Lampooning The American Dad

The new sport in satire is the American Dad. Take the show American Dad. Or South Park. Or The Simpsons. The patriarch is the buffoon who is a caricature of authority. Seth Johnson's South Park makes out dads to be stupid, perverted, hideous, comical. Anything but respectable. And what can American dads do but role. Lets face it. Being the heavy is always going to be lampooned. But where did this lets roast dad genre come from?

Certainly Ward Cleaver didn't start it. Dad was cool. He came home from work and kissed June and handled the Beave and never lost his shit. He was the man in charge who never broke a sweat even as The Beave raised hell. And from there we go to Father Knows Best  or Family Affair or Gidget or Happy Days or Dick Van Dyke. Dad did progress. Pick up on Bill Cosbys dad. He was pretty cool and kind of a hard ass. He would crack the whip but he knew the score. So dad went from the distanced Ward Cleaver to a hipster dad.

And then...then dad went sideways. He became not respectable at all. In fact dad became the guy to be disparaged. Or he became the totem pole for all that is wrong with bourgeois living. The magnet for every crappy thing that can be attached to living in a suburb and raising a family. Ted Bundy was the precursor of this animated dad who garners no respect and only derision. Like metafiction we doubt not only the man but the institution. No one can win because the whole paradigm of having a family in America is suspect. Dad being the easiest target

And why not? Suburban sprawl brings no respect. It is a lifestyle choice of the man predicated on raising kids in bland safe surroundings. So the blanding applies to moms and dads but dads are the blandest of all. Totems left over from the Greatest Generation they are respected by neither their wives or kids and left to hide in garages or in basements or to leer at young women.

So what to do. Nothing. You are either a dad or you are not. And the people who are lampooning are now dads too. They know there is little to be done to escape their fate. Of course you could always not watch I suppose.

Rocket Man...the American Dream Turned upside Down

Our Gatsby Middleclass Shame

There is lots of middle class shame to go around these days. There are people who cant pay their mortgages, are on food stamps, Medicaid, assistance programs at schools. Middle class people don't talk about these things and this goes back to our Purtian work ethic that says failure is nothing less than losing God. Rich people are people who have served HIM and poor people need not apply. The gospel of the United States is one of shaming people who don't have jobs or who cant find jobs or who are homeless. We just don't really believe people can fail through no fault of their own.

But there is another kind of middle class shame. Almost a Gatsby shame evident in Fitzgerald's novel of course, The Great Gatsby. In the novel Gatsby refers to his home as something of a prize, saying it only took him a month to earn the money to buy the mansion. But at the end after his death we meet his father who said Gatsby used to chastise him because he "ate like a hog" and his father bragged about how Jimmy had pulled himself up and left the dirt poor farming existence of his childhood.

And like Gatsby there is a group of people who are ashamed of where they came from because during the boom they bought mansions. These are middle class people who do not believe they deserve their homes but are now stuck in them. Many are just hanging on in a sort of golden handcuffs perpetual state of illusion. The dream they saw when times were good and middle class people believed they could  be like rich people is now a nightmare where they cant get rid of the costume.

And like Gatsby, who at the end reverted to his roots, unable finally to pull it off for the Daisy Buchanan's of the world, these people are no longer able to pull it off for their neighbors, their friends, and ultimately, themselves.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one word...one word...plastics.

The Silent Generation

Got some speakers for my son for Christmas. He is fifteen one of the members of that generation that texts and prefers not to speak over missives of tweet length. I notice he and his homeboys dont talk in the car or when they were hanging out together in the basement. They are the silent generation with IPODS and Smarthphones shooting their safe missives devoid of emotional content. Parents are mostly the enemy so silence is a good thing to keep THE MAN in the dark.

But I worried about that silence. Some sort of lack of declaration. When I was fifteen I wasn hanging out in my basement with incense and black lights and rocking the house from below. It was my declaration with my rock posters and trips to the local head shop to load up on music and more exotic incense burners. My sister had just brought home some new music from college with strange punkish names like U2 and the Sex pistols and I started to know who I was in my pad in the basement.

So when my son inquired about speakers for Christmas I dug up an old receiver and bought some speakers for under the tree. He had always listened to his music in silence, an IPODEd warrior sliding along with the brood of the troubled youth. I was troubled but I found an outlet in declaring myself different. My music, my dress, my lifestyle gave me identity. So after Christmas I hooked up his speakers for him and he got a PEACE sign lamp from his aunt and set it on his desk next to the Buddha incense burner. We tested his speakers and he was amazed at the sound.

I went downstairs and started to watch television. The great silence gave way to thumping steady rock of Kanye and Eminem. We went to the store and when he returned he went right back upstairs and closed the door. The thumping music pounded through the house. I  know I'll have to keep an eye on things, but I had to smile because the silence had been broken. Yeah. Rock on son.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Man-William-Elliott-Hazelgrove/dp/0982139241  A novel of independence for a father and a son