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National NewsConservative News
Family Secrets
By Joe Sobran
Posted on: April 6, 2005
The Schiavo family tragedy, which has begotten such bitter national controversy, reminds us how complicated and vexed family matters can be. It's easy to speak sentimentally of "family values," as if cozy affection and settled morality could be taken for granted, but it doesn't always work out that way in our real experience.
Often, thank heaven, it does. Let's not forget or belittle that. There are many happy families and, no matter what Tolstoy says, they aren't all alike. They may not be quite as dramatic as unhappy families, and they may not make headlines quite as often, but under scrutiny they can be every bit as interesting.
In recent years psychologists have begun to study happiness for a change. Psychology has generally been the study of pathologies and abnormalities -- failure, in a word -- but now it's turning its attention to happy and successful people. That study should include families that don't wind up in court, jail, or angry memoirs.
Still, close kinship is no guarantee of bliss, and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. C.S. Lewis once wrote that the Victorian sentimentalization of the family produced the reaction of a "savage" anti-family literature in Ibsen, Shaw, Samuel Butler, and just about every early modernist novel you can name; one thinks of P.G. Wodehouse's unsparing realism about aunts.
This reaction wasn't confined to literature. It's still with us, in the form of "sexual revolution" for instance. Today, in an inversion of Victorian sentimentalism, one gets the impression that the only happy marriages are those of same-sex couples. Among the rest of us, the fatherless household has become virtually normal. As Ellis Cose has observed, the problems observed in the black family a generation ago now afflict white families with similar frequency. Should that surprise us?
From the Greeks to Shakespeare to the Russian novel to Tennessee Williams, literature and drama have dealt with the most embarrassing (white) family secrets. And the remarkable thing is how close to the bone they can get. When you watch King Lear make a horrible fool of himself and tear his family apart with his crazy demands, you don't feel you're watching some incomprehensible stranger. If he doesn't remind you of your own dad, you may have an uncle just like him.
I recently caught up with a family I used to be close to but hadn't seen in decades. These people, all lovable, aren't speaking to each other anymore. It's sad, even heart-piercing, but not that unusual. You don't really know a family, sometimes, until you know things about them you wish you didn't.
The Schiavo case also reminds us what has become of marriage. We used to think you had to stick it through in sickness and in health, but soon we may have to amend wedding vows to take into the account the option of pulling the plug. Isn't relieving oneself of an unwanted spouse a fundamental human right? Michael Schiavo, Robert Blake, Scott Peterson -- sure, we may disapprove of their methods, but don't we all know where they're coming from?
Such men show that conjugal love isn't unconditional; at least not always, or not for long. Men may abandon their children, but they seldom want them dead. Even the man who kills his wife may still adore the kids she gave him. It's Terri Schiavo's parents who want her to live.
Comedy rings down the curtain just when everyone is about to get married and live happily ever after. Tragedy shows what may actually happen afterward, when Othello and Desdemona get around to setting up housekeeping and discover each other's little quirks. Soon the neighbors are talking, and finally Verdi is writing an opera. From romance to family squabbles to La Scala -- you never know where it will lead.
But OTELLO is a worst-case scenario. In spite of everything, there are still happy families, and even husbands who stand by their hopelessly ailing wives to the bitter end. In fact, these are the norm we should be paying more close attention to.
The beleaguered and battered family still exists, and it still manages to produce healthy children. It has even survived all of our enlightened modern society's determined attempts to reform it. That's because modern society knows when something is working wrong, but hasn't a clue when, or why, it's working right.
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Joe Sobran is an author, syndicated columnist, and editor of a monthly newsletter, SOBRAN'S. See www.sobran.com for a free sample or call 800-513-5053.
This article is reprinted with permission.
Copyright (c) 2005 by The Vere Company, All rights reserved.
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