How Fox News Stole My Father

When my dad is home, Fox News is on. No amount of reasoning has been able to lessen his devotion to it.

I often feel like it has stolen him from me.

Endangered are my memories of him from when I was most impressionable, when I was most committed to emulating him. I remember his independence, his revulsion for the media and all those “apple polishers” with bitch tits and cuff links.

He was one of those Vietnam vets who grew up on a farm, raced muscle cars and skinned deer before enlisting. The first time he saw a bumper sticker which read, “Love My Country. Fear my Government” he pointed it out to me and nodded, remaining silent for the rest of the trip. He was always willing to hear out someone who had a new conspiracy theory involving THE MAN fucking everyone over.

Inside, it was mostly science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, etc. There was also a good bit of pulp fiction with awful painted covers of naked women being saved by badass men with beards and laser rifles. Aside from this, there were many practical nonfiction books on survival and history and war and homebuilding – the sort of things prosecutors point out after the wind blows over a tarp covering someone’s stash of pipe bombs.

My father would sometimes mention the Bible or God, but he seemed to treat it the same way he did the pyramids and electromagnetism – as a mystery he felt humanity had come to a consensus on too soon. My mom made me go to church, but she never once asked Dad to join us.

After the war, he bounced around the bars of New Orleans like a bird trapped in a house. At family reunions, his cousins would tell me unbelievable stories about brawls and women and “The Mafia.”

He became a reclusive tinkerer and hunter as I grew up. He worked construction and became an electrician, falling back on the training he received in the service.

He was boisterous and outgoing when in public, a talker who would gab about the good old days with the simple people we lived near, but spin out of control with wild ideas and theories about space and time when he was with hackers and college students.

At home, he retreated into his shop to build radios or airplanes or sharpen broadheads. Stacks of Popular Science and Discover and Omni leaned in the corners of the shop he slowly filled. It became a sprawling laboratory where you would not be surprised to see a Jacob’s Ladder sizzling nearby a deep freeze with a year’s supply of deer meat inside. We probably had the first home computer in our city, and he was always taking it apart. (All of that would later be eaten by Hurricane Katrina and spit out into the woods were it lies now, covered in leaves and lizards.)

He once taught me how to use a rifle scope by letting me get a black eye. I was 10.

My uncle, an obviously gay man who has never admitted it to his family, once owned a florist shop. When the man who owned the building began harassing my uncle for being a dirty faggot, my dad went to the shop and smashed the landlord’s head into a wall. He never told anyone about this until after my grandfather died because it would have revealed my uncle’s sexuality.

Looking back, Dad seemed like that guy in the zombie movies who has been waiting all his life for something apocalyptic to visit, something to place in his busy hands, which I think is why he changed so much after 9/11.

He became that guy – the one who put American flags akimbo on the sides of his hood like a visiting dignitary. He had yellow ribbons, real ones, on his front porch. He installed a flag pole in his yard as high as the tree line and has replaced Old Glory at least seven times as the poor-quality Chinese fabric shredded in the wind each March.

He wanted to strangle the hijackers one by one. He wanted to be 20 again so he could enlist. He satiated this desire with multiplayer first-person shooters, the more realistic the better.

He stocked up on ammo and gas and canned food, which would all come in handy a few years later when the aforementioned hurricane would put his skills to use. At first, he kept the TV tuned to CNN; I know this because he started recording it to videotape. He has the towers coming down on VHS.

But, as the ripples started to dissipate, and the news stories became anniversary stories, FOX News moved into his heart. He started watching the pundits as much as the anchors.

While I was in college, he was watching FOX, and when we were in the same room it was like that old Mad Magazine cover from 1969. I was telling him about history and anthropology and sociology and Rupert Murdoch. He was telling me about the nature of man. I argued from books. He argued from experience. We both became convinced the other was brainwashed.

I’ve calmed down since graduating. I avoid the fights.

We still can’t talk about politics; it’s impossible. He parrots FOX News because at this point he depends on it exclusively for all his information about the world. Other sources, he feels, are biased.

His take on the Iraq war was simple. He never cared about bringing democracy to the Middle East. He would tell strangers about how oil is necessary for America to continue to operate the military industrial capitalist complex. Without it, our system will collapse, and if we have to kill a few thousand people to keep the oil from getting nuked – so be it.

He started thinking of other people as civilians who need to be protected from the enemy and themselves. For dad, 9/11 awakened a survival mode which he can’t let go of.

I don’t understand the embrace.

When I was about 13-years-old, my father took me with him to a job site in Alabama near a mine. It was far in the distance, and as they set off charges it created a muffled whomping sound that moved through the earth and passed underneath us at regular intervals. I remember Dad’s screwdriver hovering each time the earth shuddered, and the cords in his forearm rising to the surface as he waited. Just as he returned to the work, the sound would pause him again. After a few more whomps, he closed up the panel of wires and relays and said, “We have to go now.”

Somehow, this televised, esoteric, virtual involvement in the war on terror has allowed him the distance he needed to participate on some level with the ghosts he has kept out of his head. With the regime change here, he can love his country and fear his government.

I’ve come to realize people who watch Fox News do not wish to be informed by it, they wish to have their beliefs confirmed. Fox News says to them, “Your fears are justified.”

So, when people talk about hating Glenn Beck or wishing they could punch Bill O’Reilly, I see their anger as a tiny pea in the bottom of a washpan, and I wonder how many are out there like myself who feel cheated by those who spit when they talk to the camera.

How many of us have been forced by small men to put away the way we used to see someone we love?