[Strangler Lewis]

A couple of "funny" stories on this subject.

My father and his siblings fled Germany in the 1930s as kids and never saw their father again. Years later my father and my aunt, who was four years younger, had a disagreement about my grandfather's behavior. My father's story had always been that he was beaten regularly and that when my grandfather came home, he would ask my grandmother (re the three boys) "Which one, how many and which end of the belt?" My aunt insists that this was ridiculous and that nothing like this ever happened. My aunt insisted, however, that my grandfather was an alcoholic, which, for some reason, my father insisted was out of the question. Personally, I think they were both right.

My father also caught it quite a bit in school. In the German schools, the teachers would call you up to the front and brace your hand with their left hand so that you couldn't recoil when they slapped you with the right. When my father came to America and was reunited with my grandmother, he lived in Harlem and went to high school with a lot of black kids. Years later, my father would point to that as a comparatively civilized time because if one of the black kids got out of line, he would compliantly hold out his hand to be whacked by the teacher's ruler without, as he endlessly retold the story, "throwing her down the stairs."

My father was strange.

Without getting into personal specifics, I would observe that parental discipline has the same problems on the microcosmic level that the criminal justice system has on the macrocosmic level: it doesn't occur in a perfect vacuum of justice. The reactions towards the real or imagined transgressions varies with other factors such as the stress or the happiness level of the person dispensing the justice.