Trailer Park Republicans, I'm looking your direction here.
Just in case you call yourself a Republican and think I'm NOT looking your direction, there's one simple test to determine if you're a Trailer Park Republican: do you have One Million Dollars in liquid assets? To be clear, I'm asking if you could go out tomorrow morning, to the bank or the brokerage house or the bunker under your private tennis court and have a lackey cut a check for $1 million, no questions asked. If you answered 'No' then you, my deluded friend, are a Trailer Park Republican. Sure, you may not live in a trailer park but the respect the GOP has for you is exactly the same as if you did. Which is to say, none at all.
Why do so many people persist in identifying themselves with a movement that holds them and their middle-class situation in contempt? Like I said, I've been giving it some thought, so here goes: once someone has identified themselves with a group, it's very hard to separate from that group, even when the group's interests clearly run counter to the person's own. Like when gang members realize what they're doing is going to get them killed but they still hang out with their hoodlum friends. If you change your mind you run the risk of looking stupid, and no one wants to look stupid. But there’s more to it than that.
No one wants
to feel stupid.
Children are
used to making mistakes, it’s how they learn, and nobody begrudges them a
mispronunciation or a factual error.
When a child makes a mistake we correct them and both of us move on, no
harm no foul. But somewhere along the
line, usually when we’re teenagers, things change. Making mistakes becomes a matter of public
embarrassment. We’re ‘supposed to know
better’ even though that’s patently untrue.
When we’re wrong we’re mocked, and no one likes that. Being ‘right’ becomes a matter of personal
pride, we become emotionally invested in it because the alternative to being
right is not being wrong, it’s public humiliation.
When we
become parents our beliefs take firmer root, even the wrong ones. As authority figures now the risk to being
wrong is not just public humiliation, it’s the risk of the loss of trust and
respect from our children. Think about
the first time you realized that one of your parents was dead wrong about
something. Remember the shock like ice
water to your face? Remember the dawning
notion that if your parent was wrong about this one thing, there was every
possibility they were wrong about something else? Maybe everything else? Parents dread that same moment coming upon
their children so they do everything
they can to make sure they’re never discovered to be wrong. As adults and authority figures it’s our
natural tendency to circle the wagons, to put limits on what options we
consider, on what information we take in.
We like to think things over once
and then be done with it. As adults we
imagine that, once decided, our opinions are set in stone never to be
re-examined.
But the
world changes underneath us. What was
true one day can suddenly become an uncertainty the next and an outright
falsehood the day after that. This is
the agony and ecstasy of science and social progress. Discovery is what makes us human beings, and
as Ovid told us, there is nothing in the whole world that is permanent. I think about the world my grandparents knew
during the Depression: no transistors, no penicillin, rampant Jim Crow
legislation, no computers, no TV, no interstate highway system, and the Soviet
Union going full steam ahead. The world
seemed so certain, there were Communists to fight, FDR would always be
President, and minorities certainly knew their place, as did women and the
queers. It’s a good thing my grandfather
died twenty-seven years ago, because his head would explode if he were around
today. Almost nothing he believed to be true is still true.
His casual racism and matter-of-fact sexism seem almost quaint now, a
by-product of more innocent, more ignorant time. Quaint, but no less dangerous or oppressive.
We’d be
right there still, all of us as prejudiced as my grandfather in 1939, if none
of us ever were willing to be wrong, if none of us took a minute to think about
what we believed and the way we implemented that in our daily lives. Sticking with a political affiliation that clearly holds entire sections of the electorate in contempt is not only shameful, and silly, and contrary to their own best interests, it's holding the Trailer Park Republicans back. They're fighting battles decided decades ago, they're asking questions answered by our grandparents, and they're demanding a return to discredited, racist, sexist, just-plain-wrong policies that never worked in the first place. And they're doing it all loudly, proclaiming the justness of their unjust cause at the top of their lungs, gleeful lemmings leading each other over the cliff of ignorance, secure in the belief that even if doom awaits them, in this crowd of like-minded companions at least they won't feel stupid.
Okay, so maybe I do have some insight, but I still just don't get it.
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