When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away, to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.
– Supertramp, The Logical Song
I am drawn to stories and posts like this one on Pam’s House Blend.
It may surprise some of my readers that I was once quite the conservative. I do a lot of self-analyzing (not common among cons) and I am pretty sure that the reason I swung to the right side of the political spectrum in my young adulthood was a psychological desire to be accepted by what was then thought of as the dominant social group. This was in the age of Reagan and the ascendancy of Rush Limbaugh, who I wasted many hours I will never get back, listening to.
I know what was wrong with me but it was quite understandable when considered now. I had come from a background of being a from a working class family that, bless my parent’s hearts, always strove to launch themselves into the upper middle class with middling success.
It’s hard to claim working class roots when your dad (in what I will forever call “Ed’s folly”) installs an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard. What did my dad do? He sold carpeting for Sears. My mom was a public school teacher. This was the 1970s when people who had those kind of jobs could aspire to the Great Toys of the Upper Middle Class. And dad wanted to give his family the best of everything whether he could really afford to or not. Try doing that nowadays with similar jobs.
Sure we had that damn pool. It wasn’t heated (that would have cost nearly as much as the pool itself), so in this climate, and shaded by large maples, the swimming season ran from early June to late August. It had its moments which I will fondly remember. It died in the 1985 earthquake. Long story.
Yes we had the pool. But I would come home and find the phone disconnected for non-payment. Occasionally the house would grow cold in the winter when the ‘rents had to scramble to find cash for the oil delivery. And we actually had a memorable vacation to Wyoming in 1970 - paid for by a loan by Sun Finance.
One of the ‘luxuries’ my ‘rents went into serious hock for was to send me and my sister to a local Catholic grade school where we were, quite frankly, among the lower earning families.
At Notre Dame, the nuns clearly favored the kids of families who paid by Plan A. That was the plan where you simply paid for the tuition all at once at the start of the year. We were Plan D people - monthly payments which I dutifully carried to school when I was old enough to be trusted with them. Early on I was well aware of the differences in treatment. Some kids got all the cushy parts in the plays and positions of authority. Some kids, despite all their best efforts, didn’t have a prayer. And I mean that quite literally.
Even though dad did his best to provide us with the American Dream ™, it was quite clear in my 8-1/2 years of incarceration at Notre Dame Elementary that my ‘rents were rank poseurs next to the attorneys, doctors, business executives and such whose kids surrounded me. Add to the fact that I was bookish, fat and had a funny last name, you can imagine what I endured for years. Not nearly as bad as the kids referenced in the House Blend post, but for a sensitive boy, the imprint was deep and long lasting.
I think the reason my dad would so often get mad at my attitude was that as hard as he was trying to give us “the good life” I could see how far short we fell in relation to the kids we went to school with and I let him know it. I never forgot going over to Jimmy C’s house to pick him up for a play date and having the door be answered by their maid. Why can’t we have a maid, dad?
I can understand why he would be mad at me for that. But he didn’t have to build the pool or send us to a pricey Catholic school. I really wanted to stay in the public school I had started kindergarten in. To this day, though, I wondered if I would have been as sensitive to class if I had stayed there. I might have been happier overall. More on that later.
In any case, I do believe that I had a deep yearning to finally be accepted by the country club type Republicans I went to school with (remember the TV show “Square Pegs?” I could relate. It hurt). And that spilled over into my young adulthood when I went against most of what I truly felt inside of me to try, one last time, to ‘be felt as acceptable; presentable.’
To make a long story short, without the requisite breeding in both money, status and religiosity, it wasn’t going to work. There were a few moments of clarity that brought home the fact that I was trying very hard to be accepted in a social group of people I inherently despised. Call it leftover Stockholm Syndrome or whatever, but I felt I had to try to fit in.
One time was during the debates over Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. I went with the rest of the Young Republicans to a public forum where we listened to the ’sob stories’ and then one of the members of our group got up and lectured the poor women whose daughter was refused care at a local hospital about the necessity of genuflecting before the free market capitalist system of America because it had been given to us by God through his prophet Adam Smith.
The woman responded from her heart and gut with a ferocity that perplexed poor Joe (the oberfuhrer of our YR group) who sat down muttering to the rest of us about being ‘attacked’ for merely reciting Biblical economic truth.
A light went on. I instinctively felt sorrier for the woman and her daughter than I did for Joe.
Yeah, I know, muddle headed liberal commie bastard not recognizing the wisdom of his betters. If the goons from Lone Star Times, Free Republic or any other Modern Fascist sites read anything more on my blog or even this entry, they probably have their rope hanging fingers itching about now. Yeah, I should have been strangled in the crib.
I think, though, the reception we had for visiting YRs at the Bond Court Hotel in downtown Cleveland was the tipping point. Here I was in my ill fitting suit sitting on couches around all these trust fund babies actually smoking these big fat cigars (again a Limbaugh affectation brought to us courtesy of the YRs from Dayton) and it just hit me: what the hell am I doing here with these people?
And so the recovery started. As is my won’t I made a very wide and pronounced swing from one extreme to the other. But then again, I WAS Jimmy Carter in a student debate back in 1976 at Notre Dame. So I was returning to my original roots and basic human impulses, just more so.
In fact, I’ll never forget the aforementioned Jimmy C who led the Gerald Ford debate contingent, mention that Carter’s modest health care proposal of the time was “socialism” and seeing most of the other sons and daughters of medical professionals visibly recoil in horror at the mention of that dreaded S word.
But the one common thread that ran through all of my close encounters with the right wingers throughout my life has been one very undeniable (at least to me) salient fact - they were all bullies of some sort or gravitated to bulling types of people or behavior.
And of course, they grew up and continuing their bullying ways in business and politics or wherever they found themselves planted. They gravitate toward the aforementioned right wing sites or start their own (like Captain’s Quarters or Little Green Footballs or insert your favorite here:). You can see a rhetorical string running through all of the writing and commenting on these sites that go right back to the playground: America was good to me - if it wasn’t good to you or you didn’t make it, it was probably your own damn moral failing and you should probably have the shit kicked out of you for it.
After all, ask yourself - how many bullies do you know who espoused liberal politics or social theory? ALL of the bullies I have ever met or known were conservatives. It’s the natural outgrowth of a basic belief system that rests upon the premise that ‘might makes right’ and those that are the successful players of the game of social Darwinism both deserve everything they were able to get AND that it proves that God loves them more.
And having observed these people up close and personal for many years, if they were truly honest with themselves, they’d admit it. In most cases, the arrogance comes out over fine Scotch among the table talk of trusted people. The odd thing happens once and awhile when one of them forgets they’re in front of an open microphone and makes a racist joke (like Earl Butz) or a funny about nuking Russia (Ronald Reagan). After the requisite public apologies they go back to their clubs and make the same remarks all over again. I know, I’ve heard them - the racist, sexist, homophobic table talk. And I have to say that now I AM ashamed at myself for trying to suck up to these people. Perhaps my vociferousness today is some kind of psychological ‘make good’ for those days. I am truly sorry for having supported people like that in my past. I often wake up remembering these incidents and hating myself for them.
Yeah, I can hear the cons reading this thinking: ’self-hating liberal white guy’ and ‘you were truly unworthy of us.’
Yeah, I know.
When you spend your entire life feeling like you were dropped here from outer space as some kind of grand cosmic mistake, you second guess yourself a lot.
It also helps if you raise a son who is autistic and see the way even our so-called enlightened American society treats these kids. It humanizes you beyond what any book or speech could ever do.
So when I read stories like the ones in the Pam’s House Blend post about kids who were persecuted at school by the ‘herd’ because they were gay, appeared effeminate or different in some way, my blood begins to boil. Yeah, sue the bastards. But that plays right into the cons’ view of liberals as ‘momma’s boys’ who run to the court when they get hurt.
I have always said that the proper response to bullies is a well swung baseball bat to the chops, complete with the flying teeth and blood splatter. It’s one of the reasons, as a strong supporter of the Second Amendment (yes, THAT one) that I support groups such as Pink Pistols (because armed gays don’t get bashed - for real). If anyone needs to arm themselves in America, it’s liberals and those of us who are ‘different’ some way from the ‘norm.’
I have no doubt (because I’ve heard too much of the table talk in person) that many, if not most of these conservatives, if they really could run the country the way they wanted, would start building concentration camps for the people they hate. Oh, in public, they’d strongly deny it, but you’d be surprised (perhaps not) at how many of these people actually are, at core, real live fascists.
It’s one of the reasons I urge my fellow lefties to stop with the nice talk and realize that people like Sally Kern really, really, really, viscerally hate you and, if they had their way, would be herding you into extermination camps. Stop being nice and playing Marquis of Queensbury rules with the language. Call a fascist a fascist. Call a hater a hater. Don’t let people like Jonah Goldberg and Bill O’Reilly get away with it. If you have to start swinging fists and being impolite on television or radio, do it. If anything, you’ll get more respect from average Americans who generally only understand violence as a way of solving everything.
I know a lot of liberals still believe they can reason with and change bullies. They feel that by ’stooping to their level’ they will somehow become that which they hate. I wonder if the folks at Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership would buy that rationale vis a vis 1930’s Germany? In the Unitarian Universalist church I used to belong to in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I would ask these people if they’d be the first ones to politely board the boxcars to their own destruction? They didn’t care for the analogy. I didn’t care.
After awhile even a beat dog with little to lose starts to contemplate one last satisfying bite into their tormentor before getting the last bullet. Until this species reaches a different stage of evolution, we are still faced with the stark fact that if we want to be allowed to live in some measure of safety and respect, the only language that the bully understands is force.
Harlan Ellison wrote a great short story in the Approaching Oblivion collection (1974) tited One Life Furnished in Early Poverty, where, as a grown adult, he went back to his youth (strangely enough in nearby-to-me Painesville, Ohio where I lived once) and meet the kid he had been. A kid who had been mercilessly bullied for being Jewish.
If you’ve never read it, you should. It may bring tears to your eyes. It did to me. Ellison, as Gus Rosenthal, fights off the bullies and befriends the young man that was him as a youth. But then something unforeseen happens. Rosenthal sees the kid becoming too dependent on him and realizes that for better or worse, the child he had been needs to go through these trials alone in order to grow up as the guy who would later feel deeply enough to write these stories.
But Ellison’s description of the bullying he endured in Painesville, which really bordered on the calculatingly cruel, cut very close to the bone for me. But where I fall is that I very vividly remember, even after 30 years, all the kids we, quite literally, bullied completely out of the school - people like Greg A and Chris H.
And yes, I said we. For to distract attention from the reasons I was bullied, I joined in the torment. If I could pull an Ellison in real life, I’d love to go back as an adult and kick the shit out of Jimmy C, Harry N, Robert L and some of the others who tormented these innocent kids. Wherever they are, I hope that Greg and Chris aren’t as fucked up as I am from elementary school. Even now when I think of them and others, I feel sadness and shame for what I didn’t do. Yeah, the nuns, by turning their backs to these scenes, taught us well what life would hold.
No, some of us CAN’T quite move on. Ellison never really moved on - his experiences in Painesville formed the leitmotif of his work- he turned his angst into a body of literature. Not being as talented (I can’t write fiction for shit), I guess the other parts of my remaining life are some kind of make-good for either standing by silently or joining in those taunts.
I have always hated bullies and being bullied. Read from that what you will.
