Different realities

The Republican Convention has made me uncharacteristically loquacious—far more so than the Democrat one. This message is only a day after my last one—unheard of for me.

The more I learn about Sarah Palin (much of it from Muskrat Hunt), the scarier she sounds. In the last post, I described the Republican ideology as meaning “little except anti-gay and anti-abortion, … and maybe pro-guns and pro-death penalty.” Of course, that doesn’t quite do it “justice”: anti-evolution, anti-global warming, pro-Christo-fascism, and pro-oil are also important planks, and on every one of these (again with the possible uncertainty of Christo-fascism), the queen bitch of the Republican Party stands firm. But her personal and political history is sufficiently bizarre and unsavory to make even some Republicans a little leery of her in spite of her ideological purity. So, given her appearance as a total, unmitigated disaster as a candidate, her selection has made many liberals perceive her choice as a form of deliberate mass suicide for the Republicans, a sort of Jonestown Kool-aid Party. And yet there are some Republicans who seem to think her choice is a brilliantly clever move which will save and energize the Party and lead their way to victory. How can they entertain such radically different ideas?

Driving home last night (Tuesday), I heard on the car radio a little bit of one of the speeches at St Paul; I never did find out, or much care, who the speaker was. I could only listen to about three minutes of it before switching to jazz, since it would have been rather embarrassing to puke into my lap in the car seat. But three minutes was enough to give me, as one who generally refuses resolutely to read or listen to any of the moronic garbage spouted by the Republicans, a new insight into the mentality of these creatures. In that short time span, it became clear that this person, who is presumably representative of the Party as a whole, was coming from what I would call (as in the above title) a different reality. He had (and they have) a totally different perception of the meanings of historical events and people. He spoke (and they speak) a different language—not totally different because they use the same words we do, but they use them, again, with totally different meanings. This naturally makes communication with them practically impossible, since neither of us can really understand what the other is saying; our ideas sound as much like insane gibberish to them as theirs sound to us. It is not entirely out of levity that I routinely refer to our nation as the Divided States. We are truly, and I fear irreconcilably, divided by barriers of language and perception which form, I insist, separate realities. I say irreconcilably because it seems that large proportions of those on both sides (including me on our side) seem so adamantly convinced that their perceptions and their use of language are the only “real” ones, and that those on the other side are not just opposed but to some degree clinically insane and arguably evil, that it makes any bridging of the chasm well nigh insuperable.

So it is from this unbridgeable chasm between different realities that the Republicans can view their choice of Palin for running mate as brilliantly clever and the salvation of the Party. (Even the term “running mate” takes on different connotations as to whom or what they are running from.) It doesn’t make it any easier to listen to them, but it makes it a little easier to understand “where they’re coming from” if I do listen.