At Least They Got John Lennon

So I am hopping on my bike for my daily commute, and Joey is there at my side to see me off.

"Joe, do you think when you're grown up, and you have to go to work, you'll ride your bike to work."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm not going to work."

"Where are you going to go?"

"To the basement."

"What are you going to do in the basement?"

"I'll be in my laboratory making potions."

I am unique in having a son who aspires to be Grampa from the Munsters (without ever having seen the show). No doubt he'll be making potions for an oafishly large son-in-law.

And while we are on the subject of fathers and sons, I read in the paper today an excerpt from a book by John Lennon's first wife, where she describes him hitting her pretty hard on one occasion and walking away without a care in the world. It reminded me of a movie I once saw - it was a documentary on father/son relations made by a guy as he travelled the world with his father. At one point they got to iterview Julian Lennon, and he says quite frankly, and I am paraphrasing, that it was quite odd having a father so beloved by the world and considered to be such a lover of humanity, who was nevertheless a total ass as a father.

It also reminded me of a favorite Vegas Heavy-T story, when he was a freshman at Georgetown. A bunch of people in the dorm were sitting around in a classic bull session, ostentatiously displaying their moral seriousness and emotional correctness by expressing the right level of dismay over those lights of the world taken from us by the assassins gun - MLK, RFK, JFK, and any other person with K as a last initial. Heavy-T, after sitting quietly through the discussion, stands up and says, in reference to the assassins - "at least they got John Lennon," and walks away.

Of course it is no coincidence, in my mind, that a self-professed lover of humanity was a prick as a father. More times than not, those who see themselves as great humanists can't seem to grasp the possibility of loving an actual human; loving humanity in the abstract is comparatively rather easy. Because for these people love is a feeling, a sentiment; and as the poets of the world, they are naturally those with the most refined and admirable sentiments. The problem comes when one defines love as needing to be expressed as continual selfless action, rather than remote and fleeting sentiment. It is there that the John Lennon's of the world tend to fail miserably, because they love nothing over and above themselves.

Another famous intellectual in this genre is the recently deceased Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman and the Crucible, where he exposed us anti-Communists as a bunch of Salem witch-hunters. He was, according to the NYT obituary, our foremost “Playwright of Conscience.” Evidence to this effect is provided in the following, which I copied long ago from the Arma Virumque blog:

I wonder how many of those who champion Miller ... noticed this letter by one J. Stephen Lang in the May 23 number of National Review. Citing Martin Gottfried's Arthur Miller: His Life and Work, Mr. Lang writes that

Though clearly sympathetic to its subject, Gottfried's biography speaks of a matter that the liberal press overlooked in its flood of Miller praise. By his third wife, Inge Morath, Miller fathered Daniel, a son born with Down's syndrome. Regarding Daniel, Miller told his agent on the phone, “He isn't right. I'm going to have to put the baby away.” Daniel was put in a home for people with Down's syndrome and lived out his life there. Inge visited him weekly, but Miller never did, even though the institution was near their home. Nor did Miller acknowledge this son in any public way, including in his autobiography. Thus the great moralist of the public eye--the sensitive, socially conscious soul the liberals so admire--seemed lacking in the most basic of human affections. Attention must be paid to compassionate liberals' lack of compassion.