My dad was a lawyer up until a couple years ago when he retired. He had a little private practice and worked for the government protecting and defending kids until he decided the system he was a part of did more harm than good for them. He used to joke he fell into the law because he loved office supplies. He *did* love office supplies, but if you happen to know any lawyers and you get a chance to ask them what area of law they'd least like to practice, chances are the kind my dad chose would be near or the very bottom of their list. Most lawyers don't like much that has to do with feelings. Besides, it doesn't pay as well and there really isn't anyone you can engage in pleasant conversation over what you see or deal in on a daily basis. I won't say it drove him to be an alcoholic or a 2 pack-a-day smoker---but it didn't help much either. Once I asked to see files about what parents did to their kids. I was 8 or 9. He got upset and wouldn't show me. So that night I broke into the basement and raided a box of files and found a photo in one case entered into evidence where a screaming kid was hoisted onto an element over a stove. The context was provided in text while the damage was documented with a kid pulling down his jeans and exposing the harm. No face of the little boy, but it said he was my age. It was a confusing moment for me. I wanted to cry from what I'd seen but couldn't, because what seemed more chilling was that my dad *chose* to be intimately acquainted with that aspect of the world. And I couldn't understand why my mother would marry someone who *chose* this world 10 or 12 hours a day when he didn't have to. He couldn't stand most lawyers or the judges who tolerated them. I never saw him in court. I never met one his clients. When I was a baby I slept in his office a handful of times. He had an original framed painting of a Don Quixote-like knight in his office that might be the only heirloom I'd care to have from him. I watched them implode that office building when I was ten and helped move boxes of office supplies to the new office he had. We took in a foster kid for a few months when I was around three, but he called my mother a "fucking bitch" and my dad had to find him another foster home. My dad published a text book for social workers that sold very poorly that he dedicated to my family with a one sentence inscription. It embarrassed all of us, mostly because it was heartfelt. Heartfelt inscriptions in textbooks work on me about as gracefully as Christmas carols (say "Silent Night") in July.
These details made me biased for somebody like Atticus Finch defending a black man in a racist town. It made me biased for Harper Lee telling a story like that. I was even more biased after they showed the movie of "To Kill A Mockingbird" during two English classes in 8th or 9th grade and Gregory Peck played Atticus Finch. I wasn't the only one in class choking up when Atticus lost and was packing up his briefcase while people stood for him and his children had to be reminded to stand along with them. But I never understood what gave that Finch family such clarity about the issue of racism when everybody else in town was sipping the Kool-Aid of hating black people. Atticus had no arc to his goodness. He was born with it. And I remember feeling really annoyed KNOWING that most white people who read the book probably identified with Atticus when most of us would probably have gone along with the mob if we were around. I resented a book that flattered a lie. That profited from a lie. If Harper Lee knew what allowed Atticus to stand for good, it made sense she would have included it. But she didn't. There's no explanation.
That's why God punished Harper Lee with not being able to write anything else : ).
I'm really glad Barack Obama doesn't remind me of Atticus Finch. He reminds me of a cross between Huck Finn and Robert Jordan. UNLIKE Atticus, Huck Finn actually had some fucking soul searching going on to figure out racism was wrong. He got upset he didn't spend enough time in church to understand why slavery was okay and chose hell over giving up his friend Jim, whom he'd decided was a person after all. Obama smokes cigarettes, he smoked weed, and he snorted coke. I don't recall Atticus Finch even requiring the use of a bathroom over the course of the entire novel.
I dunno if you read the NYT on Sunday, but both McCain and Obama mentioned Robert Jordan from "For Whom the Bell Tolls" as one of their major sources of inspiration. Which floored me. McCain took the title of his autobiography from a dying soliloquy of Robert Jordan's, "The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for." Robert Jordan was a fucking communist by the way. A professor from Montana who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Which is sort of a joke because MOST of the Americans who went off to fight in that war didn't look like Gary Cooper. The vast majority were Communist-leaning Jews from New York. I met one of them over Christmas in New York back in 2002. His name was Mo and he had a fancy white suit on. I was trying to read a copy of The Sun Also Rises in Spanish I'd brought back from Havana. He asked what *other* Hemingway stories I knew with a glimmer in his eye. In his eighties by then, but he was 19 or something when he fought. All those kids never shook the wrath most Americans heaped on them when they came back. Mo had seen Hemingway in Madrid on a couple of occasions. Never talked to him.
Robert Jordan spends a fair bit of time contemplating suicide when it's clear he's not going to go home. That it's last time he'll ever see the sky. As in Hemingway's case, Robert Jordan's father had committed suicide. Unlike in Hemingway's case, Robert Jordan doesn't follow his father's lead. He keeps on fighting.
I read this book when I was 20 after making a VERY dumb decision of borrowing a few grand and skipping town without telling anybody to shipwreck into Madrid in the dead of winter. I had no Spanish and didn't know one person and the cab dropped me off at midnight at a pension just off the Gran Via that really was operating as a brothel for transvestite prostitutes. I don't really know what constitutes a nervous breakdown, but I know that I didn't eat or drink or move, let alone leave that room for 3 days. I felt like a wild animal stuck in the jaws of a trap. I smoked cigarettes and I read For Whom the Bell Tolls, the only book I'd brought along that I'd started 50 times without getting past more than a few pages. This time I went straight through. It was the first time a book really made me cry. And after I was finished, something sawed just above the area that was caught in the trap and I could leave again and did.
I'm terrified about what could happen to an American president whose hero is somebody like Robert Jordan. But for now, it just feels so nice that somebody like that could win! Fuck man, Castro learned guerrilla warfare from For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was reading it up in the mountains before he came down and took over Cuba. Shucks...
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