So easy to rail at right-wing lunacy, anti-science, intellectual relativist,
etc., in the abstract, but so complicated in the particular. I came home
to find my mom on-line; she greeted me with “did you know that asparagus can
cure cancer?” Okay. We have all heard that raw vegetables have
diffuse preventative properties. But Mom had received a spam that swore
that two tablespoons of pureed asparagus a day would actually zap cancer, and
she BELIEVED it. I was so depressed. Mom. Really.
And after she had been nattering the past few days about the pre-WWII Germans
believing Nazi propaganda (she gets strange obsessions) to which Dad replied
that Hitler was a great orator – right, Dad, I’m not surprised, because you think
that Rush Limbaugh is, too. Well, people will believe absolutely anything
– that the Jews were responsible for inflation, that we are not causing climate
change, and that asparagus cures cancer.
At dinner over pannekoeken (which were too exotic for their Midwestern
tastes) Dad demanded to know how I know that I am right that illegal aliens are
not responsible for the problems with Medicare – this is our eternal
argument. How do I know that I am right about anything, that the huge
divergence in incomes in the US is not good, that there were NO weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, that evolution took place, that the world is not 4,859
years or whatever it is old? How indeed? I don’t even know what to
say to him. Because I spent several years as an undergrad, then many more as a
PhD student, learning how to evaluate sources? Because I do not inhabit
Jacobean England? Because I recognize the Enlightenment? Do I
really have to defend science? And what is so overwhelmingly disorienting
is that I have often deconstructed the type of knowledge produced by
science. But when push comes to shove, and I am asked to opt in favor of
asparagus as a cure for cancer and chemo, I’m going with the chemo.
In the abstract I loathe the lunatic fringe, the fat, self-righteous
people in mom-jeans, blithering inarticulately about God, natural law, and the
Constitution. I hate it that they have turned my parents into people who
not only refuse to think but who are proud of not thinking. But the
individuals, the individuals. I see Dad with his mournful expression and
bug-like face, with his big glasses and eyebrows like tumbleweeds, Mom with her
cotton-candy perm and seersucker blouses, and I just want to cry with the
excruciating tenderness of it all. They are like little kids. They
are kids who never did very well in school and now they have grown-ups who
whisper, the folks at Fox, who pull them aside, tell them secrets, get them to
be complicit, tell them that they are as smart as the people with degrees.
Of course they are thrilled.
But I also hate it that after ostracizing me throughout my childhood as
a weirdo who always had her nose in book – just typing the words arouses a very
bitter anxiety, oh look, that Tracy always has her nose in a book – the family
has now ganged up on me with their spams proclaiming their pride at being
rednecks. What have I ever done to
deserve this - except go to university in order to exercise my right to the
pursuit of happiness?
Okay, okay, take comfort in the knowledge that these little bursts of
populist fervor erupt periodically and always vanish again into the malodorous
swamp of superstition whence they emerged.
We can trace it in the conflict in Sophocles’s Oedipus – Oedipus rationally
seeking the answer when he himself is the unknowing perpetrator of the crime;
Savonorola and his bonfire of the vanities tailing the burst of Humanist
learning. The wingnuts will soon be
chased back into their slough, just as Savonarola was burnt on the very spot of
his bonfire. I know, I know, but it is a bitter recognition, that Mom and Dad
will eventually be chased back into their hole
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