I am apparently behind enemy lines.
"You know where I can find a wireless connection?"
"No. It's a small town, and we have the fastest connection here."
"Yeah, normally what I do is, I drive around and tap into someone else's wireless connection. Don't know if that's legal or not." Heh. Heh.
I laugh, a guarded and jovially reproving accessory, "I wouldn't know anything about that..."
After a few moments of tapping, "Hey, do you guys have...You know...Um, filtering software on here?" He sounds mildly embarassed.
"Yeah. Are you getting the St. Bernard screen?"
"Yeah. I just wanted to check my personals. Nothing, you know..."
I'm quick to soothe his squirming. "It's okay. We had an issue a while back with a junior high schooler accessing porn. The parents were furious, so we implemented the software. I'd be happy to take it off if you'd like."
"It's not like I'm looking at pornography or anything..."
Mister, you can click on every free thumbnail offered by Barnyard Squirtin' for all I care. "It's okay. We're adults here."
I invade his bleary-eyed fog of beer and cannabis, mere inches from a rotund torso packed into his extravagant hunting camo like sausage into a casing. I log off, log on as an administrator, remove the filters, log back on, and let him pound away. I return to my desk.
He knows that I know he's not a local, and he seems to itch for some non-pheasant-hunting-buddy contact. I take the implied bait. "So where're you in town from?"
"Aw, you'd hate me if I told you..."
I know what's coming even though I don't want to. "Why would you say that?"
After an interminable silence, he replies, with more than a little defensiveness, "Hell, I may as well say I'm from Richmond." His tone softens. "Actually, I'm from Oakland."
The horror! Imagine it: every day, 9 to 5, surrounded on all sides by muds...Having to put up with your high-yeller neighbor's "African" art, to be polite to the snooty chink bitch at the bank. The master bedroom with the curtains drawn in the dead of night is the only place you can beat your wife, the locked garage the only place you can hang your framed black and white of Joe Fucking McCarthy.
And they come here in droves. I've met his type countless times, their trucks headed towards Mendocino County, with W magnets, not decals; I've seen them parked around the lake in high summer, little Confederate flags whipping at the top of their aerials.
That's because the grass is greener here. This is a refuge for the oppressed Debra Saunders and Michael Savages of the San Francisco Bay Area (one imagines their pick-ups barely escaping the liberal mobs itching to throw them to the lions in Oakland Coliseum), a place to let their guts, wretching from the SO's latest experiments with tofu, hang out. Now you're in the kuntry, son -- go ahead, pop that .45 right off into the night air. Pee on the side of the road. Hell, [leans in, whispers] I bet you could even say 'nigger' way out here! That's how the real, simple, salt-o'-the-earth, barefoot folks up in these here hills do it.
I step out of myself for a moment, to see me as he sees me: a young country goober. But one bookish enough to work in a library. Something he wishes he could be, not a corrupted product of some horrific Gotham possessed of (gasp!) more than one post office and an actual sewer system. I'm a projection screen for his vicarious filmreel of a brainy rustic, hands all outdoor callouses and papercuts, as often turning dog-eared pages of The Fountainhead as stringing barbed wire.
I mention that I grew up in Richmond. Just to watch him sink, a victim of his own expectations. To watch him watch his platonic (yet mildly homoerotic) ideal of a red-county, redneck, rough-and-tumble conservative (what else? I don't look like the Zin & brie type) intellectual melt and run down the gutter.
But I soon regain stature in his blood-shot eyes. Surely I'm here because my family, sometime in the 1980s, participated in some noble White Flight, heroic refugees fleeing the East Bay's sodomizing, spearchucking hordes...
He's been on an inchoate roll the whole time he scans his skeevy singles hook-up site. "...And those far-left liberals in Oakland...they just squish them under their thumbs, just to keep a constituency...[blah, blah] gun control...[blah, blah] gay marriage...[blah, blah] stupid unions..."
It does not occur to me to ask him why, when the military's broken, the economy's in the shitter -- when the entire country is essentially falling down around our ears -- why he is worried about cornholery? No. It occurs to me only to shelve Big Bird's "And What Did You Bring Today?"
"How dare they? I mean, how dare they!!!"
He says it the way I have when looking at photos from Abu Ghraib, or listening to Ann Coulter agitate for genocide, or reading of George W. Bush's plans to bomb al Jazeera's Qatar headquarters, or watching the Right's latest stealth attack on the poor.
I pause, to make sure he wasn't asking me a question. He wasn't; this guy has all the answers. He just wants a smart, pretty white wall onto which he might regurgitate all the fabulous thoughts he's gleaned from Hannity and the NRO.
And I'm content with not being asked what I think. Professionally speaking, I don't have an opinion. But as a librarian, I can tell you where to find them.
[ back home ]
Comments for I Live In Wingnut Heaven
CS: That's bad enough. But another thing I failed to mention about these East Bay yahoos is that a lot of them probably make three times what your average firefighter makes, and there's nothing blue-collar about them. We're talking a McMansion with pool near Vallejo, private school for the kiddies, two Hemis in the garage, and an illegal maid. Yeah, most of it's on credit, but still...No wonder their kids have drug problems.
Anyway I didn't get to mention the part where he talks about the great and noble George Bush and "his Republican Congress." Blechhh.
GS: Ha! I love it: "How do you like Big Brother now, bitch? HUH???"
Anyway I didn't get to mention the part where he talks about the great and noble George Bush and "his Republican Congress." Blechhh.
GS: Ha! I love it: "How do you like Big Brother now, bitch? HUH???"
Ha! @ Gregor.
Ugh, those types infuriate me. Perhaps I should get out of INDIANA. They are everywhere.
Ugh, those types infuriate me. Perhaps I should get out of INDIANA. They are everywhere.
Living in Texas presents many of the same, uh, challenges.
I love it when someone launches into their wingnut politics and assumes I feel the same way. You should see their faces when I calmly tell them I voted against W. for governor and twice against him for president.
I love it when someone launches into their wingnut politics and assumes I feel the same way. You should see their faces when I calmly tell them I voted against W. for governor and twice against him for president.
- Posted at 6:56 AM | By
Smartypants
Fortunately for me, my Velma glasses, two-tone hair and attitude give off definite liberal vibes, so nobody usually approaches me in person to rant about teh g4yz!! or teh L1brul5!!
But the phone is another matter entirely . . .
But the phone is another matter entirely . . .
- Posted at 11:23 AM | By Cassie Schoon
Teh, I totally understand about the work thing.
When I'm at work, I have to be very neutral. But when I'm not...
When I'm at work, I have to be very neutral. But when I'm not...
- Posted at 1:50 PM | By Smartypants
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