More Like the Waltons

The holiday season is upon us—well, it’s upon you, I’m just holing up with cheap beer and my GameCube until it blows over—and that means family gatherings, and family gatherings sometimes mean interacting with people we’d really rather not. To make the next few days as tension-free as possible, I offer the following excerpt from my upcoming book The Gilful Life: Advice From Someone You Should Totally Take Advice From due out next year from Simon & Shuster, or if those guys keep refusing to take my calls, one of those vanity presses that help lonely women channel their sadness and frustration into stories about steampunk Wiccans.

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Oh, Grandpa: How to Deal with an Elderly Relative Spouting Retrograde Nonsense When You Don’t Have an Ice Floe Handy

“Incorrigible codger,” “irascible old coot,” “Brokaw boner-killer,” these are just some of the terms we use to describe our more noisome elders. It’s important to remember that these people lived through a drastically different (read: less enlightened) time in our nation’s history and can’t be expected to see the world the way we do, or to not say seriously fucked up shit about Asians. But with the judicious employment of tact and knowledge that a mid-priced brandy masks the taste of NyQuil, a great deal of unpleasantness can be avoided. Let’s say you’ve all just sat down to Christmas dinner and a family member of advanced age is expressing some, shall we say, outmoded opinions, causing discomfort among the other guests. How should you deal with the situation?

Expressing disapproval of recent trends in music: Just grit your teeth and put on something you know he’ll enjoy. A lighthearted defense of your tastes is acceptable, but it’ll take all your strength just to keep from blurting out “yeah, Sufjan Stevens would be so much better if he wore a bearskin coat and sang through a megaphone.”

Ranting about political correctness: Chuckle noncommitally and try to steer the conversation toward less inflammatory subjects. Disagreement is pointless here; when members of our generation think of political correctness, our minds often go to things like Antioch making students take affidavits with them on dates or blog readers being like “oh, so you just assume it’s Christmas dinner we’re all sitting down to?”; he’s probably talking about integrated restrooms.

Insisting that Anita Hill agrees with him that she was the unwitting pawn of Pro-Choice forces: Rub your temples and just think what you’d be like today if you’d lived through the Depression and the age before porn torrents. You’d have all sorts of crazy ideas about what Anita Hill told you in private.

What you should not do—I cannot stress this enough—is ask him to co-chair the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform just to shut him up. You can’t ignore his recommendations for how to keep the country solvent the way you can his crotchedy proclamations on hemlines. Or rather, you can, but at your own peril—it may grate to humor him during a family gathering, but that’s nothing compared to the aggravation you’ll feel listening to journalists, some of whom generally do good work, humor him at each stop-off on his media blitz.

get it?

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