In the winter of 1966, after a big snowstorm, some days or weeks before my fifth birthday, my father built a snow fort just outside our front door. He hoisted me up and plopped me inside. He thought I’d be thrilled. “I built a snow fort,” he said. “Where?” I said, “where is it?” “It’s right here. You’re in it.” “Where?” I said. “Right here,” my mother confirmed, pointing.
This was a difficult moment for me. I had the massive authority of both parents telling me there was snow fort somewhere in the vicinity. I was excited by the idea of a snow fort. But I’d be damned if I could see one. Was I in as snow fort? I couldn’t be. I doubt the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes flashed across my little brain, but I certainly had the sense that I was being told to accept the impossible story I was in something called a snow fort. I was standing on the snow. And there was snow all around me. But I could be anywhere in the yard standing and there would be snow all around me. There was a hill of snow in front of me. But still I wasn’t in anything. I was out in the open. It was very confusing.
Two years later, perhaps, those same parents brought me to Franconia Notch, NH to see The Old Man of the Mountain. “Look there’s the Old Man,” they said. “Where?” “Right there, at the top of the mountain. I let on that I didn’t see it. They put a quarter in a viewing machine. “Here look at this.” I looked at it. I’d looked through binoculars before, and these were stronger than my grampy’s. But there was no Old Man in them. My dad looked through the machine before the quarter ran out. Made an adjustment. “Now don’t touch anything, just look. It’s pointing right at the Old Man.” But it wasn’t. It was just pointing at the rocky mountain, same thing I could see from the ground.
Seeing is different from looking at.
When I was in high school, I asked myself what I could say or do to get one girl after another to become interested in me. I had very little success. What I did not understand is that the punch line is not what makes the joke funny. What makes the joke funny is the desire of the listener to laugh. When you want to impress a girl, it makes no difference what you say; if she wants to be impressed, she will be impressed. If she wants to be unimpressed, she’ll be unimpressed. (I hope it’s obvious that I’m making no claims about girls in general that are not equally applicable to boys.)
Nothing changes when we grow up. Or perhaps I should say that differently: most of us never have any real interest in growing up. Where does support for Donald Trump come from? It comes from the desire to support him. Where does the hatred of Hillary Clinton come from? It comes from the desire to hate her. The facts we have could not lead any decent human being to support Trump. The facts we have could lead to any amount of criticism of Hillary Clinton, but not to the deeply irrational levels of hatred that have dogged her. She has made a number of mistakes—about the number you’d expect from someone who has been involved in politics as long as she has. He IS a mistake. He’s a bumbling, stupid man, thoroughly corrupt, selfish, without any qualifications for the job he holds, a job in which he’s done nothing worthy of praise or even commendation since he was inaugurated. We got the bumbling fool we voted for. But his supporters want to like him—somehow, I can’t figure out how. And so they do. It always shocked me in high school that the guys who managed to go out with all the prettiest girls were most often the most obnoxious, doomed souls in the building. But the girls wanted (in imitation of the other girls they wanted to be like) to like them. So they did.
