Dumb it down, for fuck's sake.

[NNadir]

92. The most uneducated person to whom i was close was my father.

He quit school in the 8th grade to work as a shoe shine boy to support his family after my grandfather, a violent drunk, abandoned them.

I loved my father very much, and in many ways I tried to emulate him as a father but truth be told, he was very right wing. On politics we had many screaming arguments between us.

He was, nonetheless, intelligent, skillful in argument, but again, uneducated and the holder of a very limited vocabulary.

He died early in the 1990s. I think he would have resented being spoken to with deliberate "dumbing down." I noted such resentment many times. The truth is that he was politically inflexible. There was no way, none, that any level of language would have changed his mind.

I grew up in a conservative household, and as a teenager I would say I was politically conservative. Education changed my mind, and let me tell you that my father attributed my change to "communist professors."

Actually, my transformation started with my 12th grade English teacher, who walked with a limp and had a scar across his face. I suspect that that man, who hated war, including the "good war," which I suspect accounted for the limp and scar, was informed not by language but by experience, although his command of language was transcendent.

There are minds that are closed no matter what the level at which they are addressed. This included my own father. It is only a subset of people who can be reached at any level.