Bill Arnold: June 4, 1927-August 17, 1969
My father, who died 38 years ago this week, was a card-carrying, full-fledged yellow-dog Democrat, which in the South meant that he would rather vote for a yellow dog than vote the Republican ticket. Hallelujah and Amen! His political philosophy may have come from his gut, but he was a prominent lawyer and politician in Arkansas and knew his political terrain well. And so it was that my parents fed my brothers and me politics from birth. We were suckled on Democratic ideals.
By the time I was a small child, and I mean little, I was an experienced campaigner. On election days, Daddy would take us to the polls and situate us exactly at the legal requirement from the entrance to the sacred voting booths. We handed out cards for his chosen candidates. I twinkled my hazel eyes at the citizens who passed by and said, please vote for So and So. Or being the shy girl that I was, I stood behind my father to hide. Either way, how could they resist us?
This childhood training would explain why I'm not shy about spilling my opinions at the drop of a... Let's say idiotic, unwanted, unneeded, and disastrous war which the American public was lied to from the start, and which has made our own country and the whole world less safe. Could Osama Bin Laden have asked for anything more perfect than what President George W. Bush delivered to him? He must have been turning cartwheels when Bubba Bush went out and picked his holy war.
I am my father's daughter, and I like nothing better than a smart political debate. And like my father, I'm good at them. Give me a dinner party, a few cocktails, and I'll go to town. Sometimes I get carried away or bored, and I stir a pot of trouble that rouses my dining companions to verbal blows, or at least from being dull as dirt.
Or I can take a Republican, who once wasn't as unsympathetic to the humanity around him, back to the good old days of the social and cultural revolution of his early 1970's youth and the disastrous war in Vietnam, before money and power were his only goals in life. (Not that there's anything wrong with money and power if one is tolerant and has compassion, a sense of fair play, a zeal for philanthropy, and an absence of greed.) I can remind him of what a heady time it was for all of us, that we cared about the direction our country was taking -- what the U.S. did throughout the world --a nd we let the world know. We were part of a generation that shook our country's rafters because they needed to be shaken.
Before the evening is over, my prey will be screaming "Viva Revolution!" at the top of his lungs.
My father came by his leadership qualities and political savvy naturally, although I don't know from which family gene they passed down. My grandmother, Abbie Arnold, was a storyteller. We grew up listening to her childhood tales about life on the farm, where cotton was picked and grand gardens grown while her brothers, sisters, and she were being nurtured. Grandmom told exquisitely creepy snake stories that made our skin crawl.
My grandmother loved learning, and she was one of few people I've ever known who loved school. She didn't finish her college degree until the 1950's, but she began her teaching career as a teenager and was beloved by her students for the half-century she taught or was a school principal. Unlike me, she never felt the slightest pang of doubt about what she was supposed to be doing on the planet. When I felt lost or upset, she comforted and supported me but never wallowed in my distress. Instead, she lifted me up and out of it.
Her first child, my father, loved life like his mother, and he carried her thirst for knowledge and her need to contribute to the world. But he had something she didn't--a talent for getting to the heart of issues and a desire to make his mark on them.
As she told us hundreds of times, our father made all A's in school. He was a champion debater in high school and college and was elected the youngest state legislator in Arkansas history while still a law student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He came of age in the months between the surrenders of Germany and Japan at the end of WWII when our country was bubbling with hope for the future in its new peace. He joined the Army before finishing high school, which would fund his college education, and he was stationed in Korea before the war. It was there he wrote a moral treatise at age19.
At the same age, I was drifting through clouds of marijuana and a haze of other drugs to expand my mind, have some fun, and escape depression that wouldn't lift after my father died. There was also my disillusionment and cynicism over the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the hypocrisy of American social fabric and government. I was wary about life after my father's death. I was searching for a way to express myself and what I believed, just as he had, but his quest was built on an unswerving foundation while mine was trembling. Fayetteville was "The Land of the Lotus Eaters" for me.
When Daddy was a young lawyer in Batesville, he ran for Prosecuting Attorney against a lawyer who had been practicing for some time and came from a wealthy, well-known local family. Daddy beat him. Bill Arnold connected with people, because he knew who he was and what he believed in. He spent his life enriching his mind with thoughts and ideas that he studied in the classics of philosophy, history, and literature, and he found in his faith. He was true to himself and his beliefs. His integrity was not for sale to anyone. How many people like that do you know now?
My father carried a strong feeling for the common man because he had been one himself -- in an uncommon way. He was a natural for Democratic philosophy. He understood "the people" and their problems. He gave every man his dignity, and his respect for them shone through, as did his sense of the issues that affected them. He delivered his speeches dramatically. A few years after he died, our circuit judge told me that watching Daddy try a case was to see a piece of good theater. There is no doubt in my mind that my father and I would've butted heads sometimes, but I have ever regretted that I didn't know him as an adult. I'd like to have seen him in court and debated our differences. I'd like to have felt his strong hand on my back.
At the time my father died, he was planning to run for either governor or senator. That was not to be, but if it had, Daddy might've been the first president who came from Arkansas. And he wouldn't have gotten caught with his pants unzipped.
Being a good yellow-dog Democrat myself, I once told a Republican friend of ours -- a gentleman through and through -- that not many Republicans had sat on my front porch. I was honored that he had.
You can't chalk all Republicans off except when you step into a voting booth.