KINDNESS IS NOT A VIRTUE

Get over it

We pick up the story of my family, the Couhig family, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the year of Our Beatles 1965.

We were newly removed from our ancestral grounds in South Louisiana, and were suddenly found gathered in a luxely wooded enclave near the national headquarters of Orkin Exterminating, to which my father, Bob, had recently been transferred. The family was whole again after a long pause: Bob moved six months earlier to allow my mother and we four children to complete our school year: Me, age 12 and clueless; Kevin, 14 and too sensitive by half; Owen (my sister) 15, and recovering from a terrible collision with plate glass; and Rob, just 16, but already settled into the righteous anger of a proper middle-aged white man.

Matters were about to take a terrible turn.

To be fair, it wasn’t simply the move that caused all manner of terrible events to begin their cascade. Some would say they were accidents waiting to happen, but they weren't. These were practical certainties given the decisions which underlay them. Our reassembling simply precipitated these events, coalescing the vapors until the catastrophes could no longer be held aloft by ignorance and vacant will.

My mother and father.

They had long before achieved a marital stasis that had provided, even in a house in which the word love was used only as a philosophical abstraction, a great comfort to the rest of us. But familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt. Or that is what I thought when I heard the muffled anger that emerged nightly from their bedroom. These arguments, which continued for weeks, were often followed by the slamming of the door as my father left the house, to simply drive, I assumed, and to tap his fingers angrily on the steering wheel.

I would sometimes walk into the middle of one of these arguments, sometimes curious, often nauseated. They would immediately begin their ritual: they would goofily pretend that nothing was wrong and that the conversation, which was of no particular importance anyway, was nevertheless at its end, and that we three should all go about our jolly business.

I was never told anything of the matter until the one final night when I found my family gathered in the living room having what was apparently an awful but ordered discussion on a topic I could not guess. My mother and father immediately attempted a repeat of their repeated performance – the one intended to insulate me. But this particular night my brother Rob had grown sick of this bullshit, and he said so. “I’m sick of this bullshit.”

“He’s old enough,” Rob said. “He needs to be part of this.”

And so, whether I liked it or not, I was suddenly part of it.

There was a great deal of crying going on, of course. Even some wailing – I know, because I was the one who was providing it. I had collapsed at my mother's feet, keening in horror at the choice before me. I cried as only the genuinely cowardly can cry.

My brother Kevin wept, too, a hacking cough that – as was his way – promised vomit at any moment. Owen sat crying on the sofa, her veiled face turned away from us toward the window and the dark beyond. My mother concentrated on the floor and combed my hair with her fingers.

My father spoke again, his voice emotionless:

"I'm sorry," he said, "but this is as good a time as any. We should, for everyone's sake, make our decisions now. If we wait, we'll just have to go through this again."

Everyone was quiet. Pop turned to Rob – the oldest – who wasn't crying, of course. He was watching the scene in the room with a kind of despair – not the despair of one watching his family collapse, but rather the despair of one who had hoped to see his family stand upright, and who has now given up his last bit of hope for them.

"I don't want to live with either of you," Rob said.

My father was clearly taken aback. He didn't lose his composure; my father would never lose his composure. But I could see there was something new in the way he looked at Rob. He had always, like the rest of us, regarded Rob with puzzlement. Who knew what to make of Rob? But now I could hear my father's voice take on a different pitch, which included – respect! How could he respect this son of a bitch? What could you say about these two?

"Rob," my father said. "You've got to choose."

"I have," Rob said. "Move on to the next person."

My father frowned, but decided there was no way to force a decision from Rob. No one ever had. He'd have to go through this again with the boy. Or maybe my mother would coax an answer out of him.

My father turned to Owen. "Owen?" he asked quietly.

Owen didn't turn away from the window. "That sounds good to me," she said. Her voice was strong. My dad shook his head.

Kevin said, "Me, too."

And I said, "I'm going with them."

My mother and father looked at each other, my father as angry as I had ever seen him. But there was nothing he could do. My brother, just 16 years old, had beaten him. He had taken my father's composure and had shoved it back in his face. The little son of a bitch had just told my father that he �Rob! �was making the decisions in this family.

I am a man of small but striving faith, a project made more difficult by my insistence that God is found most surely in observable reality and therefore religion should be all about pragmatism. I mean, God works in mysterious ways; everyone knows that. But if you sit in the audience you can see God's artwork, that he sometimes works through a snotty little son of a bitch who has been a snotty little son of a bitch since he was born and who is, for all intents and purposes, just being a snotty little son of a bitch when he is acting as His instrument. That's why I laughed when I read once online that my brother “is a real piece of work.” I know what kind.

For years after, Owen and Kevin often wondered why I put up with Rob – why I took his insults and moved on. It's not, as they say, like he'd ever done anything for me other than treat me like shit; and I agreed. Except the once. One time, a long time ago, when my brother – a thoroughgoing son of a bitch – did us all a favor. I, the cowardly one, the one who wouldn't know even mild disappointment for many years thereafter, was granted a reprieve from a terrible choice – and at twelve I didn't need that choice any more than any other 12 year old needs it.

The greatest beneficiary was, of course, my father, who would not be allowed to conduct his resolutely surficial life. His son, the smirking 16 year old, had smeared him with adulthood, and my father would never be his callow self again.

Years later, long after my mother died, my father revealed to me why he had stayed after that night in 1965. Why, after asking us to divide ourselves, he had been lying in the bed with my mother when two decades later she gave up the ghost. He shrugged. “I did what I said I would do.”

That was remarkable in itself, but he also told me two more things, both honest, both telling. “I didn't think it was any big deal,” he said of his affair. “I was 500 miles away.”

And then he added something else, an unpleasant surprise. He said that not a week passed in the remaining 20 years of their marriage when my mother didn't remind him of the hurt.

During one of my adolescent arguments with my mother I fought furiously for my belief that kindness and thoughtfulness are exculpatory virtues of the lazy and ambitionless – me, in other words. My mother disagreed, saying "kindness and thoughtfulness are lovely attributes. But they are not virtues."

Now I understand what she meant. You can rely on the kind and the thoughtful to provide comfort when times are difficult, and to lend a restful shoulder when such is needed. But when you need – when you really need – an ASSHOLE in capital letters, a flaming, withering son of a bitch – thoughtful and kindly people will always let you down. No, for that you need someone steeped in anger, and in righteousness (in its best sense). What you need, in other words, is a real son of a bitch.

Two weeks ago I found in Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk an interesting passage. Michael Marks had served temporarily as Tesla's CEO before an exasperated departure. Isaacson wrote that Marks “wrestles with the core question about Musk,” to wit, “whether his bad behavior can be separated from the all-in drive that made him successful.”

“I've come to put him in the same category as Steve Jobs,” Marks said, “which is that some people are just assholes, but they accomplish so much that I just have to sit back and say, 'That seems to be a package. Maybe if the price the world pays for this kind of accomplishment is a real asshole doing it, well, it's probably a price worth paying. But I wouldn't want to be that way.'”

Jesus of Nazareth kicked over the tables of the money-changers in the temple. This story is often repeated, and studied, but I find a vital point is always overlooked. These money-changers were almost certainly not greedy men, scrooges hoarding their gold. In all likelihood they were just a band of poor bastards trying to eke out a living. We can assume this because “eking out a living” was the primary, if not the universal job description of those at work in Jerusalem circa 33 A.D.

Those in churches have to reconcile angry Jesus – Jesus being an asshole – with Jesus, the loving Son of God. They primarily do so by pointing out numerous notions that are largely beside the point: some by falsely claiming the money-changers were greedy, and some by simply pointing out that Jesus was made angry by seeing his family home disturbed by rank commercialism. More usefully, they use this story to point out that righteous anger is not a sin.

Of course, these folks believe Jesus was The Word, the source book of all moral instructions. If he kicked over tables that was ipso facto proof that kicking over tables is A Good Thing.

For non-believers, the story is a bit more difficult. While many foolish people declare the Bible a bunch of fairy tales, serious people still understand it is a book of serious thought. Thomas Jefferson physically excised from his Bible all mentions of the supernatural, but he also said Jesus of Nazareth had constructed “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

The difficulty of understanding the benefits of assholishness has become more acute in recent years as many grown-ups and many college professors have begun to declare emphatically that we should be free of being offended, even in public spaces like Facebook and X.

The proper response, I have learned in my 70 years, is this: Sorry, pal, but we have a responsibility to defend the true, the good and the beautiful. The family. The temple. The truth.

Now, as for my brother Rob. Fifty-eight years have passed. We have largely effected a splendid conciliation.

But the simple fact is that Rob is, and has always been, my hero. I just can't stand to be in the same room with him for more than five minutes. Because, you know, you never know what that asshole is going to say.