Family First

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

You know those people who talk about the sanctity of “family,” and how it “comes first”? They even put it in their Match.com profiles, if people are still using those. “There’s nothing more important than family!” they proclaim, or they say their interests are “hanging out with family,” and instead of seeing those white knights the way they probably intended—that if I played my hand just so, maybe they would start a family with me!—there washes over me a revulsion so intense I don’t even enjoy it. And usually I love things I hate!

You know what “It’s all about family” really means? It means you are dealing with a bigot. Get out of there. Fast.

some real housewives

I was reminded of this, as so often happens, watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey. All the women are fairly delightful, their Fran Drescher voices oddly comforting, their shopping excursions off-the-wall, their children the usual nuisances we take such joy in not rearing ourselves. The oldest sister, Caroline, is a very sinister lady; she’s outwardly placid, even in the face of her two retarded children (the third, and not-retarded, child, has gone off to college, the first in his family, which experience is to be endlessly mocked by the cherished other son, a blustery type liberally doused in Eau de Date Rape). Caroline’s only friends are her sisters and sister-in-law, because she is paranoid and intense and bellows things into the camera like how she is going to find out everything about you if you want to come into HER LIFE—you know, coming into her life by being friends with her sister-in-law. In as much fairness as I can muster, the woman who wants to be friends with Caroline’s sister-in-law seems like she might have a borderline personality. But these days, really, who doesn’t?

When I hear people talk so piously about “family,” I assume they mean their responsibility to the world ends there; nor will they teach their children to tend to anything beyond their own ever-escalating wants. Clannishness begets greed and xenophobia, which beget Arnold Schwarzenegger rescinding the car tax because Gray Davis had raised the tax back to what it had been, and people, led by John & Ken, went fucking nuts thinking they might have to share some of their money for a common good. I got $110 back that first year, and California got a $3.6 billion shortfall. Multiply that by seven years, and what do we get? You are smart! Or else you already read Michael Hiltzik’s excellent LA Times story yesterday. (Or—I’m sorry, but I must—my story from four years ago.)

I read the saddest story in the world the other day, Dorothy Parker’s “Clothe the Naked,” which I thought desperately wanted to be Flannery O’Connor, but then I checked, and the story predated O’Connor’s stories by 20 years, so I am probably not as smart as I think I am.

Big Lannie is a laundress whose children have all died but one, a bad girl for whom Big Lannie brings little treats so she will want to stay home instead of going off with men whose treats are bigger and more expensive, and then the fast daughter gets pregnant and dies, and Big Lannie must quit her laundering for a while as she takes care of her blind grandson, and all the ladies whose silks she launders are very angry with her for taking advantage of them by having to take unpaid time off, and then eventually she gets more work, from one very charitable woman who charitably takes her back (at a discount) and then when she has to work, Big Lannie’s neighbors happily watch the little boy for her, as he is no trouble at all, just sits in the corner happily playing with spoons and deftly spooling together mats he thinks Big Lannie can sell, but each night she unspools them so he can do them again tomorrow, because of course Big Lannie cannot sell his mats, but the boy, Raymond, doesn’t know that and is happy to help his loving grandmother, because Raymond has known only love and goodness, and “[h]ad anyone come into Big Lannie’s room to take Raymond away to an asylum for the blind, the neighbors would have fought for him with stones and rails and boiling water.”

Anyway, it gets really sad.

But my point is that sure, Big Lannie sacrificed for her family, but her neighbors did too, while the good ladies of the town felt only aggravation for anyone beyond their walls. They felt taken advantage of—distressingly, grab-the-smelling-salts taken advantage of, by someone for a moment not tending to them. Because only they and their families exist; all else is shadows.

I like my family, and we enjoy hanging out together—nobody appreciates us like we do, once the proper beatings have been administered and everyone has again calmed down and sat back down to dinner—and I have even been known to do nice things for them, and they for me. But we certainly have interests and friends beyond each other. There’s a world out there.

Russ Feingold

This week, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment denying President Obama the funding necessary to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, voting for it 90 to six. Even Russ Feingold, recipient of one vote in a 2006 straw poll at the most liberal dinner party since Emma Goldman dined alone, even Russ Feingold voted for it! I called his office for an explanation—if Russ Feingold voted for it, there must be a good one!—but of course his office didn’t call back. According to published reports, Feingold has been saying for a while he wouldn’t fund the closing of Gitmo without a solid plan, which the administration hasn’t presented. Fair enough.

But Dick Cheney and Mitch McConnell and quite possibly John & Ken (I don’t know; I don’t listen to them) have been thundering and bloviating about terrorists on American soil and their grave threat to the American Family, and in a feckless pander, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid immediately whinnied that he will never let terrorists be “released” into American prisons.

Threaten the American Family, and you can demagogue anything.

Soon we’ll see what happens to our state. We’ll see whose sons will be kicked off Medi-Cal, whose daughters will sit in English class with 45 other students because all the teachers got fired, whose free clinic will close and you don’t have insurance because you got laid off. I hope you Family Firsters spent your car tax rebate on something important, like maybe a couple cases of Coors for your family barbecue, and I hope you strengthened those family bonds and your drunken brother will help you out when you need to clothe your children. Because the larger community—what we used to call civilization—has given up. It’s every family for itself. Knock yourself out.

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