Tucker Carlson reminds me of my Dad. Struggling to be at the head of the pack, domineering and cynical, and always ready with the snappy comeback. But tonight on "Dancing with the Stars," you could see a crack in the veneer. God knows he must have seen it coming, but who knows. Carlson danced like a stick having a bad day. Voted off the show, he had a decidedly sheepish look. A little flustered, trying to be brave, but nonetheless ashen and obviously uncomfortable. Oh yeah, he said, "it was fun." Carlson said he was really glad he had done it. But it made me cringe. "Another reason for him to hate," I thought to myself. "Just like Dad."
[Keep dancing with me here ...]
UPDATE: Thanks for title advice, thinkdouble
I asked my mother once what the problem is with my Dad. Authoritarian as hell, he ruled my mom like a dictator. He tried to pass on his racism and his Republicanism to his children. A person who is quick to point out others' faults, he has nonetheless no concept of his impact on others.
"It's false bravado," Mom said. "He's making up for low self esteem."
"But why?" I replied.
"He's short," Mom said matter-of-factly. "He became a bully and a bastard to make up for it."
It blows my mind to ponder how much of what we do and become rests on the nature of our childhoods. Take a good look at the psychological history of the world and its leaders and you see it time and again. For my Dad, being five foot seven inches was a mightly blow. He bullied players on the football field, then later associates in business. He domineered his wife and his kids. He hated everyone he could freely hate to make himself seem more important, bigger, better. Taller.
Take a good look at the people who currently drive the national spirit to new lows, who use hate and venom to advance their ideologies. Take a good look at George Bush, never a cool kid, who covered up his low self esteem with booze and belligerance and now wreaks havoc on the world. Bet he can't dance for shit, either. Look at Tucker Carlson. So privileged, so pompous. But his self esteem must be lower than whale shit. Can't dance. Look at Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney ... can you picture any of them cutting a rug?
No. They became cut throats instead.
I am convinced that the best way we have to create a better future is to make sure the children now growing up have good self esteem, loving parents, freedom of expression, freedom from want, freedom from bullying, and somebody -- anybody -- with courage enough to take to task and help any child who likes to blow up frogs for sport.
We like to think we leave our childhoods behind when we become adults and actors on whatever stage is given us. At 50, I'm now old enough to realize that I am five year old with grey hair. It took me years to understand that my need to be the one to lob the conversation-ending brilliant point, the one to win the trophy, the one at the head of the class was not an entirely healthy competitive spirit. I am my father's daughter, after all. My mother says that when I was 3 to 4 months old, my father got down on the floor and made me crawl, moving my legs himself to show me how to do it. He would do it until I was exhausted, until I cried huge crocodile tears. I was the first born, and not a boy, and he buried his disappointment in a quest to help me succeed at all costs. To be better than the rest. To be the prizewinner. To be taller.
I thought tonight: Tucker Carlson likes to win, too. I understand him, though I despise him. I thought: maybe if he had stayed on the show, and danced some more, and gotten better at it, and found his heart and soul, that he would change.
Sometimes I think the best advertisement for my political position would be to go down to the street corner and simply dance while the cars go by. Put a big sign out there: I am a Democrat. I would twirl and swirl and smile to beat the band. I would radiate a message: loosen up and learn to love, and you will be able to dance. To breathe, to hope, to help. I imagine people driving by and thinking, "Gee, I want to be that! Whatever she is, I want to be that."
The tragedy of modern times is not that our leaders have suffered a lack of privilege, or education, or intelligence. They've traveled the world, they've had a bevy of advisors. The tragedy is that the people with the lowest self esteem -- bad dancers all, no doubt -- thrust themselves upon the world stage and exact their revenge. The healthy among us are happy to stay in our villages and we refrain for overlording.
Consider the pitiful childhoods of those whose names we are forced to encounter again and again:
JOSEPH STALIN [from Wikipedia]
Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire to Vissarion Dzhugashvili and Ekaterina Geladze. In 1913, he adopted the name Stalin, which is derived from the Russian root "stal" for "steel". His mother was born a serf. The other three children died young; "Soso" (the Georgian pet name for Joseph), was effectively an only child. His father Vissarion was a cobbler. He opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis. (Archer 11)
Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small son. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry. (Hoober 15)
ADOLF HITLER [from Wikipedia]
Because of Alois Hitler's profession, his family moved frequently, from Braunau to Passau, Lambach, Leonding, and Linz. As a young child, Hitler was reportedly a good student at the various elementary schools he attended; however, in sixth grade (1900-1), his first year of high school (Realschule) in Linz, he failed completely and had to repeat the grade. His teachers reported that he had "no desire to work."
Hitler later explained this educational slump as a kind of rebellion against his father Alois, who wanted the boy to follow him in a career as a customs official, although Adolf wanted to become a painter. This explanation is further supported by Hitler's later description of himself as a misunderstood artist. However, after Alois died on January 3, 1903, when Adolf was 13, Hitler's schoolwork did not improve. At the age of 16, Hitler left school with no qualifications ... [Later in life]After the second refusal from the Academy of Arts, Hitler gradually ran out of money. By 1909, he sought refuge in a homeless shelter, and by the beginning of 1910 had settled permanently into a house for poor working men.
GEORGE W. BUSH
An alert for American voters and humane educators everywhere appeared on May 21 in the 61st through 64th paragraphs of a 76-paragraph NEW YORK TIMES feature on the childhood of Republican candidate for U.S. president George W. Bush -- if anyone noticed.
«One of the local rituals for children,» reported Nicholas D. Kristof of Life in Midland, Texas, when George W. was a boy, «were meetings with cookies and milk at the home of a nice old lady who represented the SPCA. The cookies were digested more thoroughly than the teachings.»
«`We were terrible to animals,' recalled [Bush pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. `Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,' Throckmorton said. `Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'»
Kristof made plain that «we» explicitly included George W. Bush, and that George W., the Safari Club International «Governor of the Year» in 1999 for his support of trophy hunting, was the leader among the boys who did it.
http://www.all-creatures.org/...
George Bush is a "red-ass in a hurry," as the sportswriters say in Texas, meaning he has a whole lot of energy and aggression to burn off or he's likely to blow. He has always been that way. When Barbara Bush took her 13-year-old son and his best friend, Doug Hannah, to play golf at her Houston club, George would start cursing if he didn't tee off well. His mother would tell him to quit it. By the third or fourth hole he would be yelling "Fuck this" until he had ensured that his mother would send him to the car.
"It fit his needs," says Hannah. "He couldn't lose."
Once, after his mother banished him from the golf course, she turned to Hannah and declared, "That boy is going to have optical rectosis." What did that mean? "She said, `A shitty outlook on life.'"
"He didn't have any passion for running for Congress, or for governor," says Bush's personal accountant, Robert McCleskey. "I think it was in his blood, but I don't know if he had it on the brain," suggests Charlie Younger, the boyhood friend who in 1975 climbed onstage with Bush to dance with Willie Nelson. Even as an adult, George was so out of control that his mother, then the president's wife, removed her eldest son to the opposite end of the table at a state dinner for the Queen of England. Although sober by then, the First Son had introduced himself to the Queen as "the black sheep of the family."
George W. Bush was then 44 years old.
http://gailsheehy.com/...
President George W. Bush was introduced to the film "The Grapes of Wrath" as a student at the Harvard Business School, where he got admitted on his family's name. "I wanted to give the class a visual reference for poverty and a sense of historical empathy," macroeconomics professor Yoshi Tsurumi told a researcher for Kitty Kelley's book, "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty."
"George Bush came up to me and said, 'Why are you going to show us that commie movie?'" Tsurumi recalled. "I laughed because I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. After we viewed the film, I called on him to discuss the Depression and how he thought it affected people. [Bush] said, 'Look, people are poor because they are lazy.' A number of students pounced on him and demanded that he support his statement with facts and statistics. He quickly backed down because he could not sustain his broadside."
The incident and a semester of exposure burned into Tsurumi's memory a disturbing view of the future president. "His strong prejudices soon set him apart.... Most business students are conservative, but they are not inhumane or unprincipled. George Bush came across as totally lacking compassion, with no sense of history, completely devoid of social responsibility and unconcerned with the welfare of others."
http://www.commondreams.org/...
Oh, I know that politics is a complex and complicated thing. I know there are major platforms, and billions of dollars, and huge economies at stake. That it's all just so intricate and dense and beyond the powers of my comprehension that I could never grasp it all.
My heart tells me quite another thing. It tells me that it's all so amazingly simple that we can't see it. We flatter ourselves to believe that we are sophisticated, discerning individuals when we are all just taller children.
It also tells me that we should have dances instead of political debates. I would be willing to lay down money right now that Tester can out-boogie Burns by a mile, and Lemont would dance rings around Lieberman.
It tells me that someone should have told my Dad he was just fine the height, and width, and depth he was. That bullying people would never garner him the respect he craved.
It tells me that -- no matter what he said -- we should have been quaking with fear the moment we saw George W. Bush dance at his first inaugural, all left feet and low self esteem.
It tells me that inside even Tucker Carlson there could be a dancer -- and a Democrat. And that's why I wish Tucker Carlson had won Dancing with the Stars.