Competition and compassion, contrasting Brad Manning's "Arm Wrestling with My Father" and Sarah Vowell's "Shooting Dad"
             Learning to regard a parent as a human being, not just as a father or mother, is one of the most formative emotional developments in an adolescent's life. Both Brad Manning's "Arm Wrestling with My Father" and Sarah Vowell's "Shooting Dad" deals with the authors' relationships with difficult, patriarchal, male authority figures. Their conflicts with their fathers are waged through violence; physical in Manning's case, and emotional in Vowell's case. And paradoxically the eventual compassion the writers are able to show towards their parent is also extracted through violence.
             The authors of both essays have almost warlike and combative relationships with their fathers. This is expressed with military language, in the case of Manning, that of arm wrestling and other athletic activities. "To get down on the floor and grapple, arm against arm was like having a conversation" (Manning 127). For Manning, developing a full relationship with his father was difficult. Unlike his son, Manning's father was a man of few words, a man who preferred to 'do' rather than to speak. Arm wrestling, not through writing or speaking, was the only way father and son connected, physically or emotionally. Manning wanted to be able to talk to his father, otherwise he would not use the language of conversation to describe the physical combat of father and son, but because he could not, so arm wrestling instead would have to suffice. Manning's father showed no interest in his son's orchestral talents, he did not even write the cards or letters in the family. But in violent arm wrestling, at least there was some closeness between father and son. Vowell's father was similarly dictatorial, and their relationship was equally s...