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Father's Day is this Sunday, and we all know how the father is treated in popular culture nowadays: the dispensable, henpecked doofus with no ambition, no particular vision to convey to his children, and who commands no respect from anyone.
What's more, in the household the father represents "the patriarchy," and feminism has told us that's a bad thing. (Incidentally, you won't find a better book on that subject than Steven Goldberg's The Inevitability of Patriarchy.)
In my case, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was set on the road to becoming the man I am today because of conversations I had with my father. No doubt about that at all.
I can easily see myself having otherwise gone in for mainstream left-liberalism, the default set of positions for anyone who hasn't really thought deeply, examined data, etc.
That's why a car covered in bumper stickers is vastly more likely to belong to a left-liberal than to anyone else: their whole philosophy is a bumper sticker, a series of wishes and demands divorced from tradeoffs, or how economics works, or any of those other mundane things their opponents insist on talking about. Want higher wages? Just demand them. Want lower rents? Just demand them. Whatever social outcome you want, the state can always crack enough skulls to bring it about, and with no collateral effects.
Thank goodness Dad spared me the indignity of going through life like that.
I grew up in the 1980s, as the Cold War continued to rage, and it was from my father that I learned both (1) the horrors of communism and (2) that there were plenty of people out there who sought to cover up or downplay those horrors.
In fact the year my father died -- thirty years ago next month; he died much too young -- I interviewed for a print magazine Professor Eugene Genovese, the ex-Marxist historian of the American South who had written a 1994 article called "The Question." The question Genovese had in mind was aimed at his fellow leftists: when it came to communist crimes, what did you know and when did you know it?
It was Dad who had grounded me in all that stuff.
He was self-taught: although he later earned his GED, he dropped out of high school as a younger man. He was intensely self-conscious about that, so he read everything he could -- for his own enrichment, no doubt, but also so he could be the best father he could to me.
We had these conversations together starting when I was around 9 or 10, and at age 53 I still remember them. I hope my own children remember their conversations with me as fondly as I do these with him.
Since the world has gone insane, fathers need to hold more crucial conversations with their kids than ever. An excellent kickstart to that process are the Tuttle Twins Guidebooks, a series of seven books a dad can use to inoculate his kids against some of the worst things they'll encounter.
Hence the set includes volumes on spotting logical fallacies, on courageous heroes, on inspiring entrepreneurs, on the world's villains, the world's worst ideas, and on the real-live conspiracies that really have existed.
These are the kinds of conversations you can have at the dinner table, on a road trip, and just about anywhere else. They'll keep your kids from having their minds colonized by crazy people, and they have the added benefit of being memories your kids will recall with fondness throughout their lives.
You don't need my help to be a good father, but we can all benefit from some quality support material, and these are it -- and they're written by my old friend Connor Boyack, who by coincidence happens to be an exemplary father himself.
The Tuttle Twins Guidebooks, on sale right now for Father's Day, can jumpstart a summer of important conversations between the kids and dad:
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