George Pyle: A Father’s Day story about doing the right thing

For Father’s Day, another story about mine.

As part of a Zonker Harris-like impulse to never graduate from college, my father, round about 1948, enrolled in law school.

“That was a mistake,” he later wrote in his memoirs. “For many years I had planned to become a lawyer and that too was a mistake.”

It was a mistake, he said, because he was quickly disillusioned of his idea that the law was a path to right the wrongs of the world. It was, he quickly realized, “a tool to maintain the comfortable status quo.”

The story our father told us many years on was that one of the first cases put before the first-year students was a court ruling holding that the pilot of an aircraft having trouble making it over a mountain range in bad weather had broken his contract to his clients by dumping their cargo over the side in a desperate, but successful, effort to remain aloft.

By law, this ruling held, the pilot should have ejected his passengers instead. They didn’t have a contract to be delivered safely.

Well, as Oliver Twist’s antagonist Mr. Bumble was heard to exclaim, “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass.”

The old man has been gone for quite a while now. But I can see the gritted teeth and steam rising from his head were he to hear that duly deputized agents of the law were rounding up inoffensive pizza delivery men, college chemistry teachers, students, parents and dishwashers, locking them up and/or deporting them to countries they may not even remember, all claiming that the law demanded it.

Not to mention the people at the highest levels of government explaining — falsely — that the law of man and of God requires them to seize the children of people seeking asylum at the border of a nation that is, at its very core, a place to run to.

If that’s what the law says (and it doesn’t) then “ass” is far too mild a word for it. That’s why Robert De Niro and Samantha Bee are digging deeper into the dictionary of offense — even though doing so doesn’t really help anything.

Ignoring the once-sensible dictum that it is always wrong to compare your political opponents to Nazis, it is impossible not to worry that the it-can’t-happen-here confidence of the American past was based, in large part, on the idea that you can’t run a concentration camp without guards. And that you could never find enough good, normal Americans to staff even one such installation.

Now, one must wonder.

If simple human decency — in an economy near full employment — meant anything, nobody would do these jobs, harm these people, follow these orders.

They would, like the Mercury 7 astronauts, stand with the right, and with comrade John Glenn, and refuse to allow the vice president to bully a shy and stammering Anne Glenn into a public appearance she really, really didn’t want to make.

Of course, the astronauts’ threat carried weight because NASA couldn’t just put up a notice and replace them. The politicians had to cave.

Most people, faced with such a moral dilemma at work, have to wonder that if they deprive the nasty boss of their services, who will replace them? Someone with even fewer scruples, no morals, no empathy at all? Someone who won’t arrest the undocumented migrants, but shoot them?

So another story about my dad.

After law school proved to be a bad idea, he lit off for Washington, D.C., in search of a career. The only job he was offered was to teach the politics of the Far East at the War College.

My father had taught before. His technique, which his progeny have inherited, being to “read fast” and stay ahead of the students. Still, his own knowledge of the subject was one college class in Japanese history (he probably got a gentleman’s C) and so he felt unequal to the task and went home.

When he told that story to the children who would never have existed if his dreams of becoming a big shot in the nation’s capital had been realized, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease him about it.

Geez, Dad. Who did they give the job to after you turned it down? Someone who had seen “The Teahouse of the August Moon”? (Bad example. Didn’t come out until 1956.)

Good children that we were, we told him that he should have taken the job, read fast, challenged his students, infiltrated the Pentagon, and maybe avoided the catastrophe of cultural ignorance that was the Vietnam War.

Yep, Pa. It was all your fault.

All a big joke, of course. Still, for just a moment, there was a look on his face, a fleeting feeling that, maybe, he could have done something. And didn’t.

When this horror of an administration is over, a lot of people should have that look on their faces. Only it won’t be a joke.

George Pyle, the editorial page editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, is still trying to read fast. He’s got a lot to catch up on. Email: gpyle@sltrib.com. Twitter: @debatestate.