Hypocrisy
"Now, that's lovely," James said. "Your in-law's farm?"
"Yes, I spent many summers there. By the way, have I ever told you my theory
of the excessive use of landscape in Southern Writing?"
"No, you haven't. Let's hear it."
"Elaborate, saccharine descriptions of plantations, farmland, rivers,
magnolia trees, and so on, are a subliminal attempt by white Southern writers
to put a pleasing veneer on a most loathesome subject--a culture built upon the
moral bankruptcy of slavery. It's like putting a bad picture in a beautiful
frame."
"Ouch!"
"Think about it. Landscape is employed as the only truly noble character
available among folks who started a war to protect their alleged right to
inflict suffering and bloodshed on Africans."
"Tell me how you really feel about it, Harold!"
"Ha! And furthermore, once they've exhausted the enobling potential of
scenery, they turn to characters who are eccentric or grotesque."
"Flannery O'Connor springs immediately to mind."
"Precisely. The woman was unapologetic about her obsession with the
bizzare. She said she was merely writing about what she saw and who she
met."
"And this is the henhouse?"
"Cluck, cluck, CLUCK."
"What's this?"
"It might be an illustration for Judges 15:16. 'And Samson said…with the
jawbone of an ass have I slain a thousand men.' This was the chap who tore
apart a young lion with his bare hands, and subsequently set the fields of the
Philistines afire with firebrands carried between the tails of 300 foxes."
"Whew!"
"Now this," Harold said, "has quite a bit of personal
significance, which goes back to the early days of my marriage to Big Burt's
daughter. It's the pumphouse. One afternoon I heard shouting. 'The pump's
sprung a leak! The pump's spring a leak!'
"I rushed over, went inside. A stream of water arced from the holding
tank. My little cousin told me if this wasn't stopped, then the pump will be
ruined. Something about the bearings overheating, seizing up, or something. Big
Burt had driven the women to town for shopping. Skip and Hank, Burt's sons,
were supposed to be doing chores on the farm, but they'd decided instead to
drive up across the Red River into Oklahoma to get a few quick beers at the
riverside bar. But right now, somebody had to DO something, and quick!
"I looked around the shed. On a shelf was a box of big self-tapping metal
screws, and a screwdriver. I stuck one of the screws into the little rusted
hole from which the water was streaming, and gave it a couple hard turns. The
leak stopped. 'Hooray!' little cousin shouted."
"So the high-falutin' Yankee Intellectual saved the day, eh?"
"When Big Burt came back he went to inspect the repair. He nodded. 'At
least somebody around here has some gad-damned common sense,' he said.
"Then Burt wanted to know where Skip and Hank were. 'Uh, across the river,
granpa,' my little cousin told him."
"These two were the brothers-in-law who always challenged you?" James
asked.
"Yes. When they got back Burt chewed their asses, big time. They stood
there in the living room, next to the pot-bellied stove, listening to their
father telling them how they'd dropped the ball once again. They gave me
resentful glances. Once again I'd showed them up. They hated it."
"I guess they had it coming, didn't they?"
"At the time I have to admit I had little sympathy for either of them.
Largely because from the beginning they never accepted me as a member of the
family. To them I always was an outsider. 'Gad-damned Yankee,' was their
supposedly humorous nickname for me. But these days, from a distance, I see the
situation in a different way."
"How so?"
"Big Burt always awed me. A genuinely powerful, charismatic figure. I
admired his strength, his self assurance. But he never said a good thing about
his own sons. He never let them feel they were good enough for him."
"That's sad."
"Yes. And it went beyond that. One time Skip and Hank took me to that
riverside joint in Oaklahoma. Hank was pretty boozed up, and bragging loudly
about something, and in a sudden silence everyone in that bar could hear an old
timer's voice: "Hank, you ain't never gonna be the man yer daddy is."
"Christ."
"As for me, well, I developed a taste for Big Burt's approval and
affirmation. I wanted more and more. I went out of my way to give Hank and Skip
exactly what they threw at me. And I fell right into the sort of macho
posturing that I so very much despised in others. There's a word for it."
"Payback?"
"No. Hipocrisy."
* * *