Hills are alive with the great right-wing illusion
Whenever I hear someone invoking “family values” to build a political argument, alarm bells ring.
In the US in particular, assertions about the family have long been dog-whistle calls to bigots operating under the guise of so-called conservative Christianity. Organisations such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family delivered millions of votes to Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, senior and junior) and they laid the foundations for the perverse fanaticism of the US’s religious right in supporting President Donald Trump.
You can be sure that when these voices celebrate “the American family”, they are actually asserting patriarchal misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and often antiblack racism. Their voices are echoed by like-minded (or similarly mindless) “family” advocates around the world, from India’s Hindu nationalist governing party, the BJP, to Family First in Australasia.
The rise of neo-fascists in Europe has been similarly marked by a discourse of “traditional family values” in their frothing-at-the-mouth fury over immigrants whose skin colour and religion don’t seem, to them, adequately “European”. In Austria the dubiously named Freedom Party was welcomed into a coalition government after
securing 26% of the national vote, and is in a position to influence state policy in line with electioneering slogans such as “More courage for Viennese blood” and “Home instead of Islam”.
The Freedom Party was started after the Second World
War by actual Nazis who had been officers in the SS following the Anschluss.
The man who turned it into a populist movement in the 1980s, Jörg Haider, often employed macho posturing about “family values” — which made things rather awkward when it emerged, after Haider’s death, that he was gay. But the party recovered its homophobic and xenophobic credentials, and now finds itself promoting a delightfully Aryan model family.
I couldn’t help thinking of this disturbing development while admiring the Von Trapp family singing their way to Switzerland by way of lofty mountain peaks. I was, of course, watching The Sound of Music, which is on at the Teatro at Montecasino in Johannesburg until the end of April before it transfers to Artscape in Cape Town for the duration of May.
Don’t be fooled by the Eidelweiss-and-Alps cliché; The Sound of Music is, at its heart, about the relationship (and the conflict) between the family and the nation. Any synopsis of the story — based on real people and events — has to take this into account.
Georg von Trapp, decorated hero of Austria’s losing First World War campaign, is a wealthy widower who doesn’t know what to do with his seven children. He palms them off on a young nun-in-training, Maria, who isn’t much good as a postulant but is a gifted music teacher and the mother figure the children need.
You can see where this is going, can’t you? There will be a few complications, but eventually they’ll fall in love and get married and live happily ever after. Except that, in The Sound of Music, the complications include the rise to power of one Adolf Hitler. Von Trapp is vehemently opposed to Hitler. But when Germany invades Austria, he is told he must fight for the Reich.
He can “compromise” and “stoop a little”, as he is advised by his wealthy friends (in a number that is notably absent from the famous 1965 film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original stage musical), accepting that “there’s no way to stop it” and submitting to Nazi rule.
A naval commission, after all, is one way to protect and provide for his family. Yet Georg knows that to be a true “family man”, after the reconciliation with his children that Maria has brought about, he cannot be complicit in the evil of Nazism. And so they flee Austria.
The Von Trapps hardly break the shackles of the nuclear, heteronormative, patriarchal, white family “product” touted by right-wingers the world over. But they do demonstrate that being part of a family, whatever form it takes, should in fact remind us to resist the false rhetoric of “family values”.