Joe - Give Us A Break, For Christ Sake

I'm going to keep on hammering you over the head with Cheever because that is what he is doing to me.

From "The Housebreaker Of Shady Hill". A guy is struggling to survive, he is in more financial trouble than his wife is aware of and he is afraid. He is stressed but simultaneously thinking about his wife and a night when they were preparing to go to a party. Thinking about her affectionately.

"There seemed to be as much truth in her beauty and the power she exerted over my senses as there was in the fact that we were overdrawn at the bank."

From "The Bus To St. James."

"As he watched his daughter doing obediently what was expected of her, it struck him that he and the company that crowded around him were all cut out of the same cloth. They were bewildered and confused in principle, too selfish or too unlucky to abide by the forms that guarantee the permanence of a society, as their fathers and mothers had done. Instead, they put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies."

In my mind, my oh so small and diseased mind, there is a lot going on in that one. A lot of truth. The picture of all of the phonies who pretend to live by the rules, who put on an outer show of unshakable morality and goodness. The same people who, when nobody is looking, cheat on their spouses, lie, steal, abuse their kids, beat their dogs and consume booze like spring water.

Beyond that, and this really hit me considering when these stories were written (Cheever died in 1982), is the screwing up the kids thing. All the parents today who organize "play dates" for their kids. This sickens me. The parents who organize and control every aspect of their kids' lives, push and intimidate them, in the belief that they can force their kids to be better than them.

I guess the thought process has existed forever, maybe, although I have a romanticized notion that there was a time when parents were parents and kids were kids, there was nothing but love between them, and the kids did not grow up to kill other kids at school.

Cheever may have seen the seeds of parental stupidity decades ago, but I maintain that the current crop of parents have perfected it.

We are mortgaging our future against the hope that our children's minds will not be so warped by their parents that they cannot even function.

Cheever saw human nature clearly.