My Beloved Dittohead Brother Sees the Light (I think)

[charlyvi]

Time: End of July, 2004

Place: My house, down South.

My brother and sister in law came to visit me the last week in July, 2004. Bro is a gun-toting, knife-collecting Dittohead who thinks Liberals are the scourge of American life. Needless to say, politics are avoided when he visits as he is my blood and blood supercedes all politics--or so I keep repeating to myself, over and over and over and over. When he introduces me to people as "my sister, the Liberal", I smile and say glad to meet you. When he shows me his latest gun, and says "I know you're a Liberal and don't approve", I hold my tongue and refrain from asking him how crazy can he be to collect all this macho gun crap and how much of an asshole is he to taunt me with something he knows I can't stand. After all, he's my brother and I truly love him. I remember when we were kids; you know, the salad days.

Anyway, the first night he mentions something glowing about shrub, I can't even remember what it was exactly, and I went nuclear on his ass--blood didn't quite matter enough anymore. I screamed, I yelled, I went through the whole list--Iraq, tax cuts, the war against the working class, Medicare Part D, the treasonizaing of dissent, the incompetence, the embarrassment of a presidential idiot, the lies, the destruction of our country's reputation, etc, etc,. You know the drill. And he was not passive during this monologue. He was yelling as loud as I; I don't know what he was saying though, as I was yelling too loudly to hear him. Windows were rattling. My sister in law was cowering on the Lazy Boy, her eyes looking like Bambi's during the fire, darting from my brother to me and back again, as though she were watching a tennis match. It wasn't pretty. My brother finally yelled, "What are you going to do, throw me out of your house!" and I have to admit I was tempted, but he lives 700 miles away. Geography prevailed.

Things eventually calmed down, and later that night we were watching TV--no one was talking much. Bill Maher came on HBO, it was a Friday night, and I didn't change the channel. My brother stalked out of the room and went to bed. Looking back, not changing the channel was ignorant on my part, but I was still truly pissed. The next day, though, the situation got better as my brother and I kind of made up--we just stopped talking politics entirely. It was a minefield we would not enter. The visit went off with nothing else memorable. Fast forward to:



The Time: Christmas Eve 2006

The Place: My brother's house up North.


I went to my brother's house for Christmas. I vowed not to bring up politics; however, if he brought it up I also vowed not to back down, though I swore I wouldn't scream and yell (but I wasn't too sure the yelling and screaming one was a keeper). I loved seeing my niece and nephew, I gossiped with my sister in law, wrapped packages, helped decorate the tree; in short, did all the normal holiday things quite happily. Then, on Christmas Eve, my brother asked me, "How do you feel about McCain?" DUers, how do you think I feel about McCain? I told him McCain was an ass-kissing opportunist who sold out every value he ever held to get the '08 nomination; a man who kisses shrub's ass after what they did to him in the SC primary, etc. When I was finished, my brother looked at me and said--and this is the supreme moment of truth--"but Bush does that to everyone!" I was stunned. I was incapable of speech. He then went on to say the Repubs had no one worth voting for and he thought Edwards was a good man. EDWARDS, a Democrat, was a good man. You have no idea how many light years of political maturity my brother had to traverse to utter this sentence. I nearly fell into the Christmas tree. But I didn't let him know it--I acted as though it was the most normal thing in the world that my right wing wacko brother should embrace John Edwards, a progressive Democrat, as a "good man". I think he has bro's vote, if he wins the nomination.

I've thought a great deal about bro's turnaround; I think economics is the key. He says he'll be working the rest of his life--his company no longer funds a pension plan--and Edwards' economic populism seems to have done the trick. Anyway, as the saying goes, if the Repubs have lost my brother, they've lost it all.

Side note: My brother gave me two art books for Christmas (Picasso and Michelangelo) and though he prefaced the gifts with "I know you like that weird stuff", I appreciated them greatly.

My brother. God bless him.