My father was once fun, cool and totally apolitical. Now, at ninety, he’s a man consumed by hatred, xenophobia, and misinformation — an unfamiliar man shaped by the constant flicker of television screens.
In the 1960s, my mother marched for peace and women’s liberation. I remember her taking us to protest outside Honeywell, a company making anti-personnel cluster bombs for Vietnam. The back of our station wagon was a moving manifesto: Make Peace, Not War; War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things. She campaigned for McGovern and filled our home with compassion for the less fortunate. My father, disinterested, found his way into her friend group through weed — which became his lifelong companion. He grew a very cool beard and wore a suede sport coat. My mother kept her focus on activism; my father drifted into a haze that never quite lifted. His only passion was the Knicks, Nets, Mets and monster movies. He continues to wake and bake to this day.
They divorced in the early 1980s, though business kept them bound for years. Time passed. Then came Marci. When my father remarried, something in him began to change.
In 2021, my childhood buddy Micheal and I visited them in Highland Beach, Florida. As we drove up A1A toward a French bistro in Palm Beach, Marci’s excitement grew. Passing Mar-a-Lago, she insisted we salute. We laughed, assuming it was a joke — until we saw her turn, rigid and silent, hand raised in solemn devotion. She had previously announced, with pride, that she is a Trumpet.
Not long after, because of his age, my father rarely left the apartment. Every morning, Marci turned on Fox, filling every room with its intoxicating stimulation. He’d smoke a joint and watch for hours. One day, he called to tell me, with disgust, that he’d canceled his decades long subscription to The New York Times, calling them “communists”. I realized then how far down the rabbit hole he’d gone.
On visits, their conversations grew more surreal and fuller of hatred. We had recently purchased a home in Montecito, California. Marci and my dad were in disbelief. They warned me about the “homeless immigrants overrunning California” who were “murderers, rapists and convicted criminals.” In total seriousness, it was not safe for us to live in Montecito. They were genuinely concerned. When I said I hadn’t seen any homeless immigrants in the Montecito area, but that the immigrants I had seen were busy working in the fields, in yards and in restaurants and that most homeless I had seen were white, most likely with mental illness issues, Marci met my words with her favorite dismissive refrain: “Oh, you don’t know.” Facts had lost their meaning. Opened mindedness gone. Only their absolute truth remained.
In response to my father’s vitriol for immigrants and foreigners, I reminded him that he was an “anchor baby” himself and that many of our relatives trapped in Europe because of the restrictive Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 were murdered by the Nazis. My dad was confused by what I was telling him and could not understand its relevance.
On one of our frequent telephone calls, my father insisted that all Afghan refugees were “Taliban terrorists with Covid and AIDS” and that they were going to rise and overthrow our government. I told him I thought it was the single largest, quickest brain drain of the smart and educated of any country in the history of the world which would set Afghanistan back for decades (similar to all the entrepreneurial Vietnamese refugees we vacated from south Vietnam in 1975; southern California in particular is still benefiting today economically from this evacuation). My dad was perplexed by my response. On other calls, with anger, he told me that Biden and Clinton were “crooks” who had “stolen billions” from the federal government and that they had to be locked up immediately. Again, his truth was certain and absolute. He and Marci hate Muslims, foreigners, Arabs, Blacks, Palestinians, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, New York City, California and Democrats. More recently, he explained to me with certainty that tariffs were paid for “only by foreigners and that American businessmen are too smart to pay them”. When I tried to reason, to explain that Trump’s government was debiting the US business account of one of my companies for his increased tariff taxes, he dismissed me with weary contempt: “Oh, you don’t know.” More recently, he simply interrupted me to blurt “Greg, what you don’t understand is that President Trump is a genius businessman who is going to make America great again!” Fox has successfully done its job. He has become a hard person to speak with. Of course, there is the weather but then there is the hoax of global warming. His favorite retort, “fake news!”
Years of weed and Fox have changed him into an ugly American. The man who was once cool and apolitical now lives in a fog of hatred and misinformation. His remaining living friends avoid him. It’s painful to watch. My cool dad —whose only passion was sports and monster movies— has vanished, replaced by someone full of vehemence, intolerance, hatred and misinformation and lost inside his own echo. He and Marci have become the provincial and hateful people who drove my grandparents and great-grandparents from 19th century and early 20th century Europe. We are better than this.
Greg Slamowitz 