you made mistakes in the past, you can learn if you change your mind. If there are lesser angels controlling your mind and your heart, you are the only one who can beat them.
We will take our country back when the better angels of our nature decide to take it back, and are willing to act on that conviction.
