My (Nonexistent) Redneck Bar Mitzvah

James Webb's 2005 non-fiction bestseller Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America has captured the fancy of your intrepid blogger, oldstyleliberal. I mentioned it in my last post, Long Live the Scots-Irish!, and I hailed its author as a good vice presidential choice for Barack Obama in Jim Webb for Veep!.

Now I want to get personal. Something Webb talks about toward the end of his book hits me where I live.

That something is what he refers jocularly to as the Redneck Bar Mitzvah. It has long been the custom among America's Scots-Irish for the boys to undergo an initiation. Jewish boys get bar mitzvah'd at age 13. Scots-Irish boys get their first rifle somewhat earlier, get taught to hunt and survive in the wilderness, master some form of physical or athletic challenge, even if it's mechanical like drag racing or virtual like video gaming, then go into the military. It's a process much longer than a formal initiation in a temple would take, but it is what allows a Scots-Irish boy to take his rightful place as a man within the group Webb calls the "Celtic kinship."

I missed my Redneck Bar Mitzvah. As a result, I turned out to be way too "sissified."

Though I am of (mostly) Scots-Irish background, my window of opportunity — from ages 11 to 13, roughly — opened and shut without my father doing what was necessary to take me across the crucial threshold to manhood.

I started out as something of a boy's boy, wanting to go into the military, wanting to go to the Naval Academy. Dad was a chief of police and wore a uniform (occasionally) and carried a gun (also occasionally). He had come up through the ranks, taking time out during WWII to serve as an officer in the Coast Guard, a part of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific theater during wartime. He was an expert marksman and liked to go on hunting trips with his buddies. I idolized the man my father was.

But I was also an incipient sissy. I sucked my thumb until I was 12, wet the bed until I was 16. When I got my first BB gun, my mother laid down the law that I couldn't actually shoot it unless Dad was present to supervise.

And that was exactly the problem: Dad wasn't present all that much.

I don't remember exactly what year the trouble started; it may have been in 1956 or '57, when I (an only child) was 9 or 10. My father had been promoted from captain to chief of the then-tiny United States Park Police in Washington, D.C., in 1954, when I was 7. He had beaten out two lieutenants, former buddies of his, who as the years went by became increasingly convinced he had gotten the promotion because he was Protestant and they were Catholic.

The Catholics on the force turned against him. One of them had a brother, not on the force, that began a harassment campaign that centered on dialing our home phone at 3 A.M. in the morning and letting it ring until Mom or Dad picked up ... by which time sleep was ruined.

So there developed an ongoing civil war on the U.S.P.P., and my father's head was being called for on a platter in some quarters of the Department of the Interior' National Park Service, which had authority over the force. My father was innocent of having obtained his promotion through prejudice, or treating Catholics on the force unfairly. But that didn't matter. He was pilloried repeatedly in the Washington papers for years on end. When John F. Kennedy became our first Catholic president in 1961, the handwriting was on the wall for his career.

(By the way, I write this as one who has converted as an adult to the Roman Catholic faith. Obviously, I bear no ill will toward Catholics, either today or "back in the day" when I was growing up — and, I can say with certainty, neither did my father, who was nominally Protestant but never much of a churchgoer.)

Between, say, 1957 and 1960, I went through my "years of trouble" when I needed but wasn't getting the strong fatherly initiation James Webb calls the Redneck Bar Mitzvah. It was during these same years that my father was fighting an internecine civil war while trying to administrate a police force. He was also unfortunately sick during a long stretch of this period with gall bladder problems that required two or three surgeries before he finally got well.

So he didn't have a lot of time for me. Not a lot of father-son bonding went on during these turbulent years.

When I was 11 and in sixth grade, my best friend Jip, a Thai boy, moved away. He had been my prime connection into the group of boys we played with and went to school with. I found it hard to forge my own bonds with the boys after that, and it got worse in seventh and eighth grades, by now in junior high school, when a couple of the boys began to bully me. I didn't know how to fight back. My father spoke of getting me some martial arts training, but it never happened.

As a result, I found out that I could by sheer will power make myself sick every school-day morning, so I wouldn't have to go to school. That went on for several months, until my parents consulted a pediatrician/child psychologist named Dr. Knop.

I don't know whether Dr. Knop believed in the Redneck Bar Mitzvah, but she had something like it in mind when she told my father he had to start being more of a father to me.

Pursuant to that advice, he decided to teach me to shoot a gun. But instead of doing it himself — he just didn't have the time — he had one of the cops on the force, Cpl. Papuga, a great guy and a super marksman, give me lessons every Saturday at the U.S.P.P. pistol range. I learned to shoot, but I developed no emotional attachment to it, as I would have if Dad were doing the teaching.

Later, there were horseback riding lessons. This time I was farmed out to the owner of a stable where the U.S.P.P. boarded some of its horses. Again, it wasn't the same as if Dad were doing the honors.

One day Dad and Cpl. Papuga took me groundhog hunting. For whatever reason, I was not eligible to do any shooting. Between the two of them, only Dad had a single shot at a groundhog ... and he missed. Then I got carsick on the way home. That day was not exactly my Redneck Bar Mitzvah, I can tell you.

I could go on, but you get the point. There are junctures in the life of every boy, of every person, where certain seemingly atavistic things have to happen. If they don't, it's as if life has pushed his head far down into deep water, and he has to kick one's way back up slowly, desperately, belatedly to the surface of normality. He eventually does surface, but meanwhile he is irretrievably behind in his developmental curve.

That's what happened to me, oldstyleliberal. As a result, my inclinations toward masculine stuff like going into the military simply evaporated. When I later entered as a freshman at Georgetown University in 1965, I was soon alerted to the fact that there was a war heating up in Vietnam, and I might one day have to fight in it. Little wonder that that war didn't appeal to "sissified" me. I was against it on moral grounds, but deep down I think I opposed it mainly because I knew that either (a) I wouldn't be able to hack it as a soldier, or (b) I would, but only by virtue of the belated initiation into manhood the military experience would represent.

People tend to resist belated initiations they have already compensated for having missed out on.

I'm not going to give you chapter and verse here and now, but I can now see that my having missed my Redneck Bar Mitzvah and become "sissified" has shaped my life ever since, both the good and the bad aspects of it. I am undoubtedly more prone to go along with, say, the feminist movement because of this omission in my developmental process ... and that I count as a blessing. On the other hand, I realize I simply do not have the ability to distinguish between a necessary war and an unnecessary one. It's one thing to be a "normal" man and yet decide one is against all war. That's an honorable choice. It's another thing entirely to be against all wars out of a reflexive "sissified" outlook that came about because one's father was too busy fighting alligators in his career path to see to one's Redneck Bar Mitzvah.


Postscript: My father and I remained close, if at daggers drawn much of the time, after I graduated college and went out on my own. Psychologists would say my attitude toward him was "ambivalent." But we both loved Mom and managed to patch up our differences rather than tear apart our little three-person family. In 1985 Mom died, and I kept on visiting Dad regularly — he was having his daily needs seen to by a wonderful young couple who lived in the living quarters Mom and Dad had built in the basement of their new home, in 1976, just for that purpose.

On the last Christmas visit before he died in mid-1988, he went to bed early one evening, as was his wont, while I usually hitched a La-Z-Boy recliner around to watch some TV before my own bedtime. On this particular evening, he came out of the bedroom and into the living room unexpectedly. He was, I'll never forget, wearing his navy blue bathrobe, the one he got when he was in the Coast Guard in WWII and still wore.

I suspect that his short-term memory loss due to the dementia he suffered from, at age 83, had led to his forgetting that I was in the house, and he came out to the living room to see why the TV was on. This is the moment I'll cherish forever: he saw me, his son, unexpectedly there, and his face lit up.

Wanting to cover up the fact that he had forgotten I was visiting, he said, "Son, I just wanted to tell you how glad I am to have you here with me now." But I realized it was also the truth, and the peculiar situation had simply jolted it out of him.

I said, "Dad, I am very glad to be here with you." I was too surprised to say or do much more than that in response. We Scots-Irish men don't do a lot of hugging. I was too far across the room to go to him without it seeming forced, anyway.

But that was fine with him. He smiled, said "Good night, son," and went back to his bedroom.

After I went home from that visit I never saw Dad alive again. But at the very end of his life we two had managed to reconcile all our silly differences of a lifetime in that perhaps thirty seconds of a brief, unexpected encounter, and we both knew it.