You’ll be a man, my son

Ethan Gunnels turns 21 today, and I’ve been wondering for some time now how to mark appropriately the occasion of my son’s official entry into adulthood.

My first instinct, of course, is to burst into tears and curl into a fetal ball.

But that would be a disservice to the splendid young man he has become and to the adventures he yearns with quickening pulse to commence.

Ethan always has possessed an independent mind and a contrarian spirit. He’s not a joiner, not a follower, not a hanger-on. He charts his own course and steps boldly to the beat of his own drum.

He is on schedule to graduate from UNT in December, a semester early. He’s eager to get on with his life and whatever it holds. He’s a bit vague about his plans. He talks about getting a job tending bar in a ski resort or going to New York to make films or a dozen other ideas that flit through his mind as he waits for the future to come into sharper focus.

I’ve resisted the impulse to lecture him about starting a career, exploring opportunities and making responsible decisions – all the nonsense fathers are expected to offer their sons at this pivotal moment in their lives.

I just can’t bring myself to do it. If I’ve learned one thing after more than 40 years of toil in the marketplace, it’s that 21 is too young to abandon your dreams, yoke yourself to a lifetime of responsibilities and toe the line society demands of promising young men with sharp minds and courageous hearts.

Ethan wouldn’t listen anyway, bless him. He’d endure my droning for a while, looking distracted and uncomfortable, and then, at the earliest opportunity, slip quickly away.

Improbably, he’s found himself at UNT. That should be the function of a college education but often isn’t. Instead, college has become the place where society prepares the next crop of innocents for the commercial maw.

His mother and I sent Ethan to Denton with some trepidation, worried he might sink like some Southlake kids into a dazed muddle of partying, dope-smoking and beer-guzzling. He dabbled in some of that – honestly now, what college kid hasn’t? But he shocked both of us last year by making the Dean’s List, deciding on a history major and sacrificing party-going and girl-chasing for a part-time job.

I don’t worry so much about him anymore, at least no more than the normal father, mindful of his own feckless youth and the inevitability of the gene pool.

To be kind, he was a lackluster student at Southlake Carroll High School, where he maintained a gentleman’s C while nurturing a barely concealed contempt for the privilege and glitter around him.

Ethan mostly hung out with Carroll’s more bohemian crowd, offering bitter, often cogent commentary about life in the “Southlake Bubble.” But he remained his own man, maintaining friendships he’d formed in childhood among Carroll’s “cool kids,” including members of its heralded football team.

Once upon a time, he’d been one of them. As a child, Ethan sampled all the sports – soccer, Little League, inline hockey, basketball and the rest. It was only when he showed up on his first flag football field that he found his place. From that moment, he embraced football and played flag and then tackle with a passion and determination that brought tears to my eyes more than once.

I loved every minute he played. And he loved it, too, until a concussion in the 8^th grade, and the medical complications that followed, eventually robbed him of his passion for the game.

So he switched to the rough-and-tumble sport of lacrosse, drawn I suspect to its violence and physicality. That’s when I learned just how tough my quiet, brooding young son really was.

I had hints before that, of course. In the 6th grade, during his last year in peewee football, I arrived at practice one night to see him coming off the field, holding his right arm, his pale face tight with pain.

“It hurt real bad, Dad, but I didn’t cry,” he told me through clinched teeth. He was out three weeks with a hairline wrist fracture, but he returned to his team wearing a Dragon-green cast and played the rest of the season. The refs made him encase his cast in bubble wrap, lest he use it as a club. At season’s end, the Senior Green Dragons won the Dragon Youth Football championship, and Ethan was a big part of it.

In lacrosse, my son, new to the game, lacked the net-handling skills of his teammates, most of whom had played the sport since grade school. But Ethan showed the fearlessness and aggressiveness needed to play goalie. So that’s where he lined up, with only light pads and an oversized netted stick to protect him from the hard rubber balls being hurled his way from every direction.

Southlake Carroll, a premier football school, had a so-so lacrosse program. After one lopsided JV game (22-3) with lacrosse powerhouse Episcopal School of Dallas, I met Ethan coming off the field. He had played a full half in the box, no match for ESD’s swarming attackers.

“Tough game,” I said. “You must have felt like you were in a shooting gallery.”

“Yeah, they were throwing the ball pretty hard,” he admitted, lifting his uniform shorts to reveal a mass of black, blue and green bruises covering the inside of both thighs. “They usually don’t turn this color for a couple of days!”

He’ll need some of that toughness as he travels along life’s road. But Ethan will manage. Turns out, he’s got a good head on his shoulders. I’d like to think I have something to do with that, but it’s probably as much my wife’s contribution as mine.

From me, he gets a low tolerance for ineptitude, malfeasance and mendacity and a generally low opinion of his fellow man. I’m not proud that I’ve made my son a cynic, and I fear that legacy will cause him more pain than joy. But alas, it is what it is.

Around his mother and me, Ethan mostly is reserved, even somber. If he has a silly side, and I devoutly hope he does, he saves it for his friends and, on rare occasions, for his sister. Rachel delights in calling herself the “Perfect Child” in her brother’s presence, and he generally regards her with irritable distain, except for when he seeks out her advice on girls and other topics he judges too sensitive for his so-square parents.

He and his mother share a special bond. He came after two miscarriages, and Marice always has considered Ethan to be her miracle baby, special beyond compare to a mom who has only sisters and whose closest cousins are female, too.

She understands him better than I do, and she has endless patience for her youngest child, even when he displays appalling judgment and engages in questionable decision-making. Her baby can do no wrong.

I look at my son and often wonder what’s going on behind those guarded brown eyes. I don’t worry about his character. He’s a good person with a kind and giving heart, and he keeps his commitments. Even as a child, he felt compelled to defend weaker kids from schoolyard bullies. He didn’t have to be taught that. The instinct to protect the victimized and confront their tormentors always has been strong.

But I’m not sure I completely understand him. And perhaps he doesn’t fully understand himself. God knows I was a cipher at his age – to my parents, many of my friends and myself.

I came late to parenthood, goaded into it by my patient and loving wife. But I have never enjoyed anything more than being the father of Rachel and Ethan. I’ve watched, with a mixture of soaring joy and profound sadness, as they successfully negotiated the transition from child to grownup.

Family and friends know I’m a sentimental man. I still cling to memories of when my children looked to me for security and guidance, when I stood much taller in their lives than I do now.

 So I still cherish the nightly ritual my son and I perform on the rare nights when we sleep under the same roof. It’s one we’ve shared since he was 3.

 “Good night, Son. Love you.”

“Good night, Dad. Love you, too. Don’t let the bed bugs bite!”

A battle with an inevitable end

I’m no longer a newspaperman. But since I spent the better part of my adult life in one newsroom or another, I guess I still qualify as one of King Donald’s Enemies of the American People. Like my former colleagues, I wear his scornful label like a medal.

 Of course, it makes no sense for Trump to declare full-scale war on the press. I can only assume our President-who-wishes-he-were-Czar has never heard of the old saying that you should never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

Perhaps he thinks that admonition only applies to the nobodies of the world, not to a big shot like him. He revels in the financial difficulties his tormentors in the news media have suffered of late. He delights in referring to the “failing New York Times” or the “failing Washington Post.” He’d like you to believe CNN’s ratings are dropping like a rock. Alas, Donald dear, they aren’t. They in fact are rising, thanks mostly to you, as are digital subscribers to both the Times and Post.

The truth can be so inconvenient at times, wouldn’t you say?

In fact, there’s a real strategy at work here. King Donald is not blindly lashing out at the news media in a fit of pique. By discrediting the news media – by repeating over and over and over that they produce only “fake news,” that their practitioners are disloyal traitors, that they are despicable human beings –he is laying the groundwork for the day when the house of cards tumbles and he is driven from the office he already has disgraced. And those cards will fall. Of that, there is little doubt.

Consider this. Who sits atop Trump’s enemies list? The American news media and the intelligence community – the two entities that can bring him to his knees if accusations are true that his representatives colluded with the Russians to throw the presidential election to him.

There hasn’t been such a news frenzy to uncover wrongdoing at the top levels of government since the heady days of Watergate. The Times and Post, traditional rivals, are locked in a fierce competition to break things wide open. Don’t bet against them, either. They’ve done this before.

As for the spooks, they have the tape recordings, if they exist, that can prove the accusations and send some of Trump’s lackeys to the slammer, where they belong. And the CIA and its confederates in the shadow world of espionage loathe the preening narcissist who has attacked their patriotism and demeaned their competency. I suspect they’re only waiting for the right time to drop the hammer on Agent Orange.

Add to this volatile mixture a White House that is leaking like a sieve, with Trumpites falling over themselves to detail the dysfunctionality of this carnival act masquerading as an administration.

What can Trump and his brownshirts do to prevent the end of their hopes and dreams? They must do everything in their power to discredit the media and the CIA and anyone else who asks too many questions or who knows too many answers.

So they strive to convince their hard core supporters that it’s All Lies. Lies, lies, lies. “Our enemies are liars,” they say over and over. “Don’t believe the leakers in the intelligence community. Don’t believe the lying media. WE are the only people you can trust. WE are your Only Salvation.”

I believe they will fail – and badly. I think there is an inevitable end to this sad, sad tale, and I believe the truth will prevail sooner or later. And it will be much-maligned members of the news media who will uncover that truth and send it into every corner of the country.

I have faith in my former colleagues, who have suffered for more than 10 years through layoffs and cutbacks and ever increasing workloads. This is the kind of story they live for. It is the kind of story that may yet demonstrate the essential nature of a free and vigorous news media.

Several days ago, in response to a Facebook post I wrote in praise of journalist Dan Rather’s social media commentary, my friend Michael Precker imagined the Times and Post as sailing frigates firing cannon broadsides at “Trump’s pirate ship.” Michael knows I’m a fan of Patrick O’Brian’s famous series of historical novels about the era of fighting sail during the Napoleonic wars.

Inspired, I engaged in a little exercise of my own. I reproduce it here, mostly for my amusement and perhaps for yours:

“A la O'Brian, here's another analogy. Trump's White House is the French navy. To outward appearances, it puts on a pretty show, brass gleaming, sails snowy white and lines taut and shipshape. But it serves the whims of a brooding tyrant, petty and egotistical, with ambitions to enslave the world. And in battle, it is all bark and no bite. Its tactics are flawed, its execution sloppy and inconsistent and its gunnery shoddy and slow. The Times and Post are capital ships of the British navy. And although their sails may be a bit tattered from prolonged combat, their hulls pockmarked and patched from past cannon strikes, their crews are highly motivated and supremely disciplined, their gunners dead-eyed marksmen whose crews work like well-oiled machines to pound the enemy ships again and again until they are shattered, burning wrecks.”