comprehensionthroughrepetition

I originally composed the majority of this essay as a message to Andrew Callaghan, the director of the film “Dear Kelly” in response to having watched it with my husband and our 13 year old son. I even sent the message to him via Instagram, but I decided to unsend it because I kept thinking about adding things that I forgot to put in there, and you can probably tell by the length of this essay, there were quite a few. So if for some reason Andrew did read that message and he happens to come across this essay, he should probably know that if this looks familiar, that is why. There are spoilers here, so if you haven’t watched yet, I recommend renting or purchasing the film from www.dearkellyfilm.com. In fact, I recommend watching it anyways.

Dear Kelly is a thought provoking portrait of a man in his 60’s in the thralls of right wing political radicalization that was brought on by personal crisis. It is a well done film that humanizes its subject, Kelly J. Patriot, by attempting to help him come to terms with the past events that catapulted him so deeply into political activism that it strains his familial and personal relationships. I think this might be surprising if you know how the film ends, but for those of us who have lost loved ones to extremist politics, I think this film is kind of healing. At least it was for me. I saw so many parallels between Kelly and my dad while watching this, and I think that anyone who is dealing with the personality shift that takes place in a loved one who has been consumed by right wing propaganda might feel the same. This is an essay about these parallels, about my dad, and about Kelly.

When I say losing a loved one to radical politics, it might sound like a death has occurred, or like the person has physically left in some way, but neither has actually occurred in my case. My father, who I love dearly, calls and checks in on a somewhat regular basis, but his involvement in my actual life is pretty minimal. If I am being honest, this has always been the case. He keeps in touch and he definitely wants us around, but it is mostly on his terms. At his house. He opens the pool every summer and begs us to come over. A full house means living the dream for him. For a long time, summer was a constant party in my dad’s back yard. Music going, grilling, swimming, drinking beer, fireworks, fire pits, guitar playing. That sort of stuff. My dad thinks of himself as a family man, but when it comes to showing up for any of us outside of his home, he has always fallen a little short (I could probably count the number of times he has visited me in the past 15 years on one hand). This is just how he is. His home (the compound, we joke) is a key part of his identity, and as such, it is an important part of this essay, because the home is literally the center of his universe, his sense of self, his community, and the world as he knows it. It didn’t surprise me that the home is a central part of Dear Kelly, too, and the loss of the home is the thing that catapults Kelly into a life crisis. I’ll get back to the role of the home a bit further down, but what I am referring to when I say lost is the sense of loss that I often feel when I talk to my dad now. 

Over the past few years I have witnessed an evolution in my dad that is probably familiar to a lot of people my age who have newly radicalized parents who are in their 60’s and 70’s. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what it was that got through to my him in terms of politics, because he has always been a non-political, non-religious, working class-ish guy. He doesn’t watch much TV. He has never cared about the news, and he cannot sit still for long enough to get through an entire television program. He doesn’t read books either (I don’t think he has ever read a book in his life). But he does use Facebook and TikTok, and they provide a steady stream of condensed bites of information that is short enough for him to follow, so I think that may be where a lot of this started. Sometimes he talks about having access to the real news, the stuff no one else knows about, because they don’t show this stuff on TV. “They hide it from us!” News from other countries that we couldn’t possibly understand, “Did you know that all over the world people are protesting Biden’s election because they love Trump abroad? Full scale protests! You guys don’t know this because you can’t read the news from abroad and the liberal media hides this from us!” I remind him that I actually can understand news from another country, because I studied another language and I lived abroad, so I know that what he is seeing isn’t true. At least not from what I can see. He changes the subject and moves on.

I didn’t use TikTok when this began, but when I finally decided to check out the app one of the first videos that came through my feed was pretty insane, and some of the pieces began to come together in terms of what my dad was seeing. I know that all of TikTok isn’t all like this, but I was shocked that the kind of video that I am about to describe was one of the FIRST videos that came across my screen. This was before an algorithm was established, or before I had typed in any search terms, and I knew right away that this was the kind of stuff that my dad got sucked into, because he had sent me a clip of something similar back in the day. The TikTok was of a man talking while images of the subjects that he mentioned revolved in the background, and he made connections between mostly completely unrelated things. I am going to misremember this, but it was something like: “Pyramids> P> people> beings> point> space> stars> beings> aliens> pyramids> dollar bill> pyramids> aliens”. It went on, and I am definitely not quoting the actual video, because it manages to use this stream to connect all of these topics back to oil, electricity in the pyramids, aliens, and politics, but the guy keeps tapping his head and pointing to the items appearing on the screen above him: think about this. A conspiracy in plain sight. Don’t you see it? My dad saw it. “The pyramids had electricity and the liberals hide this from us! It’s free! They don’t want us to know!” He was watching videos like this. Connecting disconnected dots. Creating paranoia. Moving him further from his actual lived experience. He was watching a lot of right wing extremists at the time, as well, and health hacks that they hide from us so that we become sick. My dad even started bathing in peroxide (and he still does). One thing lead to another, and suddenly every single thing we have ever been told is a conspiracy to keep us ignorant. He was taking in a lot of information about things that shook his understanding of the world, the foundations of our shared reality, and this knowledge of the truth gave him a sense of superiority. He knew something that we didn’t, and it became clear that made him feel important.

Back in the day, my dad didn’t give two shits about politics. He went from lying about voting for George W. so that his wife and friends wouldn’t get on him about it (he confided this to me, and I got the sense that he probably didn’t actually vote in that election at all), to completely checking out from reality in the middle of a conversation about his grandson to slip into rants about Hilary, Kamala, the firmament, gravity, pedophiles, medicine, and how Trump is the “embodiment of our lord and savior” who has come back to save us from the evil that has taken over our country. The shift happens out of nowhere, and when it does his tone changes and it seems as if he isn’t actually there in that moment. His face even changes. His eyes avert. I can’t tell if he is seizing on the opportunity to have the floor for a brief moment. Maybe he thinks that this time someone might actually hear him. In that moment he becomes the truth teller, the sage, the one who reveals reality to those who cannot see it. He is suddenly important, and essential, to our survival in this lie. But in these moments, it is as if there is something in his wiring that goes off. Like in those weird TikTok correlation videos, he hears a word, a vowel, anything really, and his brain recalls something he saw in his feed. “Your grandson has a concert this week.” Concert> hard C sound> same as K> KAMALA. “Did you know that Kamala isn’t actually black?” I sigh. I answer gently, “Well, that isn’t true…” He cuts me off. He cannot hear my response. He has already moved on to the ice wall. In these moments, it is as if he is unaware of who he is having a conversation with anymore. He enters the void, almost in the way that I have seen schizophrenics on the street shouting at people who are not there. It is like a possession, and possession requires an exorcism. I cannot do this, especially not over the phone while I am cooking dinner, so I suffer through it until he returns. 

In Dear Kelly, I noticed a similar switch in Kelly during the intervention scene. He starts talking in circles to avoid taking responsibility, and someone in the room rolls their eyes. Sometimes this shift looks subtle like that. As if my father is trying to look intelligent or powerful in a moment of weakness. If he talks enough, using that gift of gab that has served him so well in life, maybe we will be swept up in what he is saying so that we forget the original point. Or if he embodies the truth teller. The sage. The work he is doing is important, revealing the truth to all of us, so maybe we should forget the infraction and just buy what he is selling. He reminds us of this role by slipping in a bite of truth where it doesn’t belong.

This brings me to the subject of Andrew’s Radicalization Theory. In short, Andrew describes this kind of radicalization as having begun with a personal tragedy that deprives a person of security, significance, and connection. This tracks when it comes to my dad. In the years leading up to my father’s radicalization, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Then his mother died, and so did his two good friends who rented the rooms beside her’s in his basement. Within the span of two years his home went from full to almost empty. Pool parties began to dwindle, and his marriage isn’t exactly great. So with the loss of community, his home life started to look a little dark. There is more, but it is pretty clear that like Kelly, my dad experienced a whole lot of tragedy within a short period of time that lead to a loss of position in society, an ego death, if you will. The loss of a social circle and the identity that came with that made space for something to come in that would return to him a sense of purpose, the illusion of control/power, and a feeling of moral superiority.

Now, more than ever in his life, my dad talks about how he is going to live forever, which to me further reveals his feelings of powerlessness. After having to shoulder so much grief in such a short time, it is clear that he struggles with his the idea of mortality. He says again and again that no one has to worry about his health because he is never going to die. He tells me that his bad liver tests have been completely reversed, in spite of his drinking. The doctors are amazed by his progress, he insists. I have no way of validating his claims, but I tell him that I love him and I believe in him. 

I think an important part of this particular kind of radicalization is the way in which a person’s value in U.S. American society decreases with age. I don’t think that my dad was prepared for this (I don’t think our society prepares anyone for this, really). My dad has had a hard time finding work in his 60’s. He is someone who built his identity on his ability to make it in the world, in spite of his humble, even difficult, upbringing. These days, he struggles with his health and injuries, and it can be hard to pay the bills, never mind keep up with the Joneses. The image of success has always been an important part of his sense of self. In fact, conspicuous consumption marked my entire childhood. Evictions caused us to move constantly until my parents divorced, but we had high end furniture from rent to own stores (they were repossessed), and sometimes we even had nice cars (also repossessed). We boiled water for baths when the heat was turned off (often). We had a generator for when the electricity was turned off (often). We had black box cable (or my dad spliced wires and illegally routed them to our house). My dad knew how to show up and look good, and he had the gift of gab, which probably got him out of trouble (a lot), and definitely got him paid. In spite of a difficult start, my dad made it. He bought the house with the pool, and plenty of room for everyone. And this time, it was above board. On the books (I think). For a lot of people his age, owning a home is a marker of social progress. The home was so important to Kelly that it was probably the conduit to his transformation and entire personal crisis. For my father, a home put him at the center of his community. It made him the heart of it all, and he reveled in the attention that came with this marker of success. Now he was the guy that people went to when they wanted to party, and he was the guy who people went to when they had nowhere to go, because he was in a position to help them. And help them he did, because my dad has heart. So much heart. And he came from humble beginnings. He dropped out of school in the 9th grade when his father died to help his mom support the family. My dad knows what struggle looks like, so he tries to help.

In Dear Kelly, we learn that Kelly also had humble beginnings. He grew up in a trailer park and worked his way through college, eventually becoming a lawyer. I don’t know much about how Kelly grew up, but I recognize the trailer park, and I know that like my dad, we learn that not everything Kelly did before he lost his home was above board. His version of his history doesn’t match his self image. We learn that he cut corners, he cheated, and he was disbarred for it. Like my dad, Kelly came from a place where you step on others in order to get ahead. In order to “make it.” My father “made it” this way, too. But he got the home, and with it, the validation he strived for. The home was the center of Kelly’s life, a marker of his success. And losing it marked the loss of is identity. My dad didn’t lose his home, but he lost the things that it represented to him, the validation that came with having it, when he lost his community.

For these older guys who sacrificed their youth trying to make it only to find themselves discarded by a society that doesn’t care much for aging people, the transition to aging can be hard. Here, we value productivity, conquest, and conquer. When a person loses their ability to be productive, they lose their status, their ability to navigate the capitalist landscape, their value, and finally, their sense of place in the world. In a lot of ways, I think that for them Trump is an older man who has been able to hold onto status to these aging men who find that they are suddenly lost in the world, and I think my dad buys anything he is selling for this reason. To them, Trump continues to make it, against real and or fictional odds. And the thing that sets Trump apart from the others, is that like Kelly and my dad, he also cheated. He validates the choices that they made to get where they are, while the other guys bury that stuff in order to look legitimate. My dad attaches himself to Trump’s ideals so he can stay on the ship with him, ego, sense of purpose, and value intact. The void felt from a life of sacrifices made in the name of the American capitalist materialist dream wasn’t all for nothing. Trump validates this feeling in a lot of people, for he is the embodiment of that dream.

I try to be kind when my dad slips into these political rants, so I appreciate that Andrew was gentle with Kelly. Like him, I try to listen and respond carefully, but I also try to be honest. I attempt to attach my dad’s theories, no matter how insane, to concrete things in reality, so that we can have a conversation that I can take part in, even if only in part, and I try not to judge him, because that doesn’t always go well. Sometimes judgment pushes him to go deeper. I also try to not validate too much. It can be a hard line to walk.

At the end of the film we see Kelly get pushed further into extremism and further away from his family. It was sad, and it was a little hard to watch. The film really builds up the possibility of him coming out of this. There is a lot of hope that he will reconnect with his family. For a moment, I had this feeling that the film was unfinished because this doesn’t happen. But then it hit me: I don’t think my dad will ever come out of this, if I am being honest. Seeing how this played out with Kelly was pretty validating in that regard. Disappointing? Sure. But there is a sense of how we can only move forward from where we are. I cannot cling to the memories of who my dad was if I am going to continue to have a life with him; I have to accept him for who he is, here and now. All I can do is love him through this. I can be honest with him while doing that, too. Like Kelly, my father seems to be in the midst of a mental health crisis brought on by a loss of community, sense of self, and purpose. I am not a psychologist, but I know that shaming him or casting him out won’t help him come back. It won’t undo the damage done by extremist media. Underneath these rants, I believe that he is still a good person who wants to love and be loved. I hope that something shifts while he is still here with us so that he goes back to seeing the good that surrounds him and the impact he can make here at home, with the people who care about him, instead of focusing on things that are outside of his realm/control to fill the void. But either way, I will keep trying to be here for him while he rants away to fill the void.

I hope the Kelly’s of the world find their way back to themselves.