Private Noir

Recently, I have been delving back into detective fiction. As my readers will know, my favorite detective is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, followed closely by Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. However, this foray into crime detection was informed by a more modern variant: the private eye, as most often characterized by the noir style of filming as popularized by Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and later perfected by Orson Welles in movies from the middle of the last century. I read four books, each one much different from the others and, though I’m done, I thought it would be worthwhile to categorize this grim, monochromatic genre.

The setting is usually (but not always) Los Angeles in the early-mid part of the last century. Here is the rough-hewn private dick, a life-hardened loner, with a penchant for finding trouble and the skills to fix things. The lexicon of film and literature is filled with tropes from this genre that we all know well.

Perhaps my favorite private detective from that era is Phillip Marlowe, as written by Raymond Chandler. Smart, chivalrous and strong as chilled steel, Chandler’s protagonist is perhaps the archetype for the genre. He doesn’t play by the rules (except his own) , takes no guff from anyone, is almost always in pursuit of a femme fatale, and is perpetually scouring the streets of the Los Angeles underworld. 

In the blue-smoke filled dream-realm, everyone drinks too much, parties devolve into secret orgies and reputations are made and broken by what makes the front page. Almost always, a woman’s reputation is at stake, or a friend disappears into the city’s underbelly, subsumed into a world of rumor, innuendo, sleaze, drugs and despair and behind it all, a wealthy man, paying to keep every blackmailer silent, every damaged reputation out of the papers. Reluctantly, Marlowe wades in, usually to the detriment of his own good name.

This year, I read Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. The story is red hot, and I highly recommend it. What I admired most, though, was Chandler’s economy of line. He writes at a blistering pace. The sentences are like the rattling of a machine gun. The plot moves in an undercurrent, propelled by Marlowe’s first person narrative. His dedication to a friend is tested when the man disappears after a wealthy socialite is found brutally murdered. When her sister appeals to Marlowe for help, he winds up in the sights of the police, the murdered woman’s bevy of lovers, disgraced doctors and her rich, straight-laced father. My favorite line from the book is, “Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”

After Marlowe,I flew across the country to a brownstone in Manhattan inhabited by a most unusual detective. I’d read Rex Stout novels before, of course and so was familiar with the author’s unconventional hero, Nero Wolfe, but this time I went back and read the first in a long series of novels, called Fer-de-Lance. 

Stout’s structure is unusual. Mr. Wolfe is a mountain of a man that we would now call deeply obsessive and compulsive. He never leaves his brownstone. He takes interviews with those in need (only if their mystery captures his attention) between 9-11 and 4-6 each day. Otherwise, he is either dining on gourmet meals as prepared by his cook Fritz, or tending to an entire third floor garden of rare and priceless orchids. 

If Wolfe never leaves home, you ask, how can he solve mysteries, as the primary rule of all detection requires going to the scene of the crime and interviewing eyewitnesses? The solution for this is the author's brilliant and original character Archie Goodwin. 

Goodwin does all the footwork and is essentially Nero Wolfe’s field agent. Archie is also the first-person narrator of the stories and relates everything from his notebooks and his interactions with Wolfe. Nero Wolfe is an eccentric who drinks huge amounts of beer (but never to the detriment of his mental acuity) and solves crimes using only his imagination and Archie’s notes. While he acknowledges that other such detectives are men of science, Wolfe considers himself to be an artist of crime solving, allowing his genius to work through Goodwin and others.

Fer-de-Lance, by the way, is the name of the most deadly snake in South America, which is sent to Wolfe when his solutions stray too close to the truth and it is up to Archie Goodwin to zoom about the city, looking for the murderer who hired a machinist to construct a deadly golf club that kills the wrong victim. Lighter in prose than Chandler, but no less intense, the character of Archie Goodwin is that of a knight errant, who wins over his interviewees with charm and wit and an eye for details unrivaled by any but his boss. My favorite line from this book: “I had long since learned from Wolfe that the corner the light doesn’t reach is the one the dime rolled to.”

Second-to-last on my list of private eye detective fiction is I, The Jury, by Mickey Spillane. This story struck me as being the grittiest, pulp novel-style tale I have read in a long time—or maybe ever. Where Chandler never goes too deep on scenes of intimate sex or violence, allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks, Spillane’s Mike Hammer’s first-person narration is downright sweaty. Licentious descriptions of women, all of whom seem to throw themselves at Hammer, baroque details of murders, pulpy characters and Hammer’s hard-boiled narrative all add up to a little too much for my taste.

Spillane really was considered a pulp novelist, so he knew that sex and violence and alcohol sell, but the mysteries aren’t as interesting in the intellectual sense. Hammer solves them the same way he does everything, with a roaring, overloaded sense of self-importance, a swollen sense of his own right to commute justice, a gun in one hand and a “dame” in the other. 

In this book, the first of a shelf of Mike Hammer stories (I will not say mysteries) Hammer’s best friend and former Army buddy in the war (yes, that war) is brutally murdered. Vowing revenge, Hammer begins a race with the police to find the killer. Along the way, he falls hard for a psychologist (who is also a knockout—all the women in these stories are knockouts, and all come undressed in every scene). As he brutally slams through the backstreets and brothels, looking for the killer and always arriving just too late to stop several more murders. He eventually learns that he’s been duped in the most predictable way ever. The book closes on Hammer making good on his vow to kill the killer, leaving nothing to the imagination, but then, no part of the book actually does. I didn’t have a favorite line from this book, largely because there wasn’t a noble sentiment in the entire thing and since every other page was tastelessly X-rated or thoughtlessly violent, I probably won’t return to Mr. Spillane.

Finally, following a recommendation from a friend who dove into this author’s books with abandon, I read James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, based loosely on the famous 1947 murder and brutal Ripper-like vivisection of Elizabeth Short, the eponymous victim. Ellroy’s novel is far more noir than I expected and though it started slow, grew into a fascinating novel of illicit sex, self-deception, lust for power, obsession and, the slow madness that comes with it.

Ellroy blends a critical understanding of late 1940s culture in Los Angeles, with an uncanny knowledge of how the police force worked, building a story about two police officers, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, both former boxers, hired to fight one another to help pass a bond referendum. 

The duo become best friends and work up through the nebulous ranks of LAPD power, until the murder and investigation of Elizabeth Short drives Blanchard off the reservation. The two officers live together with Kay Lake, a school teacher and former prostitute within an organized crime syndicate ring. Blanchard and Lake and Bleichert form an unusual family, until Blanchard’s emotional crash and disappearance. Bucky’s obsession with Short only serves to drive him to the edge of mania, as he navigates the over-sexed daughter of a corrupt real estate magnate, his marriage to Kay and the ever deepening need to solve the murder.

The novel is beautifully written. Told from the first-person perspective of Bucky Bleichert, the story is deeply honest and in places, extremely graphic. Unlike Spillane’s novel, the behavior is very human, flawed and misguided. There are dark and licentious scenes, but they all serve to bring the plot forward.

Bucky’s is unreliable narration, taking the reader on a long, unwinding mental breakdown, starting in moments of high and joyous celebration, then down into the depths of depravity and ultimately the most carefully hidden and devastating personal truths. As a backdrop, the Short murder becomes a kind of litmus test of madness, where everything up to the point of her grotesque dismemberment is ground worth crossing if it leads to her insane killer. Ellroy asks what there is left of our humanity when the answers we so badly needed are not what we thought they would be. 

My favorite line from this novel was hard to sort out, because the book is a masterpiece of writing. It never sinks to the level of pulp, though it never shies from showing us the true depravity at the heart of all of us. Ellroy’s “hero” is all too corruptible. However, if I have to choose (after all who is making me, if not me?) I’d pick: “Some people don’t respond to civility.”

I’m now fedora-ed out. The inside of my head smells like Chesterfields and cheap booze. The hardboiled detective, burned on a hard life and grim memories of the war; the mystery to be solved, the punches to be thrown, the bullets to be shot and the spectacle of self-destruction, misery and bad decisions made in haste or anger all have an unfortunate way of bringing me down. I like the gritty detectives, the monosyllabic narratives, the noble intent of flawed characters, the mysteries and, of course the images, shadowy, dark, uncertain. I like how uncomplicated the complications are, and how straightforward the action is. 

This is a world modeled on reality, but darker. The men are all noble savages, merely wearing the accouterments of modernity, while living on some morally primitive plain, draped in suits instead of animal skins and drinking whiskey instead of blood. The women are all too beautiful, too voluptuous, too dangerously sexy; each using their feminine wiles to navigate a world that (in most of the novels) still considers them to be the root of all society’s most depraved ills. 

Here the physical takes the place of the intellectual. The fist comes before the probing question, the bullets before deduction. Everyone lies, everyone is untrustworthy, out for themselves alone and everyone stifles their feelings with any substance or activity that pushes away the pain. Although crime noir is just a kind of social commentary on a particular age in our recent history, it nevertheless feels too seedy, too corrupted and too vicious to be anything but a passing fancy for me.

And yet, for all that there is a draw to it. Perhaps it is a kind of animal magnetism in the characters, but I think it is really (in all except Spillane’s case) a brilliance of writing and composition; a truly midcentury modern prose that cuts through the fat and gets right to the bone. I think that's why I like it.

The Core Principles

Author’s Note: The following is a “faux” interview from when I was writing the Courier-Tribune column, which I have expanded and answered more fully, now that I’m no longer held back by the standards of the newspaper or the library. This was never published because I was asked to write something else, or I missed a week due to illness. Either way, I think it holds up and is timely, especially since I updated it! It is essentially a doubt essay, which reminds me of a little placard that was on my philosophy professor’s tiny office door: “Oh, Lord—if there is a Lord—save my soul—if there is a soul.” —Prayer of the Skeptic.

Why do you always write about credulity and ideology?

For a long time, I have written about (among much else) the problems of credulity, certainty, moral imbecility, and blind adherence to ideology especially when those ideologies are evil or maintain harmful requirements for participation. I’ve written about these things, whether they show up as belief in conspiracy theories, political affiliation, religious confession, or, as any idea taken to its most illogical point. To me, switching off the critical faculties, taking things at face value, and sacrificing reason and rationality to feel like one has all the answers is the moral equivalent of choosing to let someone else do my thinking for me. Doing this for some “brand” of belief, because it makes one feel like they belong, is repugnant to me, and is, I think, one of the worst aspects of modernity, though it is a very old problem. 

Since I first took up my pen to write my library columns, back in 2015, I have set myself up against these types of behaviors, both in myself, but also I have been critical of them in the world. These ills are more dangerous to a free society than any other danger, except perhaps warfare from outside, however that might take shape. 

Why are these things so important to you? What business of yours is it to tell people how they should think? 

This is not a thorny question. The reason this is so important to me is multi-faceted, but the main supporting structure is fairly simple. People in my family, my friends, others I care about, and most often myself, have habitually decided that they didn’t need evidence to believe a thing, so long as it either gave them a sense of having special knowledge or confirmed some already held bias. Sometimes, both of these things come together. Harm then came from that belief. The most readily available example is my mother and her belief in a snake-oil salesperson, who convinced her that her leukemia was being caused by mercury in her fillings. She and my stepfather paid exorbitant amounts of money to have her teeth fixed, believing that this would solve her health issues. It caused her to lose precious time, which, had they had any faith in actual medicine, may have given her a few more years. It robbed them of precious funds that may have helped them afford better treatments. Even when she was finally forced to get real medical advice from actual physicians, she continued to see a “homeopath” and take sugar tablets for the common cold. 

It wasn’t just this. She and my stepfather also participated in an eschatological “cult” of evangelicalism that professed a worldview that taught that the things of this world don’t matter; that the Lord was coming back any day, and all that mattered was to be ready for the end. They also believed that the earth was only 6,000 years old and that demons were everywhere. The more tense or uncomfortable life became (and often as a result of these beliefs), the more they doubled down. I was still quite young, but it was my first taste of a mindset that was stuck, stagnant, unable (or unwilling) to ask questions, to grow beyond a certain point, especially when those questions challenged their strongly-held beliefs. It cost my mother her life. I’m convinced that it ruined much of my adolescence. But, whether it was coming from the pulpit or from the office of a quack, they believed it, because they had never been taught to trust their critical faculties, to ask questions, to challenge ideas for evidence. It wasn’t their fault, because no one ever challenged them to do their own thinking. In their case, but also in so many others, it boiled down to a matter of life and death. What could be more important?

Isn’t this a Dave problem, then? What has it got to do with everyone else?

I know I cannot change every person I meet. I wouldn’t want to. And yet, I tend to put great weight on what Kant said: if you can help, then you must act as if it were your duty to help. In other terms, my words might not change anything for anyone, but there is a chance that they might, and as long as that is true, then I am duty-bound to try. There is a thing we say in our A.A. meeting at the end, which I have always liked. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but no one is entitled to be wrong in their facts.” I would simply add, echoing the economist Keynes, that when the facts change, one’s opinions ought to change, too. 

This is not a natural inclination in most people. For some reason (at least to me), people will fight to the death rather than admit that they have been wrong. This is where I’m most likely to stumble, as well. But I know how to do it, even if I’m not inclined to do it. I would like to model that “eating crow” is not nearly the social taboo it has been set up to be; that it is far easier than it sometimes feels. Far more can be gained by admitting that we have been on the wrong road, and changing direction, than by digging in, putting our ears back, and sitting down. The ostrich and the donkey rightly come to mind as literary examples of these behaviors, and we have the right instinct to find them silly and childish, not to say dangerous and ignorant.

It’s one thing to talk about such things; what are the solutions you suggest?

In a word: enlightenment. I’ve been around for nearly half a century. In that time, I have seen one thing that proves enlightenment over and over. The most enlightened among us are those who eschew certainty, who admit when they don’t have the answers, who are interested in learning more. They do not pretend to be certain about things they have no real knowledge about. They don’t usually take things at face value. They have a firm mistrust of anything that seems too good to be true. They don’t fill in the gaps of life that don’t make sense, no matter how cruel, with soft lies. These are the principles usually attributed to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. They are the foundation of the scientific method. They are the essence of discovery, of learning, of exploration, and curiosity. 

The principles of enlightenment, as the word suggests, bring light to us. The light of reason, of knowledge, of awareness; it sheds light on benighted thinking. The habits I have mentioned above—credulity, certainty, moral imbecility, blind adherence to ideology belong to the shadow realm of human thought. They prefer logical fallacies to logic. They expect immediate gratification, rather than unpleasant uncertainty. They prefer the suggested possibility rather than the mathematical probability. They seek comfort in place of knowledge, emotion rather than reason, scapegoating and fear in place of caution and thoughtful kindness. Every trait is intellectually and morally lazy. Enlightenment ends all of this by positing that only reason can provide real freedom. When we are scared, knowledge provides comfort. When we seek to blame, rationality provides a breath to consider our shared humanity. Reason allows us to forebear the tantrum, the emotional crisis, the spiritually destructive lies of certainty, and face the truth with a hopeful heart.

This all sounds preachy. Isn’t enlightenment just another false religion?

I'm not selling a new age self-help remedy. I’m not the first person nor the only person to suggest what I’m saying here. This isn’t another cult or con, but you don’t have to take my word for it. I’m not making any money from Big Enlightenment. Nothing bad will happen if you roll your eyes and decide that this just isn’t your cup of tea. In fact, you might decide that you wish to go in the opposite direction of enlightenment, and if so, you’d be in good company. 

Hitchens said that he thought humanity was still at a point of intellectual adolescence. He pointed to the rampant fear of the dark, of storms, the need for superstition to explain the minds of the gods, death, heartbreak, and financial troubles. These are not new tendencies in the human species (I will not say “race”). For hundreds of thousands of years, people have lived under the yoke of these mental shackles, believing that boiling a goat’s head would cure the pox, or that a sheep’s guts would tell of true love or fortune or destiny. We no longer live in those times. Freedom dictates that a person could choose such behaviors, or any of thousands of others, to learn the mysteries of love, money, and their futures. But enlightenment has pierced the shadows of such thinking to the point where we either know they don’t work or that there are some things we cannot know. Why choose false certainty over truthful uncertainty? That is the primitive response of a backward mind. 

You often write against religion and politics. What’s the harm in these?

Generally, there is no real harm from believing in some sort of meaning-giving structure, nor the spirited participation and discourse that arises from politics. Again, people are entitled to their opinions. Where the problem arises with them is the role they play in either helping or harming, and knowing the difference.

For religious faith, I take a very agnostic position when it comes to other people’s beliefs. I reserve the right to criticize any belief that (as I’ve said) encourages or requires the sublimation of the critical faculty. Still, faith may provide hope or comfort. It may give meaning to the arbitrariness of life and death. We seem to desire, at a foundational level, explanations for the brutality, cruelty, heartlessness of life. When we lose a child, a spouse, a parent, a dear friend, the world can feel cold and uncaring without the fellowship that comes from a consensus of belief. That these worldviews give comfort is one of their best qualities.

Where the problems begin is when people use religion to harm others by a scheme of roping in sad, hurting, or unbalanced people to fill pews and quotas, while deliberately using carefully worded emotional manipulation and coercion to keep them set. When religion lies about how the world (or reality) works, when it is used to scare children, or teach them dangerous ideas disguised as cute or sweet stories, then it becomes dangerous. There is a difference between having a strong personal faith and using that faith to bewilder people into following out of fear of eternal torture, or by making claims about literalist views of scripture. Some might claim that my real problem is with fundamentalist views of faith, but all faiths are quick to point to other beliefs as being fundamentalist, while ignoring the tendencies in their own frameworks. 

For my whole life, I have watched people use religion as an excuse to treat other people badly for myriad reasons. Those reasons are as malleable as possible, allowing those who participate to switch their pet scapegoats from people of color to homosexuals to unwed mothers, to those who get abortions, to immigrants, using the same verse for each group, all while deftly navigating falling into the definition of genocidal speech, and still somehow getting tax exemption. There is a vast difference between this and personal, private faith.

But what about politics?

Politics functions as the same mechanism as religion, but in different terms. People still allow themselves to be convinced that their fears and feelings are more to be trusted than their critical faculties. Orwell said, “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” I find it the complete antithesis of enlightenment to adhere to any political party or ideology without pushing it through our own filter of doubt and skepticism.

Politics also puts up heroes of the parties, would-be demi-deities who “embody” the parties' doctrines and dogmas to the fullest degree. Aside from being turned off by such individuals, recent history is scattered with the shells of worn-out old men who were once professed as heroes of the party, and then are left in junked up piles when they cease to be useful to the party. The polemicist H.L. Mencken said, “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” I'd call that prophecy fulfilled.

I have known people for whom their political adherence was more important to them than their last names. “I am a Republican,” said one man I knew whose name I can no longer remember. I’m sure he cared less about me knowing his name than about his party. Such is true for adherents to denominations, too. It doesn't matter at any given time what a party says it stands for. At one point in history, the values of the parties were completely reversed, and their adherents were no less convinced of their own rectitude and the other side’s incorrigible wrongness. The only thing worse than a “party person” is a party person who thinks that their faith justifies them to be right in their political affiliation and vice versa. What could be more reprehensible than a person who votes for a candidate, not because that person is of high moral standards, but because, despite how low their moral standards are, they vote for them anyway, because they're from “the party”? How much worse, when a person stands pat on the worst possible moral ideas, even when they know that they are horrible and wrong, just because they cannot be seen to abandon their party line? The vileness of both speaks for itself. The only thing worse than both is when they are combined to the detriment of all.

Doesn’t your position reek of fanaticism or radicalism?

Yes, and probably treason, too, at some point. Enlightenment, doubt, skepticism, uncertainty, non-conformity, intellectualism, reason, rationality, truth, fact, and scientific methodology are all very scary words to the predominant powers. It is a very radical position to say something like “They don’t want an informed electorate,” or “they want your outrage, not your righteous indignation.” David Brooks, with whom I disagree about 95% of the time, has said repeatedly that the last few generations have not given people the tools to develop their own moral standards. In this, I agree, especially because the very religious Mr. Brooks did not say that this moral standard had to be built upon the Bible. I agree with him. 

Children are not taught to verify their claims or how to do proper research. Any lout can look up whether or not the earth is flat, but can they discern from the host of answers they will find, which ones are based in science? If I prefer that a human thinks for itself, is unchained from coercive thinking, lies, tyranny in the form of religion or politics or self-deception, fear and would rather seek for truth than certainty, and this makes me a fanatic, a radical, or is the equivalent of committing treason from the ideologies, dogmas and doctrines of our time, then I guess that’s what I am.

Quoting Socrates, all I know for certain is that I know nothing for certain. Even when I forget and demand something is true, I try to show my dedication to enlightenment ideals by being able to admit when I’m wrong, and continuing to seek knowledge wherever it may be found. If this makes me a heretic, an apostate, a ‘free thinker’, a nonconformist, or a man without a country, then so be it. I will face the consequences of those attributions, if I must, especially if it means I get to keep thinking for myself. It’s that simple.

And while I have breath to voice my concerns about my society, for which I care deeply, and my fellow mammals, for whom I have a much stronger affinity than they often deserve, I will try to carry this message and live it in all my affairs to the best of my ability. I may be unpopular, considered a crank or a fanatic, but it is worth it to me if that means I get to keep my mind free of chains and continuously ratify my opinions.

The Sad Tale of Uncle Staunton

First, the End

At his funeral, Aunt Esther told me something about Uncle Staunton that I never knew: it bothered him that I didn't agree with his way of seeing things. She said he worried near the end if he was the one who had been wrong in our email debates. Both Esther and her twin sister Elsie had encouraged him to write to me, saying as much, but by then, he was unable to sit upright long enough to really manage it.

For my part, I never worried whether the old relative still liked me, regardless of who was right or wrong. Our email correspondence had been fairly legendary, and, except for my Aunt MJ, with whom I wrote back and forth for most of my life, Staunton and I had typed reams (or whatever the analog is for email) for almost twenty solid years. Most of it was argumentative, but he rarely failed to reply, making me feel a little less worried about our relationship until just before he was unable to write. I know some people who terminated relations with their relatives because their views had become too radicalized. It never quite came to that with Uncle Staunton.

It is hard to say whether I felt anything good hearing Aunt Esther say that. I was really worried about him because of the things he started to believe in the last years of his life. He called me, unusual for him, about six months before he died. His voice was high and raspy. He was as polite as he ever was, but he called with something to say, and I let him say it. He wanted to be done arguing. “Agree to disagree,” he said. He didn't have the energy for it anymore, and hearing how weak he sounded, I couldn't bear to push him further. It was the last time we spoke.

The Long Fade

It all probably started with Ike. Staunton liked the Republican ideals as proclaimed by Eisenhower. He voted for the general twice and later voted for Nixon in ‘60. He proudly called himself a Nixon Republican (Nixon was Ike’s VP). After the Kennedy assassination, Staunton was convinced that the Democrats had brought the tragedy on themselves. He blamed the social decline of the late ‘60s on Johnson. Though he was a staunch advocate for Civil Rights, Staunton felt that LBJ had badly bumbled the Vietnam conflict. He voted for Nixon again and was very happy when he won. 

The aged relative was approaching 35 by then and was moderately successful in his work, but he was beginning to notice that the world was not what it had been when Ike was in office. This was deepened by the Hippie and Free Love subculture spreading across the nation. He found the changes in society painful and missed the idealistic 1950s. 

He was well aware that the world around him did not reflect his values. A man of his generation and his convictions expected certain things to hold: that people his age would have a job, own a car and a house, vote, and perform the daily, if prosaic, duties of a patriotic American, and that the generations coming up behind them would follow that example without much argument. When they didn't, he needed someone to explain why. Bill Buckley was one source. Urbane, erudite, and razor-sharp, Buckley gave the aggrieved conservative movement something it badly needed—an intellectual architecture. He made it respectable to push back against what Staunton saw as the whacko philosophies blooming out of the Left, and Buckley did it with a vocabulary that Staunton admired. Even back then, Staunton was boring the neighbors with claims that universities were hiring Marxists to teach history. 

Uncle Staunton, though successful in his career, was sensitive about not going to college. Nixon spoke a language that resonated more with middle-class high school diploma men, and in Nixon, the old relative found a man he could both admire and support. Nixon was angry about all the same things. The sense of grievance was not overt, but was still there. It suited Uncle Staunton to think that he was not alone in his feeling that America was not what she had been. Buckley told him he wasn't wrong to think so, and dressed the argument in clipped, patrician cadences of undaunted, self-assured authority.

The End of the Innocence

After Nixon's downfall and resignation, there was only one course of action for those people who had given so much of themselves to him: focus solely on his successes. Just like my younger, but no less conservative parents, the response when someone mentioned the president's corruption was to point out that Nixon had gone to China to meet with Mao. Otherwise, Nixon, the Hero of the Republican Party, was a fraud and a failure, and, as Uncle Staunton later said himself, “had a reputation down in the cellar”.

The rest of the 1970s seemed only to solidify his dissatisfaction with the state of things. Jimmy Carter was yet another “Southern hayseed” who would never shake off the appalling record of Democrats Johnson or Truman: men he thought were desperate to make progressive decisions despite the majority opinion. Years later, when I was working on a term paper about Carter, and mentioned to Uncle Staunton about the Camp David Accords, a significant bit of foreign policy (and something akin to, if not more impressive than Nixon in China), he told me to look up gas stations in that era.

This was the aggrieved attitude, taking a more prominent position, of course. He couldn't face Nixon's culpability and so put up Tricky Dick’s best success as a means of avoiding having been wrong about him. I think this was when he started to realize that the Republicans were not all they had cracked themselves up to be. Rather than face it, though, he pretended it wasn’t happening.

The Endless ‘80s and the Unaccountable ‘90s

Unlike my mother and stepfather, Uncle Staunton never fell into the trap of evangelical Christianity. He was a devout Lutheran and thought men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were self-exalted televangelists. Toward the end, when we were filling each other's inboxes with tough words, this was one area where we uniformly agreed. For all their appeal to the newly born-again masses, he saw them as nothing more than bigoted Southern Baptists looking to institute antebellum race laws under the nominal cover of the gospels. Although born and raised in Virginia, Uncle Staunton never considered himself a Southerner. Rather, he thought he lived too close to the Beltway to be anything other than an honorary resident of D.C. and, therefore, the North.

Surprisingly, he only tolerated Reagan. He often set John Wayne up as the ideal movie cowboy to be president. He really liked Margaret Thatcher, who he felt was callous enough with the do-nothing youthful hooligans and the poor people who just didn't work hard enough. He often wished Reagan had been harder in his own right, but was too old and too much the smiling movie star. Again, though, looking back, Aunt Esther confirmed my suspicions; Uncle Staunton had by then turned a corner in his political worldview. It would take a heavier hand to wrangle the punk rockers, drug addicts, and welfare queens. He was already, though perhaps unknowingly, yearning for a Strong Man leader to put things right.

For almost the entire decade, Staunton raged against “these lax modern times”. Kids dropping out of school, drug use, video games, and heavy metal could all be solved if parents gave them more spankings. They would not have tried that in his day. Aunt Elsie, diffident, humorous, sweetly and shyly hilarious, made him a t-shirt later in life with large red iron-on letters that just said: “Back in My Day”. Oblivious to the irony, or perhaps despite it, he proudly wore the gift from his sister-in-law at family reunions and holidays, right over top of his usual cream-colored button-down short-sleeve shirt and his tiger eye bolo tie.

By the time George H.W. Bush was in office, Staunton was beginning to appear more middle-aged. This was when I first remember seeing him in person. I never knew how old he actually was, back then, but older people seemed far older then than they do today. Maybe their mentalities were older, too. I think as he reached his sixties, he started to feel that he was a man in a strange land, and that the idealized 1950s of his early adulthood was slipping irrevocably out of his reach.

The Clintons were a particular torment. He hated Bill on principle—the draft dodging, the saxophone, the ease of the man. He wasn't so much a politician to Staunton as he was a symptom. Here was everything wrong with the generation that came after his: entitled, slick, and allergic to consequence. The impeachment felt, briefly, like vindication. Then Clinton survived it, which was worse than if it had never happened at all. He was glad when Bush beat Gore. 

The Missile in the Plane

The first great tragedy of the new century became the tragic turning point for both of us. For me, it was the first time I could see evidence of the blatant evil that arose from religious and political fundamentalism on every side. For Uncle Staunton, it was the first step of a journey into conspiracy thinking. The email that started our long correspondence, I first got from him in the spring of 2002. It was a chain email, but with a significant introduction written in his curt style. 

The forwarded email itself was nonsense. It was just one more example of trash that had somehow gained traction in the newly christened Internet Age. It suggested, along with some animated illustrations, that girders in the towers had melted completely away. “As in vaporized”, his own commentary sarcastically pronounced. “Regular jet fuel couldn't do that.” The conspiracy was laid out with the usual “just hear me out” level of ludicrous magical thinking. Rather than actual passenger jets, both flights were actually super missiles disguised as planes. I had seen various versions of this in my inbox, but that Uncle Staunton was buying it—or, if not exactly buying it, acknowledging it—was deeply upsetting to me. I told him so. I was only about 25, he was 68, by then. He had enough life under his belt to see through such ridiculous claims, but then, I now see that I was missing the bigger picture.

Staunton's closest friend, a man he had known since high school, had died in 2000, suddenly by an undetected aneurysm. The blow was shattering to Staunton. Here was a man who felt his world was unrecognizable, dealing with the loss of one of the few mooring lines to his own sanity. Rather than deal with the grief (not something that was modeled ‘back in his day’, as Aunt Elsie said), he started to become very interested in conspiracy thinking, perhaps as a way to fill in the gaps when things didn’t add up to him.

Reading the emails back now, I see more than anything else, fear and grief. Not just for his friend, but for his era, his youth, and the realization that his life was passing. The promises that politicians had made to his generation all turned out to be lies. The men he voted for, whom he had pinned all his hopes on to bring about a new golden age, had failed. George W. Bush, even with the strong backstop of Dick Cheney, was a halfwit, according to Staunton. The wars in the Middle East were hamfisted attempts at dominance. Society was slipping further into malaise. There had to be a reason things weren’t panning out. To Uncle Staunton, the suggestion that the ones responsible for keeping America from reaching her potential were working quietly in the background to dismantle any progress made was potent and strangely appealing. As the Internet bloomed, those perpetrators and their methods, no matter how ridiculous, became more accessible and prominent.

Fringe Theories and Social Pressure

A man who spouted conspiracy theories before the Internet age would have been thought paranoid or otherwise mentally ill. When I first moved to North Carolina, there were a handful of regular writers in the Letter to the Editor section of the paper. They were all considered a little off. Whether people agreed with them or not, most folks were aware that the letter writers all participated in Churchill's definition of the fanatic. No one really took them seriously.

But they were all kept at bay by the social awareness that they were all essentially a few fries short of a Happy Meal. When people slowly got access to the Internet, one of its most efficient and intellectually deadly byproducts was creating a sense of community in conspiracy thinking. The theories themselves grew, but so did the communities that believed and created them.

The social pressure against such thinking went away. The newspaper letter writers finally got what they had been craving all along from their one-sided diatribes. They got the validation of the conversation. Internet forums and email chains gave rise to entire conspiracy mythologies, all of them crowd-sourced by the most ludicrous ideas, infinitely and meticulously revised and edited until they became self-supporting mythologies. It all served to give them the essence or appearance of special knowledge that explained away all the inconvenient truths and realities in our society.

Uncle Staunton started slowly. The missile disguised as a plane was his first dip into the pool of that so-called special knowledge. It provided him with a glimpse of something he didn’t know he needed: a reason to be angry and a series of fake issues to worry about.

Cable News and The Tan Suit

Other than our emails, which remained fairly steady, we didn't really speak. The emails always began, usually, as chain emails, filled with conspiracy theories. To some—the really egregious ones—I carefully composed replies. Those replies would initiate a series of correspondence over a few weeks. The content and emotional tone of the letters would grow intense, and then he would go radio silent for a while, until he forwarded the next chain letter.

He never bought into the really wild stuff. Flat Earth, ancient aliens, chemtrails, or spiritualism. He knew that the moon landing wasn’t faked. After all, he lived through all that. He was more interested in the theories that eventually got labeled “The Deep State”. 

This was a series of conspiracy theories that, at least in part, suggested that a cabal (a term always used as a euphemism for antisemitic ideas) of very powerful billionaires was working to undermine democracy and eventually make the US a communist country. It became a very solidified worldview for Uncle Staunton.

When Obama was elected, Staunton, who was not an overt racist, saw it as one of the first steps toward the fulfillment of this shadowy group's work. People who voted Democrat were unwittingly helping to bring about the group's whims. He believed “They” were having their way with us. That, when the time was right, society as we knew it would collapse. There would be signs. It was obviously apocalyptic as well as magical thinking.

In one of the longest emails he wrote to me, he railed about Obama wearing a tan suit. This was how it started. The child sex rings, the secret initiative to end elections, the rampant corruption, it all started with a sign as simple as what color suit the president wore. In one way, it reminded me of the eschatological mess my parents often touted. I think it comes from the same vein of belief.

Making America Great

By the time Obama was a lame duck, Uncle Staunton was unrecognizable to me. His letters had become screaming vitriol. He ranted in all caps. Clintons and Benghazi, emails and Bin Laden, George Soros and “Pizzagate”. The so-called ‘gay marriage bill’, bathroom bills, and birtherism. 

I happened to get a call from Aunt Esther one day. Uncle Staunton had been walking in the yard and had fallen and broken his femur. The doctor asked some tough questions. She (the doctor) found that the old relative was displaying signs of severe mental health issues. Upon further investigation, she discovered that Staunton was watching Fox News all day, every day. He was muttering about politics in his sleep.

Aunt Esther, in her always-too-sweet way, said that the man she loved had become angry. Ranting all the time about politics and propaganda. He fell, she said, because he was yelling at his neighbor for putting out a Hillary Clinton sign in his front yard.

After that, now walking with a cane, whenever he rarely left his La-Z-Boy chair, he went full into the Trump campaign. Staunton became a hardcore supporter. Sending in money, wearing the red hat, parroting all the shibboleths of the movement. He fell into QAnon talking points, railed against “the Radical Left,” and became impossible to be around.

Along with all of this, he seemed to decline intellectually, too. His positions, though somewhat unpleasant (even for someone who leans to the conservative position), were, up to that point, at least reasonable, if not always rational. Now, his emails were just rants, parroting what he had been fed from the Cable TV News and his weird Internet feeds (I think he joined Facebook, like everyone, sometime in 2012).

Eventually, I stopped replying. It hurt my heart to do so, but when I saw him taking leave of his senses to not step away from his political convictions, even when it meant selling his reason and his relationships, I couldn’t keep indulging him. I was going through my own issues, too, which may explain why I was so angry at him for abandoning even the illusion of reason. To Uncle Staunton, everyone who disagreed with him, regardless of their true position, was an enemy. It was heartbreaking, but it was perhaps to be expected. He wasn’t the only person who degenerated into a conspiracy-breathing puppet during that time.

The Curse of Seeing

After I got sober, I stopped being so angry about a lot of things, myself. The one thing I could never reconcile was how people believed things that were obviously untrue. The poster child for this, at least in my mind, was Uncle Staunton. Here was a man I had always admired and respected, even when I disagreed with him. I wanted to suggest a means to get us to bridge the gap, to talk about other things, to look for things we had in common. I sent him several lists of things that I was reading (carefully curated to avoid any triggering authors or topics, almost impossible to avoid these days), and I never heard back from him.

In one of the last emails she wrote me, Aunt Esther asked me if I knew why I was immune to conspiracies. She, I think, was asking for Staunton as much as out of genuine curiosity. Why, she asked, did I not fall for the talking heads, the Facebook algorithms, and the “cult-like” strategies of the (at that time) current administration? I reflected on my answer before sending it. What I said still feels true, though I think I could be clearer about it now. I told her that I thought it had to do with my own deconversion from Christianity. Being raised in that system, I learned early on that the dogmas were made primarily to keep people coming back through fear and emotional coercion. Not all Christian denominations, of course, but certainly the evangelical ones. Also, I said that I had been to college, and I had met with people from other walks of life, had friends who had come out as LGBTQ+ and who were experiencing a kind of oppression that shaped them at the level of their most primary cores. I reiterated that I did not want to be part of any ideology, regardless of which “side” it came from, that worked to separate people because of who they loved, or their skin color, or where they were born.

Ultimately, though, I told her that I wanted nothing to do with any ideology that surrendered to bigotry, antisemitism, hatred, cruelty, or a Dollar Store brand of “patriotism” that borrowed most of what it defined as national piety from the most tawdry, miseducated, and imbecilic ideas on either side of the political spectrum.

Mostly, though, I gave the administration at that time as reason enough. The con artist, promising all kinds of carefully and specifically chosen magical worlds to come, if we would only give them unlimited power, we would all be the recipients of wealth and freedoms beyond our greatest dreams. It was all too good to be true, but it wasn’t even wrapped in a believable package. Anyone, I said, who had been awake at all in the last few decades ought to know narcissistic personality disorder when they see it. What I didn’t understand was why people winked at all of that, and gave their full support to an unselfconscious fraud anyway.

As my reply drew into multiple pages, I told Aunt Esther that to me, the lie that any one of us has all the answers, that we can in any way pretend absolute certainty, is part of the larger authoritarian and totalitarian self-sealing system. Believing that any one mammal suddenly has all the answers is as silly as being an adult who still believes in the tooth fairy. I feel the same way about anyone who suborns their own personality to make everything they do or think or believe fit with someone else’s ideas. I did not add in my letter that this was the part of Uncle Staunton’s descent that upset me the most.

I carefully told her that I thought that Uncle Staunton had made the ideology of the movement his whole personality, which acted in place of his ethical sensibilities. When challenged, he responded as his candidate had done, mistaking rage and name-calling for a carefully thought-out position. The supporters had been manipulated into putting a shutter on their critical faculties; willingly giving over any semblance of curiosity or intellectual growth, just to feel like they were part of a movement and had all the answers before having to do any of the thinking. 

I closed by saying that, for me, whether it was “secret tunnels” supposedly used in mass child abuse rings, or planes disguised as missiles, or any of the hairbrained ideas that ranged between, I will always be the one at the end of the table with a dubious look on my face who says, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” which I lovingly call Hitchens’ Razor.

Brave New Whirlwind

Strangely, I’m glad that Uncle Staunton never lived to see the current iteration of that administration’s first era. From January 6th on, I got the impression that he could possibly be second-guessing his affiliation and support, but I never heard anything for sure. It was later that year that he called me, and after that, anything I sent him was only about work or family and never the themes we had once written about.

I often still wonder about him. I miss his wit and his odd sense of humor. He remains one of the most mysterious people I will ever know, especially when it comes to understanding the depths of his descent into political madness. I sometimes regret the tone of some of our correspondence, but I hope he took it as it was meant, in the frame of spirited and lively civil debate, and not out of hatred or worse, disdain. I wouldn’t have ever thought about disowning him, but then distance provided some buffer space. The people who have had to deal with this in person have my empathy and support. It is a horrible thing to see. It happened to more than a third of our population, too. I’m not sure how we will ever come back from this.

I miss Staunton, but I’m also glad that Esther and Elsie got some relief at the end. They’re both going strong in their mid-nineties. They live at the beach now. They go shopping every day and get just what they want for supper, and then eat heartily and watch the seagulls swoop and dive. They don’t own a TV. I sometimes remember our letters, and I read them back, wondering how he would feel about current events, but I kid myself that he would change his mind, even now. 

And that is my parting lesson. If I learned anything from Uncle Staunton, it was that when we are wrong, we have to promptly admit it. We also must never keep believing something just so we don’t have to change our minds or face reality, no matter how distasteful it is to eat crow. There is no ideal world; there is no magical cure to the fact that time changes the face of the world we recognize. And no matter how compelling a candidate or preacher or sales pitch is, keeping our critical faculties in sharp working order is always the bargain when compared to the alternative.