Mary-Louise Parker: Military Life Is Misunderstood by the Left and the Right | Big Think

Military Life Is Misunderstood by the Left and the Right

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Tony Award-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker isn't the first person you would associate with a military family upbringing, but that may be the point. The closer you get to a person — in this case, her father, who fought in three wars as an American soldier — the more your stereotypes of them melt away. While the American armed forces are composed of a smaller segment of the population than ever before, there is still great diversity in their ranks.

In the case of Parker's father, who told her that "no one hates war like a solider," their was an undying critical attitude toward politics and deployment that came directly from his experience in battle. He was, according to Parker, a magnanimous man who checked his ego and presuppositions before getting to know you. There was a downside, too — a direct byproduct of the wars he fought it.

The post-traumatic stress he suffered affected his daughter, and the rest of the family, in a way that carried through generations. Yet Parker knows it wasn't him "driving the car." What also carried through from his generation to his daughter's was a sense of what war is really like. We think of war as a television news program or a video game scenario, says Parker. But the reality is something far different, far more distressing. If that knowledge is lost — knowledge of what war is really like — then we risk sending our friends and loved ones into battle for unwarranted reasons.

Parker's book, in which she discusses the legacy of her father as well as other men in her life, is Dear Mr. You.

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MARY-LOUISE PARKER:

Mary-Louise Parker is an actress and writer who lives in Brooklyn with her two children. Her first book, Dear Mr. You, was published in November and became a New York Times bestseller. She has been a frequent contributor to Esquire magazine, and her writing has appeared in O Magazine, The Riveter, Good Housekeeping, Bullet, and others. She is a Tony, Emmy, Obie, and two-time Golden Globe winner. She originated roles in the plays Proof, How I Learned to Drive, Prelude to a Kiss, Four Dogs and a Bone, The Snow Geese, and others, including the play Heisenberg, which will be revived at the Manhattan Theater Club in the Fall. On television she has appeared in Mike Nichols’ Angels in America, Weeds, and The West Wing, along with numerous television movies, and was seen on the big screen in RED, RIPD, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Client, Solitary Man, Red Dragon, The Portrait of a Lady, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and many others. Her acting and writing careers as well as her philanthropic work are archived at the Howard Gottlieb Center at Boston University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Mary-Louise Parker: I think that people have an idea that there is one kind of mind, one kind of mentality that is attracted to the military and that’s not necessarily true. It can be true. I do understand it and maybe in this day and age it’s more true than certainly when my father went into the war but my father was in three wars and he was a massive lefty. You know he was the most politically open minded liberal person and he used to say no one hates war more than a soldier, you know. He helped my brother get conscientious objector status during Vietnam. And he would have helped him get into the war if my brother had felt that was what he was compelled to do politically and ideologically. So I did not grow up in a conservative household at all. I grew up in a household where there was a very strong code about honor and about morality which is a tricky word. But it wasn’t honor that I necessarily equate with the military itself. I equate it with my father and his spirit and who he was. And it would have been like that were he – had he worked in a deli, had he been a lawyer. That’s just who he was. And he was quite uncommon.

You know, he was open to everyone. And he was a feminist and he was, you know, all of my friends who were gay or if you were transgender. I had a friend who came to dinner one night who brought his girlfriend who was in the eighties there were these people they were called walk-ins and they said they were – their bodies had been invaded by aliens. And my dad just, you know, talked to her. He was really interested in her.

My father had retired from the military when I was four but that still, you know, the residue of that remained.....

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