Sara Vowell And Brad Manning: A Comparative Analysis
1540 Words7 Pages
It is obvious that in one aspect in all of our lives, our parents don’t understand us. One particular example from my life is the issue of multiplayer games. Personally, I have always found them to be safe and fun. However, my dad has always seen them as a detriment to our society because no one ever picks up a football and wants to play catch with it. Sara Vowell and Brad Manning both had parents that did not understand them. Vowell on one hand had a dad who had different political and social points of view. Her dad and guns went together like bread and butter whereas she and guns were eternities apart. Manning had a father who had a desire to arm wrestle him and display his strength in front of him. These stories are very similar because…show more content… She and her dad are always bickering about the different political view they both have. Though everyone has a slight difference of opinion with everyone else, Vowell and her dad take it to a whole new level. “Dad and I started bickering in earnest when I was fourteen, after the 1984 Democratic National Convention. I was so excited when Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate that I taped the front page of the newspaper with her picture on it to the refrigerator door. But there was some sort of mysterious gravity surge in the kitchen. Somehow, that picture ended up in the trash all the way across the room” (Vowell 153). In this quote, Vowell and her dad were arguing about the political race towards presidency. When she found out that Ferraro, the first female vice president candidate, was running with Mondale, she was ecstatic. However, her father had a different opinion. The phrasing that Vowell uses in the third and fourth sentence gives the reader the connotation that her father threw the paper away. In addition, the image of Vowell taping, “the front page of the newspaper with (Ferraro’s) picture on it to the refrigerator door” (Vowell 153), helps the reader understand and appreciate the level of excitement that Vowell was facing and how that excitement was ripped apart and replaced by confusion and anger. One more thing that further intensifies their relationship is…show more content… He always challenged his son to arm wrestle him even though he knew for a fact that “Dad would always win” (Manning 144) . in order to add insult to injury, he would make it “easier” for his son to win by putting his arm a few inches away from the ground and then letting his son gain a few inches. Finally, he would win without a sense of mercy. At first, this made a young Brad Manning joyful and ecstatic that he had such a strong father. Then, as he got older, things began to change. He started to grow intellectually. He would talk about religious matters and correct his dad’s verbal mistakes at every turn. He realized that in more ways than one, he was growing to be smarter, wiser, and most, importantly, stronger than his dad. During his teenage years, Manning recollected of an arm wrestle with his dad. He remembered that “It was not a long match. I had expected him to be stronger, faster… Then something occurred to me, something unexpected. I discovered that I was feeling sorry for my father. I wanted to win but I did not want to see him lose” (Manning 146). Manning was close to his Holy Grail, the one challenge that he always seemed to lose— he was about to beat his father in an arm wrestle. However, the unexpected happened— his dad was losing to him. Manning surprisingly did not want to see his dad lose this arm