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.