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A SF LIBERAL IN IDAHO / MORFORD
After all, we all have our frames, our boundaries of perception, into which we only allow certain notions of truth that resonate with our levels of education, spiritual understanding, experience. And the true art lies in respecting the frames of others, plying those borders with words of polite wisdom, all while still able to enjoy the same wine : Mark Morford / SF Gate columnist
How many times have I found myself recently in the same situation that Mark Morford describes ~ sharing obvious self evident truths about the most corrupt administration of our times as well as the hope of a new congress with a new mandate from the people while having the listener blank out and fervently blame Bush's failures on a liberal press who won't report the good things that are happening in Iraq.
Morford catches the moment brilliantly ~ " This is when I should've noticed. This is when I should've been paying attention to the signs: the crossed arms, the utter lack of smile or nod, the narrow eyes looking at me like I was from some planet where pagan pervert yoga teachers grow Toyota Priuses on the backs of organic chickens. "
Read and enjoy,
Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2007/01/06.html
Damn Liberals Cost Us The War!
At the dinner table in a very red state, little room for obvious truths. But can you try?
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By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 5, 2007
So I'm up in the Idaho hinterlands at the family getaway lake house over the holiday break and I'm sitting at a nice dinner party with some family friends, and the wine is flowing and the friends are lovely and the conversation seems relatively open and hence I forget what a deeply, aggressively red part of the country I'm in because, well, the wine was very good, and when you're from San Francisco you tend to carry the progressive bubble with you as some sort of happy delusion that much of the world must be at least relatively informed and open and somewhat willing to lick the divine candy of current truths.
It can be, you know, a problem.
This is when it happened. One of the dinner guests I've met before but don't know very well, he asks me about the media world and the general timbre of my column and, more specifically, what the atmosphere was like in San Francisco when the Dems swept back into power in November like a glorious gob of long overdue balm for our festering national BushCo rash (analogy, of course, mine).
I smiled, I sighed, the nubile S.F. bubble present over my head like a hum of cosmic lubricant as I mentioned the general feeling of a wary sense of renewed hope, a feeling among the attuned and the informed that maybe there can now be a slight return to balanced humanitarian progress in the nation, alongside a blessed reduction in all sorts of brutal, dehumanizing, embarrassing scandals and BushCo atrocities and environmental devastations, et cetera and so on and pass the wine.
This is when I should've noticed. This is when I should've been paying attention to the signs: the crossed arms, the utter lack of smile or nod, the narrow eyes looking at me like I was from some planet where pagan pervert yoga teachers grow Toyota Priuses on the backs of organic chickens.
But alas, I forget. Or rather, I don't really care to stop to ponder, and so I begin tell my tablemate what I think is the terribly amusing and illuminating tale about the recent spate of hate mail I've received, much of it in response to a column I wrote about how the United States has so obviously and painfully lost yet another war, this time in Iraq, and how we have so little idea what we're really doing on the world stage anymore, how we cannot seem to learn from our mistakes.
The hate mail, I tell him, goes something like this: Yes, we have probably lost the war, you freak hippie commie punk. But do you know why we lost? You know why the terrorists hate us even more? I'll tell you why: Because of the goddamn liberal media! Because of the liberal agenda, the one that wouldn't give Bush a chance to really unleash the dogs of war, to quash our evil Islamic enemies, to really make America into a strong and ruthless machine of brutal moral justice.
We lost the war (my hate mail sneers), in short, because of people like you (that is, me), who so obviously hate America and hate our president and won't allow our fine and manly military to take whatever actions necessary to bring terrorism down because of some stupid ethics rules and anti-torture laws and hippie-dippy Geneva Conventions and silly pagan notions about saving innocent lives and examining true causes. Goddamn you liberals!
Something was wrong. There was a decided lack of laughter and incredulity on the part of my tablemate. There was no knowing nod, no chuckle, no shake of the head at the absurdity and intellectual despair of it all. I had the distinct feeling, in fact, that nearly everything I had just said came out in Greek and I'd just hurled a whole pile of words at a large and uncomprehending sweater.
Perhaps, I think to myself, he did not understand the humor? The rich and sickening irony? I decide to reiterate: Isn't that hilarious? Isn't it amazing how, despite nearly six full years of unchecked Republican power, despite a brutal and scandal-ridden rule over both houses of Congress, despite a stunning gutting of the treasury and a war that is costing us $100,000 per second, despite a lapdog media that was terrified as a Chihuahua in a hurricane of Karl Rove's appalling disinformation machine -- a supposedly liberal media that, for more than five years, didn't dare question anything about Dubya's rush to war for fear of upsetting the wailing evangelical neocon "majority" that ruled the schoolyard with a bloody iron Bible, is it not amazing that the GOP's historic national disgrace is, of course, all the liberal's fault?
Nothing. No response. Just a narrowing of the eyes, a slight shift in the seat. And finally the words that sound like fingernails on the chalkboard of truth: "You know what bothers me?" he said. "The feeling I get that I'm never really told the truth about Iraq and all the good things that are happening there."
Wait wait wait. What?
"You know, that I never hear what's really going on from the liberal media. They just can't be trusted. I never feel like I'm getting the real story. And we're doing some damn good things over there. That's what I think."
My jaw hung open, a smile of disbelief drifted across my face as statistics and studies and staggering death tolls and harsh anti-war comments from American generals and tens of thousands of dead civilians and the shrill idiocy of Fox News swam into my head and prepared to launch out my mouth in a torrent of arguments and fact and proofs that would have done, well, absolutely nothing to penetrate the ideological fortress of what I had just heard. There was, I see now, simply no room. But I was about to try anyway.
Then something unexpected happened. Before I could unleash my disbelief, my other tablemate, herself a young and whip-smart New York liberal and history buff, jumped in. Deftly, calmly, with the ease of a seasoned rhetoric pro, she wiggled into our friend's seemingly impenetrable frame of reference and first offered some understanding, some consideration of his "position," then skillfully steered him to another relevant, though less volatile point that still made him think and reconsider, just a little. And she did it all sans combat, or angry debate, or wary rolling of the eyes.
There was, in other words, no jumping down of the throat. There was no hammering home of the obvious numbers, the headlines, the countless undeniable proofs of the Bush disaster that would have found no intellectual purchase anyway. There was only the deft maneuvering of simplified ideas, a calm allowing of another's observations -- no matter how foreign or uninformed -- so as to, at the very least, keep it all on a reasonable keel. It was a precious -- if frustrating -- lesson indeed.
After all, we all have our frames, our boundaries of perception, into which we only allow certain notions of truth that resonate with our levels of education, spiritual understanding, experience. And the true art lies in respecting the frames of others, plying those borders with words of polite wisdom, all while still able to enjoy the same wine.
Which is not to say it all doesn't make you want to scream and tear out your hair and whip out the picture of George Bush giving Satan a back rub and some smooches over at Ted Haggard's bathhouse. But, hey, you do what you can.
Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio www.conscioustalk.net
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