Well elite, the winter solstice and the shortest days of the year are behind us. Goodbye Christmas/New Year’s depression and angst! We’re on the way to springtime happiness! March Madness! Spring Training! The golf tournament that shall not be named! The only problem is the goddam winter in between and all its mundane every-day-ness. How are we supposed to manage? At least Christmas, shitty as it is, has time off and parties. Where are we supposed to look for joy now? Football is over. Sure Georgia is playing in the championship game tonight, but only fringe elites like Will Bayles care about that, and yeah Trevor Lawrence is in the playoffs, but meh, if we’re being perfectly honest, we southern elites just don’t care very much about the NFL. Surprisingly, Brad Brownell has the basketball tigers at 5-0 and in solo first in the ACC. We’re super excited. It’s the best start to conference play in Clemson history, we’re going up for the Duke game on Saturday, and it’ll be our boys’ first Clemson game of any kind. Still, we’ve learned not to put our faith in Tiger Basketball but to approach it with a double dose of skepticism. So where are we to look for relief during this time of everyday days? The Christians just celebrated the baptism of Jesus, who is turn supposed to baptize us with the Holy Spirit and fire: “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” That’s John the Baptist in Matthew 3:11. The Christians would tell us that now that we’ve been baptized by the Polar Bear Plunge, we have to be baptized continually by the Holy Ghost, which we accomplish by letting Jesus into our hearts. Well, elites, we all know that’s not going to happen. If that preachy Jesus showed up at our door with all his condescension and holier than thou shit, well we’d slam it shut in his fucking face! We don’t need God, ok?! For us, the whole religion thing is something we’ve moved past, a relic of a time before true eliteness, useful only in the way it provides a sightline into the pagan ritualism that former subelite cultures practiced as a way to comprehend their place on Earth. Christianity is just a fairy tale that got copy and pasted onto that ritualism, and now we have science (Hail Science!), so we understand completely our place in the universe and don’t need all that religious calendar shit to tell us how to feel. Don’t tell us what to do! Still, a little relief or guidance would be nice while we’re caught in this sucky time of year where we just have chores and Clemson Basketball and no big holidays on the near term horizon. Well, I’m here to help. I suggest that our elite situation has more in common with the Naskapi Indians of the Labrador peninsula than with the modern Christian. Marie-Louise Von Franz describes the Naskapi thusly: “These simple people are hunters who live in isolated family groups, so far from one another that they have not been able to evolve tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and ceremonies. In his lifelong solitude the Naskapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations; he has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals, or customs to help him along. In his basic view of life, the soul of man is simply an ‘inner companion,’ whom he calls ‘my friend’ or Mista’ peo, meaning ‘Great Man’.”1 Yes, that’s more like it. We elites have a Great Man inside us, so all we really have to do is listen to ourselves. Thanks but no thanks, Jesus, you got the wrong number. This is the Great Man’s house. Ok, so Great Man, you got a minute? How’s about a little help dealing with the kids this winter?
Yes, elites, it’s possible that the kids are currently presenting us with a bit of a challenge. It would seem that just as we are heading into the long and difficult lowcountry winter here at elite HQ, we find the kids at opposite ends of a transition period, giving each other a ton of shit and at times driving us crazy in the process. So while the Christians were celebrating Jesus’s baptism and accepting the Holy Ghost into their hearts this weekend, we were consulting the Great Man for some assistance with frequent high-pitched, whiny squabbles erupting inside our living area and wondering what the hell we’re going to do when the kids are off school all summer. When taken alone the easier child right now is definitely Scotty aka Scott Hog. Scotty turns 5 in April, and as he heads out of the comfort of early childhood and into the grade school years, he is nostalgic about the idea of being a baby. He is open about this: “I feel weird. Like I’m supposed to be a baby.” He has smallness, cuteness and a knack for being hilarious all working in his favor. His older brother, Cartter, nearly exactly 6 ½, is getting noticeably larger, his moods more frequent, and his forthrightness is nothing like that of the Scott Hog. These days he is way too often saying things like “I don’t want to do this,” when asked to help with the dishes or “I promise I’m not going to like it” when presented with the ordeal of playing a new game during family time after dinner. On New Year’s Day after wasting a dollar on the stupid claw game at the to-go place where we got pizza on the way home from the Polar Bear party, he came near tears when he didn’t win any candy. Then when he barely touched the pizza, instead eyeing some cookies left on the counter, I told him he better eat and put the cookies away. He said it was “the worst day ever.” Babydom has passed Cartter by, and as he looks around in the new world of middle childhood in which he finds himself, where, rightly or wrongly, expectations have ratcheted up, he is disappointed and exasperated. He wants to be big, he isn’t, and it’s somebody’s fault. Guess whose fault it is? Cartter can manifest all this childish despair quite on his own, without the help of his brother, and it can give rise to fountains of anger and frustration that drown the Great Man within and spill out of my mouth in the form of statements like “Nobody out here in this park wants to hear you whine and yell, so shut up.” Being the oldest, the first to be baptized into the age of full-fledged boyhood, trying to find his way, all these things are hard enough for poor little Cartter, and that’s without the Scott Hog’s pestering. Add that in, and the situation becomes quite combustible.
As eager as Cartter is to show that he is big, Scotty is ever-ready to show that, actually, he is not, that in fact, Cartter is a lot closer to being a baby than he is to being big like Mommy and Daddy. For Scotty, whose best friend and closest ally is his older brother; Scotty, who introduces so many of his thoughts with the phrase “No, Cartter Cartter Cartter;” for he who would prefer to remain a baby, Cartter’s becoming “big” is the worst thing that could happen.
With this emotional backdrop, the stage is set for the basketball drama that kicked off our weekend this past Friday evening. The basketball goal in the driveway is new, an early Christmas present for the boys this year, and it is currently getting used pretty regularly, much to my fatherly satisfaction. My brother-in-law Eric took down the rusted out goal that was there and put up a new one. It was a huge bitch, we couldn’t have done it without him, and we are eternally grateful for him being so generous in helping. The kids have developed a sort of merit system that is based on how many shots they can make in a given practice session. No way that could be problematic, right? Back to this Friday. While Danyelle prepared dinner, I set out to entertain the kids, sweeping aside all the gumballs dropped from the Hackberry from Hell and commencing to shoot around with Cartter, Scotty opting to mostly watch . . . and commentate. Scotty’s narration of events mostly focused on Daddy making more shots and thereby earning more “points” as compared to Cartter. Standing beneath the backboard, head cocked to the side, eyes wide and looking skyward, he held both hands up above his shoulders, using his fingers to apparently indicate some sort of crude scoreboard. The more that Cartter protested with screams of “Scottyyyyyy!!!” and “that doesn’t count!!!! We’re not playing for points!!!!” the louder Scotty’s announcing and matter of fact posture became, a little human scoreboard, standing there posing, as if to imply “Look, this is just the way it is. What do you expect me to do?” Naturally, it didn’t take too many airballs before Cartter ran back into the house crying, which left me and the scoreboard alone. Now, I don’t know exactly what the Great Man wanted me to do in that moment, but I opted to remain in the driveway with the human scoreboard rather than to follow the enraged Cartter monster into the house and try to appease it. I also don’t know for sure how the Great Man felt about what ensued, but I couldn’t help but laugh.
The Scott Hog was having no trouble at all. He accepted my brief encouragement to be more sensitive towards his brother, picked up his ball (which is smaller than the one his brother plays with), and started shooting while I rebounded for him. He shoots granny style. With each passing shot, he grew more confident. With each word of support from me, he grew more pleased. And the more confident and happier he grew, the more the ball started going through the hoop. He was making them at a much higher clip than his older brother ever has. For me it was delightful. And then I heard a weak tapping on the glass of the side door that leads from the house to the driveway. I looked up, and there was Cartter’s sullen face, spying on us accusingly. Eventually, I motioned for him to come out and join us. He opened the door, leaned himself out so we could see his face and said serenely “I’m never playing basketball again.” Well, that was a lie. He came out two more times that very evening before the Scott Hog and I went in. Each time the human scoreboard reappeared, and each time the Cartter monster burst into tears and vowed never to pick up a basketball again: “Now, I promise I’m never going to play again!” After one of these tearful disappearing acts, Scotty looked at me, standing at our little kid version of the foul line with his little ball in hand and said “Why is he like that?” If I could have been perfectly honest, I might have said “Well, Scotty, he’s going through a difficult time right now, and you’re being mean as hell, so you might want to try easing up a little,” but Scotty’s 4, and he wants to be a baby, and I’m just an elite searching for the Great Man, so all I could muster was something to the effect of “I don’t know. He’s sensitive, and we need to be nice. We need to tell him that we’re sorry.” I would say I’m sorry for laughing at each of Cartter’s absurd outbursts and that I wouldn’t do it again, but sadly, it was just too goddam funny.
Now, I don’t want anyone to think that elite HQ has fallen into an evil abyss. Yes, I am sometimes fully enraged by my son’s Brad Brownell-like levels of exasperation, and yes, I have on occasion laughed at his pitifulness, but the Great Man dwells within me and my little hellions, so fear not for our mortal souls (the scientific kind). At the end of the basketball debacle, Scotty pulled through and made a decent apology, and then coached me through mine when I started getting too wordy at the dinner table, telling me that what I was trying to say was simply “Cartter, I’m sorry, and I forgive you.” I guess sometimes the Great Man takes the form of a three-foot tall tormentor. We made it through Friday’s sibling warfare, Brad’s Tigers won an astonishingly exciting game on Saturday, and by Sunday morning Cartter was out in the driveway hoisting up airballs again, excited to get better (in a stroke of brilliance I kept him and Scotty separate by getting them to do chores with me at different times while the other played. Scotty complained that his arms and legs were too tired to clean up his toys at the same time as he begged to go play basketball with Cartter). At the end of the day, I suspect that I get so angry with Cartter, because I hate to see him lose his innocence and assume (gasp) many of my own flaws. Lately, I’ve been pondering the idea that our children are in many ways the living manifestation of all the things we don’t like about ourselves. Of course, they are much more than this, but part of who they are, and specifically a lot of the bad parts, come from us, and these aspects are very much in your face as a parent. Von Franz says, “When an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in other people . . . If you feel an overwhelming rage coming up in you when a friend reproaches you about a fault, you can be fairly sure that at this point you will find a part of your shadow . . .”2 Well, I feel an overwhelming rage coming up in me when I see my son’s refusal to enjoy life and his insistence on being disgusted by the slightest inconvenience, so . . . must be his mother’s fault, because a Great Man lives inside me! Yes, that must be it. It’s his mother’s personality flaws that are causing this negative behavior. Anyway, to make a long story short, at bedtime on Friday, the Great Man counseled me, and instilled in me the truth of the matter that my son’s life is wholly his own and in no way mine, despite the multitude of my shadow traits that he may possess. In that moment in the dark of Cartter’s room, the Great Man awakened and guiding, I sighed and finally gave up searching for the right words, and that’s exactly when they came: “I know you’re upset. I understand. It’s ok,” and the boy exhaled as well, finally relaxed, and went to bed. Stay with me, Great Man. It’s a long way to spring break.
References
- Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Man and His Symbols. edited by CG Jung. Dell Publishing 1968. pg. 162
- Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Man and His Symbols. edited by CG Jung. Dell Publishing 1968. pg. 174
The Raging Elitist 