BartBlog

So you’re going along having a nice conversation with someone who appears to be rational and suddenly out of the blue they drop some weird, off-the-wall jingoistic or religious tripe on you. I try to ask the person, as reasonably as possible, after dusting off my flabbergasted jaw, why they think this way; here are a few examples of the answers I’ve gotten:

There was the Nice Guy Christian who once told me seriously that Jesus approved of the death penalty. Really? Where did you get that notion? “Look at the way he died.” (Yes, quite an endorsement.) Oh, and he also reminded me that Jesus never intended the ‘turn the other cheek, forgive your enemies’ thing to apply to nations, just individuals. (How convenient for the pious Bush Empire.) The NGC couldn’t recall exactly what part of the Bible contained that revelation, but he swore it was in there. (Perhaps the Book of King Junior, Chapter 1, Verse 1, of the Robertson Revised Version?)

I have also been assured that this country was founded as a Christian nation, regardless of the rejection of traditional Christianity by Enlightenment scholars such as Jefferson, Franklin, Washington and Paine, et al, and the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797, as passed by Congress and signed by President John Adams, that specifically stated we are not a Christian nation in Article XI of that document: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…” None of that historical fact, though, sways these believers from asserting such drivel as “the separation of church and state means that the government should stay out of religion, but not that religion should stay out of government.” Moreover, “religious teaching should guide the government in everything it does.” (I am still searching for that part of the Constitution.) Oh, and children should be “required to pray in public schools” (whose prayer?) for their own good, contrary to Jesus’ instruction in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:5,6 KJV) that Christians should pray in private.

Then there’s the sweet little white-haired lady who said that John Kerry, had he been elected president, would have surrendered the United States to Al-Qaeda. Where did she get that bizarre idea? “It’s well known in Washington!” Why would Kerry want to turn the country over to Muslim terrorists? “He’s afraid to fight them, just like he was afraid to fight Cong in Vietnam.” (Of course, maybe she was talking about ‘King Kong’ since her trope was pure fantasy anyway.)

And the young mother at the laundromat who was outraged that her kids in public school were being taught by evil ‘pedagogues.’ “Those people are really sick and disgusting and they need to be in jail. Figures that the liberal bureaucrats would hire them as teachers.” I pointed out that ‘pedagogue’ is just another name for a schoolteacher. Turns out she didn’t like them either, “They sit on their butts and make a fortune for doing nothing.” Yet somehow her kids learned to read, write and do math anyway. “Oh, hell, they can get that from TV.” (Yes, from Paula Abdul on ‘American Idol,’ no doubt.)

There have also been the occasional daffy conversational forays into killing all the Muslims before they kill us — yep, a mass genocide of over one billion human beings because an organization with fewer than 50,000 members attacked us on 9/11; and the well-worn GOP theme that lower taxes and a larger military would work without running a deficit, if only the Democrats would stop giving away all our tax money to the poor; and the insistence that all liberals basically “hate America” and would like to see us be forcibly converted to Islam. (That would be the ‘godless’ liberals of Ann Coulter, I guess.) And, before I forget, tolerant, broadminded progressives, who want to protect our Constitutional rights, are “fascists” because they want to “use the laws to prevent the president from fighting our enemies.” (Wrap your mind around that one.)

And how about the latest Fox News blip? Barack Obama is like Hitler because he inspires people! (Can’t wait to hear that slur repeated by a drunken neocon on the barstool next to mine.)

“[Tom] Sullivan then introduced the ‘comparison’ by stating: ‘So, ladies and gentlemen, from the past, a little archive, a little walk down Der Fuehrer’s memory lane. Here he is, the one, the only, Adolf Hitler!’ Sullivan proceeded to play a clip of a Hitler speech, followed by Obama’s February 9 speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Richmond, Virginia. Sullivan mimicked the crowd during both speeches, yelling, ‘Yay! Yay!’”
– Media Matters, Feb. 13, 2008. (Caught out, Sullivan is now hastily denying there was any attempt at a comparison.)

Finally, the one that really floored me was the middle management white woman who bubbled over NAFTA, CAFTA and all of the other ‘free trade’ job-stealing acronyms, and was fiercely anti-union. Turns out her father was an auto worker, and the only way she was able to graduate from college and get into a white-collar management job was thanks to his strong union making sure he received a decent wage and benefits for his work. When confronted with this, she didn’t bat an eye, pulling the ladder up behind her as she said: “That was then, this is now. American workers are going to have to learn to get along without unions and be more competitive in the new free trade world economy.” That was in 2001.

I read last year that her company was closing its US headquarters, eliminating white-collar staff in this country as it shifted its operations to Asia to take advantage of a cheaper work force, including at the executive level. I can’t help but wonder what she thinks of the ‘new free trade world economy’ now?