Over the last several days, my mother and I have been having a very interesting political debate over email. In the past, she usually avoided the topic, but now that I’m a political science instructor, she appears more than happy to discuss the issues in this presidential election year. Without going into TOO much detail, I’ll just say she is NOT a fan of Hillary Clinton. (But I’m still working on it!)
As my parents get older, I’m realizing that they won’t be around forever. After seeing Anderson Cooper interview his mom and ask her all the questions he has been dying to know about her life, I thought that now was a great time to ask my mom those same kinds of questions. I didn’t know where to begin, so I started on a subject near and dear to my heart: politics. Its not so much a desire to debate ideology, but to gather a trove of mom-facts. I started by asking her for whom she cast her first presidential vote. She said that she couldn’t remember, but she laughed that whoever she votes for ends up losing.
While we were talking, I calculated that her first presidential vote was likely in 1956 since she was born in 1937 (after hanging up the phone realized that in 1956, you couldn’t vote at 19). When I said that her first likely vote was to choose between Adlai Stevenson and General Eisenhower, she said she probably voted for Ike (thus disproving her hypothesis . . . my research methods teachers would be proud). I then mentioned that her next vote would have been choosing between Kennedy and Nixon. She immediately responded with, “Oh, I voted for Kennedy.”
But enough about my mom’s failure to prove her theory.
One of the items I mentioned in defense of Hilary was the successful CHIP program. The day before yesterday, she responded via text message with “What country do those 800 million kids on Hillary’s health care program live in? Who pays for it? Is it a UN program? I never heard of it!” As it turns out, this was just one of the many issues we would discuss that day. Closer to dinnertime, she texted: “We’re having quite a conversation over here. Would you like to join us?” It turns out she had spent the afternoon with her sister, my aunt, trying to figure out what issues would get me into a lather. “How can we say this to get under his skin,” they admitted was the conversation they were having in Florida while I writhed in my seat in Minnesota.
I asked, “Do you need a political intervention? Wanna Skype me in?”
My dad was also present at this virtual confab.
A couple of weeks prior to this conversation, I had another with my Dad who is comfortable discussing politics with me. He admitted in this conversation that he was voting for Trump and proceeded to parrot back the Hannity/O’Reilly/FOX talking points about Hillary, Benghazi, and the Democrats in general. While he refuses to admit that FOX News has hold of him, it is impossible to ignore the manifestations of partisan selective exposure and hostile media effect that he exudes.
We talked at length about *BARF* . . . Benghazi.
“Why did they change their uniforms four times?” This notion was simply impossible to dislodge from his mind. He really didn’t know all the details, but he implied that it was obvious Hillary Clinton let the folks at Benghazi die based on the “fact” that one of the units that was going to be sent to Benghazi (as it turns out, he was referring to the FAST unit from Rota, Spain; some 2000 miles from Tripoli that wouldn’t have even been deployed until after the four Americans had already been killed) was delayed because they had to change their uniforms four times.
Mind you, I hadn’t even bothered to look up this precious little detail until after the Skype confab with them. After reading the Politifact.com and FactCheck.org accounts of Benghazi (more than once), I was able to match up what my dad was saying with the findings from the various reports issued by congressional and independent investigations that served as the sources for the fact checks.
During the Skype meeting, however, I simply held to the fact that his assertions were wrong. I was confident in that assumption because my Dad is generally a skeptic of everything and everyone; partially due to being a Puerto Rican raised in New York City in the 1940’s and 50’s and his likely experiences of blatant and overt racism. He’s not a partisan; he’s basically a contrarian who, in this case, was willing to stand in opposition to Hillary and the Democrats irrespective of the verifiable realities that contradicted his conspiracy-prone thinking.
What’s most frustrating for me about the political conversation over Skype was that instead of engaging with me, he simply repeated – at louder and louder decibels – “WHY DID THEY CHANGE THEIR UNIFORMS FOUR TIMES?!?” This is his most common tactic. It doesn’t matter that I’m his son and he loves me (I love him too, by the way), what matters most to him in these kinds of exchanges is that his voice will be dominant. ANY challenge to his knowledge or opinion is met with derision and harsh dismissal. His bloviating is so pronounced and takes over so much of his personality when confronted with evidence that directly contradicts his belief or opinion that earlier this year, while having a discussion at my sister’s house, he stuck his finger in my face and shouted, “You’re exactly the type of person that ISIS wants!” when I dared to voice my disapproval of Trump’s Muslim ban.
After the Skype talk, I decided to follow up with my mom and answer some questions I was unable to during the virtual conversation. I began my note with, “There’s just no talking to Daddy, is there?” along with several other laments based on his behavior. She sent me a reply today that was so sweet in its simplicity:
“Thanks for taking the time to point out a number of facts. U will be an outstanding professor. But try to be less sensitive. I say this because I want u to reduce your stress level. Especially when it comes to Daddy. He is that way with everybody.”
Her loving admonishment helped me realize that investing so much effort in trying to “convert” him from his warped view of reality (thanks a lot, FOX) is likely always going to fall on deaf ears. “I’ve learned to dismiss his attitude and u should try to do the same. It is just not worth the aggravation.”
Without using Internet nomenclature, my mom basically said, “Dude, don’t feed the trolls.”
A lesson it would behoove me to embrace.