2016 may be the first election in my life where my vote serves as more than canceling out my father’s vote. My father died three years ago. He wasn’t a bad guy at heart. He treated people decently, would help anyone who needed it, was smart and had untapped artistic talent.
Unfortunately, he was socially extremely awkward (incompetent, I would even say) made bad decisions, and never managed to acquire any of the respect and success he felt he deserved.
His early education took place at a Catholic school run by abusive nuns. My grandmother tells a story about how once, when he was getting a haircut, he kept begging her to cut it shorter and shorter, until finally he ran his hand over his head, smirked and said, “Let’s see Sister ______ try to drag me around by the hair NOW.” He wanted to go to college, but his own family refused to help or encourage it, and he didn’t manage to acquire the money himself. His lack of higher education led him to later sneer at people who did go to college—jealousy combined with an inferiority complex and a stubborn streak of reverse snobbery that ran in that side of my family. “Were just plain folks,” Grandma would say huffily.
His marriage turned into a continual bickering match. He could not get funding to remodel an old house he bought, so he had to tear it down and build a new one. The house he built (acting as his own unqualified contractor) was never completely finished, with nobody but himself to take responsibility when the foundation cracked, or the doorways were crooked, or when the ancient septic system crumbled, or when the jackasses who put in the new septic system made it into a huge mound that went DIAGONALLY across the entire back yard, rendering the whole space unusable for anything else. He occasionally took up hobbies, entered competitions, attempted to start a business on the side, or even got caught up in dreams of treasure hunting. He rarely had anything to show for it, though after years of expense and effort, he did manage a second-place chili cook-off trophy. (He made fantastic chili, and never wrote down the recipe.)
Basically, none of his dreams ever came true, nothing he tried ever succeeded, and when the house was finally sold as the housing market collapsed, at about half what it should have been worth even in its eternally unfinished state, the divorce settlement gave my mother all the profit, and he was left to live out his retirement on social security and what was left of his pension after alimony and after the idiot boss had gambled away most of the company’s pension fund on iffy investments. Dad’s dream after retiring had been to drive a motor home all over the country. His finances scuttled that, though his health would probably have made short work of it anyway. He lived out his end days in a low-income apartment complex for the elderly, kippering himself with cheap cigarettes and watching TV. (Which was, I admit, the way he had spent most of his free time before retiring.) I couldn’t help much, I made even less at my two part-time jobs than he did off his Social Security.
While he was never intentionally rude to anybody, he did manage to offend people regularly, usually when he was trying hard to impress them. And the more he realized he was failing at that, and looking like a fool, the more resentful he became. Right-wing talk radio help to stoke and direct his resentment. While he never confronted anyone who actually wronged him in real life, he ranted freely at abstract right-wing targets...the Liberals, the illegal immigrants, etc. He was a huge Rush Limbaugh fan. When we drove places together, I was often a captive audience of Rush’s program. I vividly remember one program where Rush had a Clinton imitator speak some lines that Rush thought Clinton MIGHT be likely to say, then Rush went into hysterics over Clinton’s nerve in hypothetically being capable of saying such things. The crazy rants appealed to my Dad, though, someone with a history of frustration and disappointment, and an aversion to direct confrontation.
I was treated to a lot of Dad’s Rush-dittoed comments, too. Like, ‘Hillary Clinton can never be president because she’s already served two terms.’ And that I (and all the other women of the US) only voted for Bill Clinton because he was good-looking. He ranted and tore down Bill Clinton at me frequently...I often reminded him that Clinton had been out of office for years, and asked why he was so obsessed. He claimed I was the obsessed one, which was pretty ridiculous. I didn’t care a hoot about Clinton one way or the other, his prime qualification for me was just that he had been an alternate to the Republicans. But Dad thought all us Liberals adored Bill Clinton down to his little Socks, apparently because Rush spent well over a decade telling him so. Dad claimed that all social programs should be eliminated because the purpose of government was not to fix peoples’ problems for them, to which I would respond, what the heck is government for, then?
By Dubya’s second term, though, Dad had quieted down quite a bit. Not totally sure he voted Dubya the second time around, though I’m pretty sure he would never have voted for Gore. Quite sure Dad didn’t vote for Obama, either, but by that point, I was refusing to discuss politics with him any more, in the interest of being able to have a civil relationship. I was high on ‘Yes We Can,’ and didn’t give a rat’s ass what the opposition thought.
I can’t help wondering if my father would have voted for Trump. He loathed Hillary with all of his Rush-soaked soul, and would never, ever have voted for her. But he was certainly not stupid or delusional enough to be able to sincerely make the claim that Trump was an honest politician telling it like it is, or that a rube with no self-control would make a great leader. He might have considered ‘throwing his vote away’ on an independent candidate. Or not voted at all. Or used the Supreme Court as his excuse.
Deep down, though, I worry that Trump’s message of Scary Muslims and Evil Mexicans might have rung a chord with this guy, who, like a lot of the local rural men, seriously considered investing in ammo and sheet plastic after 9-11, in case, ya know, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden happened to visit Wisconsin and come strolling down the back road of our rural neighborhood hand-in-hand, lobbing poison gas bombs at the cows. (To his credit, Dad did not actually buy any.) He would occasionally grumble that Native Americans were lazy drunks, and was outraged that Susan B. Anthony had been put on the dollar coin because she was (gasp) a LESBIAN! And while I don’t think I’d use the word ‘misogynist’ on him, he was kind of a chauvinist. He was definitely in Trump’s demographic.
I suppose I will have to choose a Trump supporter who is not too loathsome, and vote to cancel out their vote, in honor of my dad’s spirit. I do miss him. But not his vote or his politics or his radio programs.