"The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith." -- T. S. Eliot
"I am never better than when I am mad. Then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders. But reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell." -- Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
I went shopping today to cure a melancholy.
Yes, I have melancholies. I sometimes have vapors, too. What's it to you, Mack?
Anyway, I decided to walk through shops that I had little interest in to find things that I had no need for to purchase with money I cannot spare -- its being early in the month. Thus, I went to a store that calls itself a "Teenager Store." I was not looking to purchase a teenager, but they hadn't any in stock anyway. (A beloved former student's family owns the shop, and I hoped she might be there that I might find out how she has fared.)
I live in a crimson portion of a district. The actual population breaks about even, Democrat/Republican, with an advantage to the party of unreason, but the white folks. . . the white folks are strawberry red in face and kept that way by daily radio, weekly pulpit injections, and a strict code of politeness.
It is polite to say, "Obama's taking over," but it is impolite to say, "The Republicans are crazy." It is polite to say, "That Obama is a socialist," but it is not polite to say, "The TEA Party is in the pay of corporations." Among the white folks here, politeness means not "mentioning politics," and "politics" means Democratic Party thoughts. What comes from "the radio" is not political. I am well aware of this. I am very, very, very careful to remain polite. Anyone who is impolite will find him or herself facing purpled faces, raised voices, and, on several occasions, violence.(1)
Pelham Bay, New York City, 2000
Right: So, in the teenager store, a doughy lady spoke with the proprietress while her daughter shopped. She spoke of how frightened she was that The Government was going to tell her what medicine she could take. She had heard that The Government was now going to be making all the decisions, and she was scared. Plus, she said, there was a big plot to make the young people sign up, and, if they didn't, then the whole Government would go bankrupt. We can't afford it.
Meekly, pleasantly, and kindly, with all my training as a southern gentleman and teacher(2), I said, "I don't think that's right." I told her that I knew something about the subject, and the decisions were up to the insurance company. "But my mother had someone telling her what she could have done this Summer, and that never was before!" I pointed out that the "someone" was her insurance company and the health care law wasn't involved. "But it was due to Obamacare," she said. That's what she had been told. "Been told," hark ye.
It took some time, but I explained the ACA to her. I explained that single payer, which she thought was the law, was not the law. I explained that the price for health insurance could never be crippling to the individual. I told her to go to Healthcare.gov.
She left.
I went later to another shop, and she saw me and confronted me, full of fury and purple.
She had spent a "long time" on the phone since speaking to me. Her brother-in-law owns a business, and it used to be $400,000 a year, and now it's $780,000, and so he has to fire all his workers! She didn't want to hear another word from me, because her brother-in-law had told her . . .
the TRUTH.
I had facts, but she had Uncle Ned.
Are you going to call Uncle Ned a liar? Are you!?
Follow below, and we'll talk about Uncle Ned.
I think it was my first or second diary here where I talked about porridge thinking vs. noisome intellectuals. I don't remember the point of that, really, except that intellectuals, whether they're good or bad, are defined by using the intellect for all life experiences before any other facility. (Poets don't have to be good to be poets, and intellectuals don't have to be smart.) Intellectuals are intellectuals because they're always looking for the details, the contradictions, and the "actually" footnotes.(3) Intellectuals are nasty and unpleasant, and no right living person wants to take one on a camping trip.
I am writing this diary in exigency -- strained purple faces of rage will do that -- but I had been in the middle of writing about how Jonathan Swift described "truthiness" and "truthers" in 1697. In a day or so I still will write on it. The take-away from this diary that I have written but not published is that two seemingly contradictory impulses are not only commonplace among non-intellectual and anti-intellectual voters, but that these tendencies are bred in the McRibs and a natural part of humanity.
Those who gravitate toward the "truthy" (Stephen Colbert's term for a preference for the thing that "seems true" "in the gut" over that which may be true in reality) have good reason to mistrust the methods of higher reason. They either have had the methodologies of high reason used for false conclusions (have you had a banker explain to you why you owe the bank money for allowing it to make a profit off of you?), or they have had the elaborate terminology of reason employed to cloak a self-serving end. More commonly, they have lent credence to advanced reason, disobeyed its dictates, and not felt the predicted consequences ("I been smoking all my life, and I'm fine" or "I smoked dope, and nothing happened").
Those who gravitate toward the "truther" (secret, elaborate, and esoteric understandings of the world) side usually work from emotional dissatisfaction. They need or strongly desire a meaning to individual suffering. Because the moral umbrella of the family unit has been removed or because merit is unrewarded or because how we speak matters in the world, these people have been derided or suffered without a reason that is sufficient. Because the world "doesn't make sense" as it is, a private understanding that gives them personal importance at the same time that it gives power is preferable. Thus, Bilderburgers, gnomes of Zurich, Illuminati, ZOG, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Free Masons, or Woodrow Wilson is a more satisfactory explanation than reality.
It's not seeing things in black and white, really.
Here you are, telling someone that the ACA doesn't demand anyone pay more or less for health insurance, but then that person calls Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned knows. Uncle Ned is a
Real Person, and you are not. Uncle Ned has an anecdote.
The anecdote is delivered with passion. It can come with names. It will have shouting in it. It will have dire predictions, and it will be dipped to the elbows in human suffering, because Uncle Ned built that business from scratch, and now They want to take it away from him. Is this where this country is going?
You would like to tell her that Uncle Ned's current health insurance offered to meet minimal ACA standards for that rate precisely to get this reaction. However, to make this comprehensible, Uncle Ned, and his niece, would have to have attempted to use COBRA before and seen the tactics. ("Why sure! The government says we have to offer you your old policy, so how does three times your old rate sound? What? You're quitting it in a demonstration of freedom? We're shocked.") You would like to say that Uncle Ned has to have the insurance, and he should have brains enough to shop for a plan he can afford. You can't.
You have facts. She has Uncle Ned.
You would like to tell the niece that AHIP IS LYING. AHIP's members are potentially coordinating a plan of telling companies that the next year's premiums will be astronomically high. You can't do that. Uncle Ned knows reality. Sebelius is from The Government.
Here, I admit, is the one bit I stuck to my enraged fellow citizen:
"If the ACA is so much of a disaster, then shouldn't the Republicans want it to go into effect so that everyone will hate the Democratic Party?"
Neither she nor Uncle Ned could answer that.
---
1) In 2006-7, a local gas station was owned and operated by Indian immigrants. As is too often the case, the station employed family members who were not competent in English for some shifts. A soldier home for leave went to the station before Christmas, got gasoline, and went to get a cup of coffee. The elderly woman in the store did not know how to run the credit card machine, so when he opened his wallet and pulled out his card, she began to freak out. The young man told his father about it. The father went on a local website and re-told the story, claiming that she saw his military ID and began speaking Arabic and refusing service to him. He organized a boycott of those Muslims there. A local business owner spoke up to say that 1) they're Hindus, 2) they're not Arabs, 3) he did not see the incident and wasn't reporting the facts, 4) the son denied the account. She found a brick thrown through her plate glass window.
2) Once upon a time, I got a Valuable Award for it. Otherwise, I've just kept my job while others haven't, but I suspect this has to do with the whole "work like a galley slave, but for less pay" thing that I've got going. Still, I'd like to think I'm pretty gentle, since I've found from long experience that I can't be intimidating.
3) John Barrymore said that reading a footnote is like running down stairs to answer the door on your wedding night. The point I am making here, though, is that intellectuals annoy the stuffing out of each other and all the rest for starting sentences with "Actually" or "On the other hand." If you find that these are among your repertoire, then you can be an intellectual -- whether of the Cliff Claven or the Niels Bohr sort. I should point out that intellectuals are in all forms and places, including religion; just look for the sort down-marking each others' comments.