When my father would introduce his father-in-law he would
invariably say “This is my father-in-law, Morris Witow. He killed millions.” Or
so he claims…
For twenty-seven years, my grandfather was an engineer for
the United States Department of Defense. During World War II, he was on the
team that built the Smart
Bomb, and apparently made a discovery that led to its successful invention.
After spending World War II at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio,
my grandmother wanted to live nearer to her parents. As a result, my grandfather lived in
Silver Spring during the week so he could work at the Pentagon, and would
return to Baltimore on weekends to the house where my mother lived with her
mother, younger brother, her Bubbie and Zaydie and her great aunt (Tante)
Miriam.
It is said of Zaydie Witow that he was the perfect gentleman
except when three issues came up: Richard Nixon, Chicken Chow Mein, and
Liberals. I’ll deal with chicken chow mein in another post, but according to my
father, the moment somebody said the L-word, this meek and mild man grew red
with the beastliness of a wild animal, his fury unable to be assuaged until
somebody reminded him that Richard Nixon was still president. My father also
claims that when he first started dating my mother, there was a picture of
President Nixon in every room of her parents' house, whereas in his parents’ house,
there were pictures of Nixon on the toilet paper.
Zaydie’s father, Henry Witow, was a Socialist. He was an
intellectual with red hair and a fiery temper in whose apartment you had to be
careful not to trip over piles of books (sounds familiar…). When the factory he
worked for offered him a job as a foreman, he turned it down on principle. He apparently got into a long standing family
feud with his Communist cousins about whether Stalin’s Soviet Union was the
socialist utopia. He died in 1941 and did not live to see his two sons enlist
in the army. My great-uncle Nathan served in the Navy for the war’s duration
and apparently survived a sunken battleship, whereas Zaydie was called into the
engineering corps after six months and never saw real action.
My Zaydie was always to the right of his father, but as a
young man that meant that he was a New Deal Liberal. I don’t know precisely
when or why it is that my grandfather decided to abandon New Deal Liberalism to
become a member of neoconservatism’s charter generation. All I know is that it
was sometime in the mid-50’s, and that during the McCarthy era, my grandmother
was questioned because she was on a mailing list at a bookstore that was known
to house Communist meetings, or employees, or something... My grandfather,
hired by the federal government after he learned no private engineering firm
would hire a Jew if they could help it, doubtless feared for his job’s security
– perhaps doubly so in light of his father’s activities.
At the center of the story of my father’s family is money.
At the center of the story of my mother’s family is politics. Both sides can
accuse the other of rampant hypocrisy in their beliefs (and do). My father,
like his father, has always voted resolutely Democrat, and for as long as I can
remember has railed against a system of government that would allow the
undeserving wealthy to claim rewards made possible by their hard-working
employees. But as my mother likes to point out, he rails against the very
system that allowed his businesses to prosper just as his father’s did before him.
For years, his main source of income has been investments, on which there is a
14% capital gains tax, which means he pays half in taxes what he would pay if he made most of his money through income. For just
as long in my memory, my mother and uncle, like their father before them, have
always railed against the inefficiencies, corruption, and mendacity of
government wastefulness at the expense of the taxpayer and the self-sufficient
entrepreneur. And yet for seventy years, my mother’s family has made its career
in government. My grandfather was defense department engineer, my mother used
to be an economist for the State of Maryland, and my uncle is a State
Department officer in the Foreign Service. For forty years, my Bubbie has lived
like a queen on Zaydie’s pension – which has allowed her to take trips by the
dozen to six of the world’s seven continents. Like my father, my mother’s
family benefited enormously from the very system they claim to hate.
Is it simply hypocrisy in both cases? Or is there any deeper
motive at play? I suppose that in both cases, the two sides of my family grew
an understandable but unhappy contempt for the frustrations of their jobs –
perhaps resentment at how undeserving colleagues benefited, or an exaggerated
sense of the importance of the wrongs they saw every day at their jobs. The
personal is always political, and like so many millions of people in America, both
my parents seem to vote against their own interests. Every evil we see done
will linger in our minds more than any five acts of good (that’s actually a
statistic), and in the journey to self-improvement, it is very easy to get
distracted by all of life’s impediments.
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