Wilfred's
diary about his surprising trip to Texas inspired me to write about my own recent trip back to the 'hood in Louisiana. Unlike Wilfred, I went "home" expecting to find some cracks in the armament of right-wing, Bush-supporting hard-headedness, and, man, was I sorely disappointed. In fact, I came back thinking we're more divided than ever, with loyal Bush supporters digging their heels in deeper and deeper. The whole disgusting experience gave me the final push I needed to decide to take a job offer I received in Europe and get the hell out, before the Titanic hits the iceberg.
Details below the fold.
The occasion was my dad's 80th birthday. The extended clan made the trip, and so I got to sample the views of a lot of people, most of whom I consider to be decent, well-meaning people, if poisoned by their environment when it comes to larger political questions.
My first shock came when I jokingly remarked to my brother-in-law -- the kind of guy who would literally give you his last cent to help you out of dire straits -- what the chances were that I wasn't the only Kerry voter in the crowd. Instead of making a joke to follow mine -- such as, "the same chance of finding a snowball in hell," or some such -- he literally spit out this sentence: "John Kerry is a traitor who should have been shot. You won't find anyone within 500 miles of here who voted for him."
This was not the kind of light-hearted disagreement I was hoping for, so I quickly dropped the matter. Then, later, his wife, my sister -- a saint if there ever was one -- threatened to throw me out of her house when, in the middle of countering a statement she made about how reliable Fox News is, I recounted that Fox deliberately lied about FDR's views about "private accounts" in order to make it sound like FDR had put forward the same ideas about privatization that W was trying to sell. Somehow, instead of hearing it as a comment about Fox, she immediately wheeled and said "you are not going to criticize the commander-in-chief in this house." By this time, at the end of a long day silently listening to slanders and lies about the Democratic party, I lost my gentility and asked if she had followed that rule during Clinton's eight years in office. All hell broke loose. Suffice it to say that this episode just made me start counting the minutes until I could get on the plane out of there.
Everyone in my family still sported their Bush-Cheney bumper stickers. My nephew, now working for Halliburton in Afghanistan, had a wondrous sticker with a peace sign fashioned out of a B-52 bomber, with the caption "Peace...the old fashioned way." I made no comment on how witty I found it.
Without going into further details, I just wanted to say that I'm glad people are finding some of their red-state friends and relatives are starting to doubt the faith. But I can't say that I found any evidence of it. All I could think as I was leaving was "god help us all."