I’m trying to explain men.
Sons never really know their fathers. I do not make this
statement in order to imply that daughters know more about their fathers than
sons [although I hope MY daughter does], but sons have more of a need to figure
their fathers out, to wear their manly abandon, and to compare the size of
their... Seriously, it doesn’t need to be written.
Daughters are spared these comparisons by the sheer luck of
design.
The history of not knowing one’s father, really knowing
one’s father, leads to the present condition of being a father unknown by his
son. It’s the paternal cycle of partially developed humans, x and y,
unsearching [sic], vocally remedial, and emotionally stunted. Nary one father is
excused from this paradigm be he a president, a prime minister, a king, a
cowboy, a coroner, a lout, dolt, pun or professor – they’re men, part human,
retching human, cold and cylindrical, and part ghost. I know them. I know how
they look at the world and how easily they can retreat into the cave of their ideals.
What would a man’s chances be if he were, in fact, fully
developed and he imparted unto his sons a sense of earnest self-awareness that
produced truth? What if a father weren’t necessarily a “man”? The outcome: a
divine remedy, a midnight stroke of genius, a weightless baton suspended in the
air of a rising beat… or simply, a very relevant cliché – a cliché I can live
with: a Man.
But who’s to blame for the father’s failure? Did the caveman
patriarch find the threatening gaping maw of the sabertooth to be more
inspiring than his newborn cripple of a son wailing in the colic of his doomed
humanity? Instead of using the helpless infant as bait for the threatening,
buck-toothed feline, he could’ve roasted the prattling little chap with his
newfound fire; but no, he dragged the child through the muddy fields to the
beast’s lair as a sacrifice of sorts. Or, perhaps, like mighty Zeus, the father
swallowed the leaden small fry whole.
Barump!
That was no stone.
The enduring history of men is that of violence and from
whence it starts, the chest-beating thunders through the generations.
Was Cain a victim of violence and did he then transfer his
anger unto his brother? And what if Abraham went through with it? Was he not
nearly psychotic or devoted to his schizophrenia? And how about all those
prophets and the voices in their heads – shattered, dysfunctional,
dissociative, preening egomaniacs all? Good role models? Christ. Mary,
wide-eyed in the dream and clawing at the twitching, glowing face of her rapist,
endeavors to keep the truth from her husband and then nursing son. Is it the
fabrication of her supreme dramady that spares her a good, old-fashioned
stoning? And what of poor Jesus? He was almost human and certainly tried to get
it right; but it was those who followed that stripped him of his nearing the
truth, including his own sons. How many people killed in his name? Millions?
Billions? Millions of men killing billions?
And who burned all of the books?
This is a father’s virulent legacy unto his son – a history
of silence, of violence, of beer bellies and balding pates.
[And this is why we need a woman for president.]
No comments:
Post a Comment