inklings

My dad the insurance adjuster brought home some good stories. Like the trucker’s claim about a nearsighted moose that charged his headlights but at the last moment leapt onto the hood and drove its front hooves through the cab roof. Dad pantomimed the driver’s panicked reactions right down to his boggled shock at the moose hooves dangling beside him, hilarious.

He also once told a tale about a father who’d instructed his young son to climb a stepladder in the family kitchen and jump off. Said he would catch him. Then he stepped aside and let the kid fracture himself on the linoleum. Leaning down he said, “Let that be a lesson, son: ‘never trust anyone.’”

It never occurred to us this was not any kind of actual insurance claim story. Everyone stopped in mid-bite at the dinner table. My sisters all gasped and sputtered in horror, my older brother and I flicked glances at mom’s furrowed look and back at dad, who did something cryptic with his eyebrows as if to say, “Watch out: there are deeply sick mentalities in the world.”

 It was decades later before the internet revealed this was an oft-repeated story told by generations of fathers; a simple family fable about trust, power—and if you were so disposed— ethics. It had versatile uses; imagine that instead of warning about betrayal by others, a father told it as a legitimate instruction in tough love. In that dad’s mind, “The world’s a cruel sewer, my kid should learn it from me.” It’s a short hop from there to skipping the story and carrying out the deed— out of sincere love, of course.

In a 2004 NY Magazine article, Ivanka Trump revealed that a version of this was Donald’s parenting instruction— although decidedly more upscale and sporting. “I remember skiing with him and we were racing. I was ahead, and he reached his ski pole out and pulled me back,” Ivanka says with a glamorous twinkle. Her brother Eric chimes in, “He would try to push me over, just so he could beat his 10-year-old son down the mountain.”

Donald Trump lets nothing pull him back— the very first action of his administration was to kill the Office of Ethics, a campaign that recently succeeded. Really, who actually needs ethics slowing you down with the world such a fast-moving sewer?

So, it’s all downhill from here—Donald, the father of our country is in the driver’s seat. Pay no attention to the hooves.