Fiction | August 05, 2019
Fields of Empire
Joan Silber
My father, who meant well about some things and not about others, died at seventy, not that old. He’d been living in our house in New Jersey, with caretakers around him, and in the front window was a bumper sticker that said, Get US Out! !United Nations. He’d once been a member of the very far-right John Birch Society and maybe always was (we didn’t keep in close touch). In our years together, when the Cold War was still on, my father took pride in never being duped by the insidious plots of those trying to turn the US into a socialist hell, a pride that rode on urgency. Every day he woke up to important work. The sticker did not look that old, actually.
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