Living Blue in the Red States

12. The Kreskin Effect

12. The Kreskin Effect Jim Peterson It was Friday night. No school tomorrow. I was a kid, and I loved The Tonight Show. Permission requested and granted. Watching Carson with my father is how I got to know his sense of humor, an affinity for slapstick and other forms of silliness. My own sense of humor fell in line. I laughed until I cried. And I learned. It was on Carson that I first saw Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Lenny Bruce. Strange heroes for a white kid in the Bible Belt, son of a conservative business man. Maybe my favorite guest on Carson was the Amazing Kreskin. My father and I were both literally glued to the screen any time Kreskin came on, and he was a frequent guest. I like that I could have both King and Kreskin as heroes. Kids don’t draw so many boundaries, so many lines in the sand. I loved King for his idealism and courage; Kreskin for his feats suggesting an important mystery, and for his perceived ability to control others with nothing but the power of his mind. Black and white in those days.A flickering light.A youthful Carson in a conservative suit and tie playing the consummate straight man to his guests: Tony Randall, Elaine Strick, Mickey Mantle, Liza Minnelli, Don Rickles. And suddenly Martin Luther King. If my father had not loved Carson so much, he probably wouldn’t have kept watching. But he did watch, with a certain grave concentration. Carson treated King with the greatest respect, gave King this popular forum to put forward his important ideas. King was confident, relaxed, charming, righteous, brilliant. How difficult it was for my father to process the power of this black man and the truth of his words. Especially since 163 164 | Jim Peterson King’s power stemmed from being morally right, and from passive resistance as opposed to violence. In our country we know what to do if someone threatens us: we get out our big gun and blow ’em away. There is clarity. But when someone stands passively in our way with their truth, we may not know what to do; we feel doubt, confusion, and impotent anger. Any sense I have of my political engagement with the world, with my connection to praxis in other words, goes back to my relationship with my father. My mother was a presence also, but she was much more in the background, a voice reassuring or coaxing. My father was dominant. Patriarchal dominance was the case in most households of my generation, as it has been in most households going back to the dawn of the Iron Age. Perhaps we are on the cusp of breaking through both the matriarchal and patriarchal structures of culture into a more balanced understanding of power and responsibility, but this more healthy hierarchy hasn’t emerged yet; and we continue to suffer under a hierarchical imbalance that places the father (god) into dominance. Before the Iron Age, and for thousands of years, the mother (goddess) was dominant, but that’s another story. I wonder if it’s possible for us to harmonize these two essential energies in ways that produce a more open and yet stable society where everyone has a realistic chance to learn and grow and prosper. But harmony is not our strong suit so far; now dominance, that’s something we can really sink our teeth into. There is no point, of course, in faulting my father for who he was. Like each of us, he was the product of many factors inherited and environmental. My father’s father was even more dominant in his household than my father would ever be. He had a violent temper and favored corporal punishment to get his point across. Thus, his three sons and his daughter were often afraid of him. My father was the middle son and was the most resistant and rebellious. My father liked to tell a story about wanting to play football for the high school team in the little Georgia town of Waynesville. But his father was against it, wanted my father to get home after school, to have a job, and not waste his time with a stupid game. But my father sneaked away to practice and to play in the games. When his father discovered the de- The Kreskin Effect | 165 ceit...