Author Archive Send to a Friend <% dim printurl Version

Frorm the January 28, 2002, issue of National Review My Family Affair The deadly aspects of huddle-and-cuddle.

ou know what I like about this magazine? I never hear a word about "the National Review family." We must be the only outfit left that doesn't push the huddle-and-cuddle organizing principle now rampant in American business, political, and cultural life.

The word "family" has become ubiquitous, right up there with those automatic ejaculations of "Absolutely!" that have replaced the simple "yes." At the rate we're going, it threatens to join "aloha" and "ciao" as an everything word that means whatever we need it to mean. Is the phone ringing? Pick it up and say "Family." Spot an acquaintance on the bus? "Family. How's things?" Get off before he does? "See you around. Family."

The possibilities are endless. It could become our all-purpose Big Ten cheer — "Family! Family! Sis boom bah!" — replace "roger" and "ten-four" in two-way radiospeak, and give Sen. Robert Byrd a golden opportunity to repeat the ancient history he loves so much. Cato the Elder had such a wild hair on about Hannibal that he ended every speech, regardless of subject matter, with the words, "Carthage must be destroyed." Byrd, who has never minded non sequiturs, could wind up his orotund disquisitions on West Virginia cement with "The family must be preserved."

References to family are getting more and more compulsive, lacking any direct connection to the subject at hand and frequently clashing with it. On my last trip to the supermarket, I noticed at the very top of my cash-register receipt the words: "Spend More Time With Your Family! Hot Rotisserie Chicken!" That sounds forced, until we realize that the store must have been subconsciously inspired by the excuse that philandering politicians have cooked up to explain sudden early retirements necessitated by their taste for spring chicken.

Even more far-out is the boat-on-a-rope commercial for Eukanuba Dog Food, which is said to contain a teeth strengthener. It tells the tale of a Labra dor named Mas who saved "a family in trouble" by pulling a boat containing the whole lot of them to safety through a raging river with the mooring rope clenched in her iron teeth. My, how far we've progressed. Lassie played favorites, reserving her greatest devotion for young Joe; at the end of her trek she dragged herself to his school, not to the family's cottage, but then Lassie was not an American dog.

If all politics is local, all news is family. This is achieved by the widespread practice of tossing in the phrase "and their families," which, as Michael Kinsley has noted, has an immediate cheapening effect.

Read any story about any workplace shooting spree and you will be deep in huddle-and-cuddle by the third paragraph. A recent affray took place at an Indiana factory that makes Nu-Wood, a synthetic used for decorative trimming — i.e., by charming coincidence, a fake substance. One company rep was quoted as saying, "I'm concerned for the people, because they treat me like family." Said another, "It's not like an assembly-line situation. Everyone knows each other, and everyone intermixes with each other." (Is it possible, can it be, that this is why matters erupted into gunfire? Don't ask.)

Even the Health Section-or rather, especially the Health Section-is a clearing house for huddle-and-cuddle, often expressing more concern for "cancer families" than for the cancer patients themselves: How to Tell Your Family you've got whatever it is you've got; How Families Cope with the news; and What If Your Family Is in Denial? A typical recent article told of a man who had a stroke that left him paralyzed and afflicted with double vision and slurred speech for almost a year. "And the worst part, he said, was that he could not interact as he used to with his children and his wife." He couldn't walk, couldn't talk, couldn't see, but the worst part was inability to "interact"? Give me a break. (Help Your Family Cope with Your Osteoporosis.)

The most deadly aspect of huddle-and-cuddle is now staring us in the face. Our immigration policy favors family reunification over all other considerations, including national security. Once an immigrant gets in, we let him send for his family members, a policy that favors the very ethnic groups we should be leery of, but neurotic sentiment mitigates against leeriness. Show us a slew of Third World relatives — Eldest Brother, Venerable Aunt, Honorable Uncle, and two dozen fifth cousins all named Mohammed — and we will show you a visa, because an "extended family" is even more sacrosanct than the immediate kind.

Does it come as any surprise that gays want to marry and adopt? For centuries they celebrated their freedom from the spills and bills of domesticity, but in our relentless obsession with family we have inadvertently activated what was once assumed not to exist: a gay gene for respectability.

Huddle-and-cuddle is an inevitable response to force-fed diversity and political correctness. The instinct to seek out one's own kind is hard-wired into human nature, but we don't dare acknowledge it, so we manufacture artificial ties that bind as we go along. Referring to groups of coworkers, customers, subscribers, and people with the same hobby as the something-or-other "family" imparts a vague sameness in which noble-sounding metaphors such as "the Family of Man" can be personalized and reduced to a manageable size.

I don't usually find a light at the end of the tunnel, but this time I've found two. First, the return of liquor ads to TV means that the word "family" will be verboten for all of 30 seconds.

The other light was shed (no pun intended) by Garfield the Cat. Two Sundays before Christmas, Jon was on the phone with his dreary relatives down on the farm. One by one they came on the line, spouting hearty clichés, exchanging trite sentiments, until we got to his brother, Doc Boy, he of the room-temperature IQ, who was inaudible because he was talking into the wrong end of the phone.

At this, Garfield looked up with his fiendish grin and said: "Happy holidays, all you family members out there."

— Ms. King’s column, Misanthrope’s Corner, appears regularly in NR.