What I learned over this holiday: when somebody says "redistribution of wealth", what he really means is murder, mass murder.
I went to my girlfriend's current town for the last two days of Passover. She lives in a soulless suburban area of a Pennsylvania city, where it's very planned post-war residential, you know, classic white-flight fodder. Everything's laid out on a grid, right? Anyway, while I was staying with a very nice man and woman, with whom I'd rather discuss pets and orchids than plants and whom I suspect of being exceedingly reasonable, I had dinner one night with the couple at whose home I'd stayed the first time I came to town.
I was warned: "Don't talk with G______ about politics. No really. Don't." But what the hell, you know, I did. And I got a pretty hefty lecture. Not about the policies I would like to see, as I didn't actually get to talking about that. Much more about who the President allegedly is, who progressives are, etc., etc.
This individual is an ex-Soviet citizen who came to the USA in the late 1970s or early 80s, so he is (understandably) anti-Communist with an all-consuming fury. The problem is that instead of saying "Come, let us reason together about how to accomplish the goals our values demand that we pursue", he's swung over to the far right.
The guy loves the second amendment to the Constitution, which he claims is intended to enable citizens to guard themselves against government. (Fine, fine. Not that his handgun and handgun training will protect him if Uncle Sam is really motivated to come screw with him, but never mind.) And, you know, I'm totally fine with this. I like A2 pretty well myself, and I exercise my right thereunder by not bothering to purchase a piece. But that's tangential...
He loves Glenn Beck. It is just such a headache. I want to talk with these people, because hey, we do have a lot of the same values and goals to pursue. Making sure individuals and families aren't going without necessities merely for lack of cash is a big one, for example. But after our short conversation on the matter, I don't think I could talk with him. He doesn't seem to understand on an intuitive level that when we say "redistribution of wealth", that means "using your tax dollars to advance the interests of public health and general welfare" as opposed to, say... mass murder.
Death panels, for heaven's sake. He's convinced that President Obama and the Democratic-majority Congress will destroy the country, even though it has obviously survived many years straight of other presidents whose politics might have been disagreeable to him or to me (Roosevelt and Reagan, for two examples). I said, straight up, I think the country is more robust than you give it credit for. He said, Oho, don't be so sure.
And then he told me something very telling. The problem with this country, he said, is the same problem with most of the world. See, originally everything was run by a patriarchal aristocracy: it was the older, more experienced men who ran things. Of course young people have big ideas, but they don't understand that big ideas never work. But the young people eventually introduced democracy, meaning that their views were given equal weight to those of the community patriarchs. G______ cited some anonymous thinker that "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner" [a brief Googling suggests this is a distorted version of libertarian author James Bovard's remark that democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep etc.]. See, if only we lived in a patriarchal aristocracy, everything would be all right... but here we have these dangerous ideas like sociology (which was founded at the University of Illinois, a hotbed of anti-Americanism, as everybody knows), the idea that all people are equal (they are obviously not, and treating all people as equal is as smart as trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole), the idea that wealth should be redistributed... Yeah. He did actually condemn all of this.
He also opined that President Obama was clearly a radical, that candidate Mr. Barack Obama, Jr. had made it clear he was a radical when he was running for office at any level, that the President's mother was also clearly a radical (I didn't ask why she would be classified as such because I thought the answer would sting me),... and so on. I thought later: I could have told him, in absolute truth, that some of my ancestors were traitors, in that they were Americans who levied war against these United States, adhered to their enemies and gave them aid and succor. Would he judge me a traitor because I am related to traitors? That makes about as much sense as saying that, because some woman is a "radical", her son must also be.
So, what do you think? Is there any connection to the fact that this guy G______ is a control freak whose marriage is suffering as a result?