Dammit Grandpa

Grandpa Duane's blossoming insanity first reported here and here.

"Kerry thinks he's Jesus Goddamn Christ. Thinks he's gonna make the cripples walk. Everyone in a wheel chair is going to just get up."

I had no idea what grandpa was talking about at first. Jesus Christ? He said it a day after the death of Superman, that should have been a clue, but I was distracted. Most of my brain was trying to will into existence the telekinetic gravity to separate his portable radio from its power source while staying seated across the patio. The patio has a short, uneven carpeting that affects the look of astroturf. "See Lukey, it's like grass," Grandpa had told me as a kid. Later I noticed the effect was diminished because the carpet is black. Also, the cigarette melt-holes reveal it for what it truly is, some kind of plastic polymer. See, It's almost like imitation grass.

This thing I do on this fake grass-like surface--spending time with grandpa during an election cycle--it's a game of inches. Deceptively tactical. You think it's just some crazy ass old man barking about what an evil sonofabitch the candidate you support is. It's that, and more. Because of the kind of person my grandfather is, I have to play the game continually on the defensive. So defensive it's almost passive. For example, I don't think grandpa knows that I'll be voting for Kerry. If he did, his efforts would be re-doubled. Rather than diffuse caterwauling, he'd begin with a, "I just don't see how you can vote for [insert one or more Sean Hannity talking points]." It would become a direct challenge on myself as a person. I'd eventually have to stand up to him. It's much better this way. Even the uber-right relatives that do know my leanings, are keeping it from grandpa. They fear interfamilial bloodshed. That's kin altruism.

From the moment I walk in the door and hear the AM band voices bellowing like a pipe organ through a large, tinny cylinder, my brain comes under siege. I have to use my mental resources conservatively. I have to play the odds. Thus I only pay him enough attention to know when to say, "Mhmm." Wait for the pauses, that's the trick. When his voice goes up in pitch at the end of a sentence, you know he just asked a question. Those are tricky.

That morning, Rush Limbaugh was on, I was wishing Rush Limbaugh was off. I don't dislike Rush. He's a bigot and an idiot, but not the biggest bigot or idiot grandpa listens to--those come on in the afternoon. He's funny at times and he serves a purpose, ideologically countering the stupidity of Al Franken with his own hot-blooded, myopic folly.

When Rush's co-host is Duane Renz, though, it's unbearable. Lately, his co-host is always Duane Renz.

There's a meanness to Duane Renz, a meanness I didn't see a year ago when I moved to Seattle. It's a meanness that isn't just confined to questions of national policy. To be fair, he's got things on his mind, like coming to terms with the fact that his spouse has effectively lost hers. Still, Grandpa is becoming an all-round asshole.

My entire life Grandpa was a compassionate man with a funny little giggle, always eager to laugh at himself and others. He was a crew chief in the Air Force, meaning he'd flown all over the world fixing spy planes during that long, chilly war. He spent time in Okinawa, Thailand and, I think, the Philippines. He was gone for most of my mother's childhood, but made it home just enough to ensure Grandma spent the better part of her 20's and 30's perpetually radiating pregnant-woman-glow.

Above all else, I think, he identifies himself as a soldier. He continued to work at Fairchild Air Force Base after he retired, becoming the civilian equivalent of a crew chief--a mechanic. Now that he's retired, he takes cruises on naval ships any chance he gets. My earliest memories of politics is my grandfather lamenting the Military cutbacks and base closures that followed the fall of the iron curtain.

I don't remember just what he said, but it was cutting, and filled with profanity.

My grandfather smokes menthols. At that time, when I was around 7 or so, he'd taken to smoking them through a long, reusable filter, in the fashion of Cruella De Vil. He never bothered to remove the cigarette from his mouth when he talked, so it would hop and pirouette, the ash growing ever longer until it drooped like a game of Jenga somehow played horizontally. That day, with his cigarette in the filter and the absurdly long filter in his mouth and the way he exaggerates his enunciation when he's angry, the lit tip of the cigarette cut insane arcs and angles the entire length of his face, bobbing, sticking, weaving inexplicably.

Politics with grandpa was more fun then. The props were better anyway.

That's where, I think, my grandfather's hatred of John Kerry comes from. His identity as a soldier, not his bizarre tobacco paraphernalia. I should say that I've never talked to him about this, because to do so would be suicide, my brain would literally implode at the ignorant vehemence of his rants. Of course I say that never having experienced grandpa's ignorant vehemence. I fear it. Call me a coward.

I wasn't around, but I can wager a guess at exactly what set Duane Renz off. It was that great discourse sullying smear campaign aimed at fence-sitting ex-GIs. In this case, it worked.

Now that he's taken over the co-hosting duties for every conservative call-in show on the AM band, I can't even stand to go visit. If it's between 7am and about 5pm, you can bet there's a call in show on, and grandpa will be hooting and testifying like an evangelical. "Give it to that sonofabitch." If it's between 5pm and 7am, he's probably recounting the day's shows, lamenting all the horrible, despicable things the liberals are doing to this wonderful country.

He's rubbing off on poor diminished Grandma. I drove her somewhere the other day and remarked about the amount of Kerry/Edwards signs I had been seeing. "Yeah--I don't like that Kerry Edwards. I don't like him one bit." Sadly, her vote still counts, which means, basically, that Grandpa gets two votes.

He doesn't realize, I don't think, that all of these people are sharply partisan. In most cases they're far to the right of Bush himself. In some cases, these pundits wish they could get someone in office that was more pro(proer?)-business and wanted to really shrink the government, overturn affirmative action, close the borders, shoot people who speak Spanish, take health warnings off cigarettes and push tougher laws against drug offenders. They want to end restrictions on the flow of capital and litigate morality as rigidly as possible. They want financial freedom and a moral caste system, and they want it now.

That's fine, that's part of the political spectrum in this country. I hope it never gains more power than the moral majority it has now, but its right to exist is beyond question. The problem for grandpa is the problem for a lot of other people who listed to AM radio on the drive to work and don't bother to tune into the evening news. They only get half the story. They mistake commentary for news. The fact that the perfectly objective newshour is a myth propagated by American newsmakers and laughed at everywhere else makes grandpa the victim of a systemic problem. He's still belligerently uninformed.

Here's what I think happened. First of all, his mental capacities are diminishing--not at the rate my Grandma's are, but diminishing nonetheless.

Then the second Swiftboat ad came out, it showed Kerry testifying about atrocities that were already known, but that were classified. It then cuts to people saying how betrayed they felt and how they had been sold out by Kerry. They didn't like the truth and it made them question what they were dying for. That hurts.

Grandpa, ever the military advocate, saw this as an act of unAmericanism, aimed at sabotaging the military. Fair enough. In his increasingly senile state, that thing he most identified with, his military service, long in the past, was dredged up. He felt personally attacked. He felt those thirty-year-old words cheapened the sacrifice of his dead friends. That's hard to take, especially when it's so immediate. What he didn't do, though, is look at the other angle, that Kerry was trying to prevent any more of Grandpa's friends from dying. That's a dangerous lack of objectivity, but how can a person be expected to be objective when so many of your friends have just died . . .

He then sought out the people who played to this feeling: Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mike Savage, et al.

So that's that, and I can't begrudge a crazy old man deciding his vote based on satellite non-issues and 30 year old film stock. But now the AM gurus are starting to influence Grandpa in other ways. The bigotry and blatant racism that has propelled Mike Savage to the number 3 radio show in America is rubbing off. The other night, at my cousin's birthday party, he made some crazy remarks I only half-heard, about the number of virgins he'd receive in heaven after having his throat slit. He hates Muslims now. This was a non-sequitur of the most insane variety. The conversation had nothing to do with politics or Iraq or anything, it was the inane drivel that families have when they get together.

So I don't know, at first I just thought I'd wait until after the election to go over there, let the situation diffuse itself. Now it looks like the Swifties have turned an impressionable dotard and former Roosevelt Democrat into a vehement and bigoted psychotic. Unless he loses interest post-election, I won't be seeing much of Grandpa anymore.

QED guys.