Something that’s been bugging me for a while:
Historically speaking, conservatism is a movement organized and funded by society’s most powerful members; politically speaking, it lusts for tax cuts and government rollbacks that will benefit those same fortunate folks at the top.
But what it really is, in its own mind, is a crusade on behalf of society’s most abject members: the true Americans who are victimized, sneered at and persecuted for their faithfulness.
Who persecutes them? Well, the mainstream media, to begin with, which supposedly chuckles at their unadorned heartland ways from its lofty perches in New York and Washington. Academics, for another, with their fancy rhetoric and their bottomless contempt for the red, white and blue
I’ve realized in my rapidly advancing age what really bugs me about people. I have my mother’s innate desire to be friends with everyone, to make everybody feel comfortable and loved and happy, to please each person I see. This will surprise people who only know me online but I’m actually rather conflict-averse; I’d rather not have a fight if I can help it, and the older I get, the less effort it seems to require to just be sweet to people even if they’re being kind of dickish.
But there’s one thing that trips my trigger every time. That makes it impossible for me to be nice or make the extra stretch or go the extra mile or even keep my voice on an even keel while I’m talking to somebody on the phone, or smile while I’m sitting across the lunch table from someone even as I’m thinking of ways to get away with murder.
Condescension.
I cannot stand being talked down to. Cannot stand it. It is irrational, I should be bigger than this, I should be able to say to whoever it is lording his- or herself over me that hey, I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to worry about, let ’em feel like the big men or women on campus if that’s what they want. But I’m not bigger than that and even the hint that somebody’s getting superior makes me see fucking RED. Worse yet, you talk to someone I care about in that tone of voice? My spidey-sense for this kind of thing is pretty finely-tuned, is my point.
So I’ve never understood, with that finely-tuned sense, how people don’t pick up on just how much of this “You’re so REAL, with your really real-ness and your authenticity and your pickup truck and dirty hat” from Republicans and right-leaning pundits who live the same lives as those rich liberal media assholes is such complete insult, top to bottom. It’s so reductive, the definition of people by what they drive, where they eat, all the Bobo Brooks and James Lileks-y crapola about shopping at Target — which last I checked was very successfully carrying the same fugly-ass designers of tweeny jeans as department stores now — It’s just a way of calling you stupid.
Does it take a woman to know this, when you’re being “respected” and when you’re being fetishized? Somebody complimenting the outlines of what they consider your life by pointing out how different you are from them and how exotic, like a zoo animal, does that ever sound like anything other than something that ought to get you slapped? You’d never go into someone’s fancy $3,500-floored marble foyer (Mr. A and I saw one of these in a home store and were like, “Who are these people and can we go live with them?”) and compliment its authenticity, you’d compliment its beauty and its coloring, or something, even as you thought, “I could buy so many BOOKS with that” or whatever. I don’t think anybody ever toured someone’s private stables and tennis courts and talked about how real they were.
I don’t think I’m alone in knowing instinctively when someone’s being condescending to me. I think everybody who went to middle school knows what that feels like. So why doesn’t the “you’re a real man, shot and a beer, order coffee in the diner, small-town values” characterization tip that off for more people? Is it a deliberate decision to close your ears to the inherent nastiness of it? Is it that they’re just not hearing what’s really being said?
A.