Conversations with My Dead Grandparents

I am very fortunate to have had wonderful grandparents.

My grandfather was born in 1893. He was a WWI flyer, a Georgia Tech graduate, an electrical engineer, an avid reader (including sitting for what seemed like hours at a time reading the dictionary). He obsessively followed the hourly stock market reports on WOR radio out of New York City. He was a quiet man who valued his southern roots but who never felt a need to display a Confederate flag.

He was a Republican.

My grandmother was born in 1897. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1919. She was a suffragette, and she remained active in the League of Women Voters for her entire life. Family lore has it that the only job she ever had was during World War II, when she worked for a time in a factory that assembled fuses for bombs. Details are somewhat sparse. She recycled before there was a word for recycling. She, too, was an avid reader. She was a mother and grandmother.

She was a Republican.

They were members of the Audubon Society and they loved feeding and watching the birds that came to their feeders and suet cages. They regularly played bridge with their friends. They were Scrabble players and did crossword puzzles and, in so doing, instilled in me a love of words and language. They paid attention to current events via their local newspaper, the evening newscast, U.S. News and World Report, and the Wall Street Journal.

I loved them both dearly. They were lovely, gentle, kind, and compassionate people. Did I mention they were Republicans? Why, yes. Yes, I believe I did.

I remember them struggling to make sense of the Vietnam War — a war that our government was telling them was the right thing to do but that young people (myself included) were protesting in ways that the nation had never witnessed before. They grappled with the issue.

While I understood Woodstock only as “three days of peace and love and music,” they saw only monumental traffic jams and tens of thousands of wet, muddy young people. The reality, of course, was somewhere in between those two extremes or, perhaps more accurately, the sum of those two extremes.

When there was an issue that perplexed them, they didn’t rush to judgment. They stepped back and tried to learn about it in a measured way.

Both my grandparents died in the mid-1970s at a time when I was too young (or at least not adult enough) to have adult conversations with them. But, from time to time, I imagine sharing with them the events of my own life and discussing with them the affairs of the day.

Those imaginary conversations often have consisted of discussions of things that exist now that didn’t exist when they were alive — microwave ovens, bullet trains, Starbucks, bread machines, flat screen televisions, and such. I remember the look of awe on my grandmother’s face the first time she listened to my transistor radio using its earphone, and I imagine equivalent looks of wonder for these newfangled everyday objects.

Sometimes when I pick up my smartphone, I ponder what my grandfather — the electrical engineer who worked in telecommunications — would think of the ability to carry around all this technology in one’s pocket. I’m certain he would put his engineer’s mind to work and learn all about it.

But lately, I’ve been trying to imagine how I would explain to them what has happened to their beloved Republican Party. As open-minded as they were, as much as they sought to understand things, I cannot fathom them comprehending how their party of Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower has morphed into this cult that unabashedly worships a convicted criminal — a lifelong con artist who somehow has risen to the highest office in the land, not once but twice.

Both my grandparents lived long enough to witness Richard Nixon’s demise, and they were disturbed and ashamed — not just because he was forced to leave office due to the threat of impeachment but also because they acknowledged what he did was morally, ethically, and legally wrong.

So how could they possibly understand the allure of Donald Trump? They were in their last years when Trump was charged with housing discrimination in 1973. That probably would have been their only exposure to him, if indeed they were aware of him at all. Those of us who are living through these terrible years can’t begin to explain his criminality coupled with his utter lack of a conscience, though we don’t stop trying.

It’s a difficult enough endeavor to explain his first term in office.

“Yeah, there’s this guy in your party who had no relevant experience, whose sole qualification was a sketchy real estate career in New York City, who leveraged his personal grievances and racism in his attempt to achieve elected office. Not only that, but there were recordings of him bragging about his sexual conquests. Oh, yeah. Did I tell you he won?”

The first term would be shocking enough to people of my grandparents’ generation — Republicans and Democrats alike. The fact that Donald Trump achieved a second term would be outside the realm of comprehension.

“Yeah, remember that Trump guy I was telling you about? He was impeached. Yes, twice, as a matter of fact — once for trying to extort one of our allies for personal political gain and once for an insurrection that he fomented. Yeah, I guess I forgot to tell you that part. He didn’t accept the results of the election that he lost, so he incited a violent mob to stop the peaceful transfer of power. He put the life of his own vice president at risk. But he also instilled enough fear of retribution in the members of his own party so that they didn’t convict him in the Senate. Yeah. He was re-elected.”

I cannot even imagine what my grandparents’ reaction would be.

There’s a logical chain of events between the first telephone and the iPhone. I’m pretty certain I could help them make sense of that evolution. But the chain of events between the Republican Party of my grandparents’ time and the Republican Party of today is not so obvious.

But it’s there. It’s there in the gradually increasing emphasis on attaining and retaining power within the party. It’s there in the subcutaneous racism that found a welcome home in the GOP as part of the Republicans’ southern strategy. It’s there in the “greed is good” mindset of the 1980s and in the infusion of massive amounts of cash into our politics, thanks in part to the Citizens United decision.

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I am now almost as old as my grandparents were when they died. Overall, I’ve had a pretty damn fortunate life, but one that has also had some significant struggles and challenges. I don’t think anyone reaches their seventies without struggles and challenges.

I don’t have children or grandchildren. I sometimes think I was born gay because of my complete lack of affinity for child-rearing. But I wonder if the kids who are the age of my non-existent grandchildren will reflect, in their senior years, on the Trump era as a dark and shameful anomaly in the nation’s history or if instead Trump’s personal and political behavior will have become so normalized that he and this time we’re in will not stand out.

I hope it’s the former, but I’m certain I will never know.