"Your observations are offside"

My Dad used to teach medical courses at his hospital. He'd start with Aristotle and Galen and then, of course, he'd cut to the chase, discussing new requirements, technology, and procedures in depth and detail. After my Mom died, in fact, my Dad returned from retirement to study and pass all the required Illinois examinations in medicine. He knew his profession.

Nonetheless, he seemed to have had a reputation among American-born physicians as not quite the thing because of the "irrevelance" of Aristotle and Galen to modern medical science, which seems to be using high technology to extract tons of cash from well-heeled people while telling Gomer to Get Out of My Emergency Room.

However, when I came to his former hospital, following his second and final retirement, doctors at that hospital praised him with what seemed to be a sincerity in excess of what a man will tell a man's son after his retirement.

By that time, those doctors were all from the Middle East and India, cultures which don't frown on relating daily life to the eternal.

My Dad wrote. He wrote a signally bad novel, Cycles, many medical journal articles and advocacy of his holistic belief in the definition of death.

For the equivalent of a PhD he wrote about psychology although he was a neurosurgeon. Apparently, circa 1945, the US Army confused brain surgery with psychoanalysis, in the innocent military way, and had the United States not used the atomic bomb, my father would have been just behind the lines in Operation Olympic, the planned US invasion of Japan, counseling soldiers to return to the front using Dr. Freud, who was fashionable then. He's glad the war ended when it did.

His writing style was more complex than mine and more luxuriant in references to culture.

But he never sat in a goddamn office in a goddamn insurance company violating his goddamn Hippocratic oath "never to do harm" by denying care to people with the bad taste to be African goddamn American, as he would phrase it himself when he lost his temper.

Let us now praise famous men. This issue of "writing style", this issue wherein Fat Bastards on Lamma Island who can't write a coherent sentence find mine all too long, seemed to be marginal when it surfaced for me at SEI Information Technology in Chicago in 1979, as marginal as "writing".

But it became central. Basically, "simplification" as ideology does violence to the truth.

In the horrible YouTube Republican debate, candidates like Giuliani and Romney vied with each other to simplify, promising to intern illegal immigrants and remove the separation of church and state. But Mike Huckabee tries to speak the truth.

Governor Huckabee is so dumb that it comes out understandable (he didn't know what a National Intelligence Estimate is), and he recently was endorsed by none other than the Chuckster, Chuck "Walker Texas Ranger" Norris, which might get the NASCAR vote, but he speaks the truth and people in my country are hungry for the truth.

If only (if only) we could get back to Adlai Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt. My father didn't like either: for him, they meant him getting shipped overseas in a cru-sade and by 1955 he and his generation wanted to chill. He didn't understand that the Eisenhower administration, the good gray Eisenhower administration, could and would create the problems of the 1960s (Vietnam and race relations) by starting the Vietnam war (cf. Chomsky) and sitting on its hands during the Montgomery bus boycott, afraid, as is the Republican party today, of offending the base.

Nothing replaces understanding, and my understanding as his was, is imperfect. But nothing replaces the attempt.

Late in life, my father had a job checking up on patients for Social Security qualification for disability. I am certain he not once turned down a patient under the rules unjustly, because I saw him drive an innocent young medical student crazy by constantly making him revise, expand, improve and refine his reports.

Those reports weren't "mere words". In fact, the poor and desparate Hoosiers trying to get disability needed the truth of their condition expressed in writing accurately, and that is why, I believe, my father was so intense about the quality of the writing.

My father is still alive. I last got back to the USA to see him in April. We're not close: he has always excluded me emotionally and each and every time I see him he manages without meaning to do so, to wound me, because he could never abide the very idea of the necessary competition between males and for this reason emotionally downsized all his sons in a way I don't think I have done to my own.

Still, filial respect demands the truth.