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I'll call him Greg, though that's not his real name. He's an acquaintance, a frequenter of the same little neighborhood bar my boyfriend and I drop in to watch a baseball or basketball game. I know Greg's politics are fiercely to the right and that he defends booosh as one of the greatest presidents of all time. So I sip my margaritas and I watch the game and I listen to what Greg has to say in the conversation with my boyfriend, but I do not engage him. I know my personal limits when it comes to dealing with those whose perceptions strike me as utterly stupid and utterly wrong.
Greg is of the general boomer age, old enough to have young grandchildren but not old enough for social security. He is a Vietnam-era veteran, but I do not know what branch of the military or where he was stationed or whether he ever saw combat. I'm sure he has graduated from high school, perhaps has some college but not much; I do not know where he works or what he does for a living, only that he was recently promoted by his employer (the occasion of some celebrating at the bar).
Last night I listened, almost incredulous, as Greg denounced anyone and everyone who has ever criticized booosh or his regime. He labeled all criticisms as lies, including the video footage of booosh reading "The Pet Goat" at Booker Elementary on the morning of 9/11/01! "That never happened!" he insisted. "It was all made up by that traitor Michael Moore! It never happened!" When asked what DID happen, Greg had no response except to reiterate his insistence that booosh did not sit glassy-eyed in a first grade classroom while terrorists flew planes into large prominent buildings.
When confronted with the reports of atrocities in Iraq, Greg shrugged them off as "normal" for war, and then explained that war is the normal state for humanity. There's been war ever since two guys met up, Greg informed all of us. Killing is just part of human nature, though he couldn't explain how the species has avoided killing itself off. It doesn't matter if the victims are military or civilian -- it's just war. And besides, when it comes to civilians in Iraq, even kids can be terrorists. Now that some of them have been killed and the incident might encourage other children to become terrorists in revenge, it'd be better if we just killed everyone over there and started from scratch. Let the military just go in and clean it up. (Chivington and his "Nits become lice" line came immediately to mind.)
Needless to say, Greg allows no criticism of the US military, which in his mind can do no wrong, either collectively or individually. Supporting the troops means denying any report that they have screwed up, and it also means supporting without criticism those who have sent them there. The military is honorable and our boys (Greg conveniently forgets that there are women in the military; he is appalled that a Phoenix freeway was renamed to honor Lori Piestewa, the Native American woman killed in Iraq) never commit atrocities and if they do it's okay because that's the nature of war. . . . . . . . .
But Greg would send his kids to Canada before he'd let them be drafted.
And he'd gladly round up every brown-skinned person and ship them all -- documented or not, citizen or "illegal" -- back to Mexico. Why? "Because this is our country, not theirs! I was born here, this is my country, and I don't want to see it taken away from me by a bunch of people who don't even speak English!" Never mind that when asked, he can't tell you if any of his ancestors entered this country legally or not; possession is much more than nine-tenths of the law. What we take from someone else is ours and they should just get over it; what someone else takes from us is still ours and we have the right to kill them over it.
My boyfriend tried several times to get me to enter the conversation, but I refused. I know the limits of my patience. . . and the force of my temper. I do not need to explode in public and will avoid incendiary circumstances whenever I can. So I began to make conversation with another patron of the bar, a newcomer I'll call Ted. Ted and Greg are of an age, but Ted claimed to be on the other side of the political spectrum. "Claimed" is the operative word.
Oh, Ted dislikes booosh and thinks the war in Iraq is wrong, but only because we should be spending our military efforts in Afghanistan, hunting down bin Laden. (He was wearing a tee-shirt to that effect and said he had more in his truck that he would be glad to give to anyone who wanted one.) We should be killing civilians THERE, because they harbored bin Laden. And rather than spend taxpayer dollars on an increasingly expensive prison system here in the US, we ought to arm all the prisoners in our jails, train them to kill, and then ship them over to Afghanistan to wipe out the terrorists. And if they happen to kill a bunch of civilians, well, that's too bad, but at least they won't be killing civilians on the streets of LA or NYC. And if they happen to get into a gang war over there and kill a bunch of each other, well, that's even better!
It was not a pleasant evening, but it was not a surprising one, either. People like this are out there.
And they are not open to conversion. They not only do not see the truth in front of their eyes -- they REFUSE TO LOOK AT IT. On returning home, my boyfriend pointed out that I refuse to listen to boooosh when he is on tv. I change the channel, hit the mute button, or literally stick my fingers in my ears so I don't have to hear that whiny, phony drawl. "It's different," I explained, "because I already know what the little weasel has to say. It's not his ideas or his words I'm blocking out, it's just that ghastly voice. I know what he has to say and I know I don't agree with it. Greg refuses even to acknowledge that there might be another perspective."
When boyfriend asked why I thought that was, I fell back on the only explanation I've been able to come up with -- he, like so many others, are afraid. They're afraid of being wrong, of admitting that they might have made a mistake or been taken in by a swindler. If there is a culture of fear in the US, I would say that it is as much a fear of being wrong than of anything else. A fear of admitting that maybe there isn't a god and maybe there isn't anything after we die and maybe there isn't anything we can do to fight off evil and maybe there isn't in fact anything "evil" out there.
I'm the first to admit that sometimes I don't have a whole lot of self-confidence. Maybe it's because my myriad mistakes were always pointed out to me as a child and so I don't have much confidence but I also have less difficulty admitting my mistakes. (Sometimes even when I haven't made them!) But I've known too many people who, for whatever reason, will go to great lengths to avoid admitting, to hide or cover up, to blame someone else for, or to simply deny their mistakes, whether they are mistakes of action or merely errors of judgment.
In boosh they find reinforcement. They don't have to examine their positions on issues, they don't have to analyze causes. They don't have to think.
Eventually, we'll see Greg at the bar again, and the conversation will again deteriorate into argument. And I will sit at my end of the bar and sip my margaritas and explain it all to boyfriend on the way home. Because Greg, like the rest of the 29% or whatever it is that are the hard-core, will never change and we will never change them.
Tansy Gold
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