What Uncle Remus Has to Teach Us About Not Arguing With Fools in the Age of Trump
Politics has a way of barging into romance in this Age of Trump. The following is a cautionary tale...
The missus and I decided to mark our twenty-third wedding anniversary with a bottle of wine and appetizers at a fancy restaurant overlooking a lovely lake. We were two minutes into our discussion of how it feels now to be empty-nesters when another couple asked if they could join us at our heated outdoor lakeside nook. Uh, sure. Okay. Have a seat, we said graciously. Let's call them Dick and Jane. We offered to share our wine and goodies. Some jolly banter followed.
Here I interject an observation about my wife and me. She's Dutch. We met in Cambodia in the '90s where I was a diplomat and she, a UN peacekeeper. It was a war-time romance. We dated via helicopter. We had matching flak jackets and dined on some fare I swear was still moving. We ducked bullets and mortar rounds. In the same trench together, so to speak. But we agreed on nothing. I saw her as just one more sanctimonious, anti-American Euro-snob. She considered me to be yet another naive Yank, brainwashed in my country's lore about equality for all and limitless opportunities. The sparks flew. Which made for mutual fascination, each one engaged in a mission civilizatrice to change the other. We got married anyway.
Over the years, I've counseled her to refrain from trying to civilize others in that somewhat imperious way Europeans have a habit of doing. I quote my Italian grandmother, Mai discutere con un cafone. Persone non sapranno la differenza. "Never argue with a fool. People won't know the difference." I recounted the Uncle Remus tale of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit, The Wonderful Tar Baby Story. Brer Fox makes a doll out of tar. Brer Rabbit tries to strike up a conversation with the figure, but receives no response. He gets offended, punches it and becomes stuck. The more Brer Rabbit lights into the tar baby out of rage, the more stuck he gets. You get the picture. As did my grandmother.
Anyway, Dick asks my wife where she's from. My wine-addled memory serves me poorly in how that innocent question slid quickly into a political maelstrom. But a class issue played a role for sure. Dick is what we call in this country, a "white ethnic." My beloved is, like me, an over-educated professional; she works do-gooder issues in the nonprofit realm and teaches at the university level.
My third chardonnay in, I hear Dick bellowing, "My family started from nuthin'! Nobody ever gave us anything! I believe you eat what you kill!"
Huh?
He kept repeating this "eat what you kill" mantra. In our post-mortem analysis of this travesty of a wedding anniversary debate, my wife interpreted this to mean, "You reap what you sow," or "Kill for your food or starve 'cause you're a lazy-ass otherwise." It's at this point that I grabbed for another bottle.
Dick is of the sort who believes resolutely in that American ethos of "lifting yourself up by your boot straps." It's what I grew up with, descendant of immigrant farmers. Rugged individualism within a community bound by region, patriotism and faith, forged at a time in our history when the social welfare net, such as it was, was mostly church and community based and government was small.
Dick and Jane are what we high-fallutin' types call libertarians. Work hard, reap the benefits. Be a slackard, and sink. Your choice. Leave government out of it. Both have "good" jobs with local companies which provide no defined retirement or health benefits. Dick and Jane, in their mid-50s, are fine with that. Social Security and modest IRA's and savings will keep them going past age 65. All that social welfare nonsense the Dutch and their fellow Europeans provide their citizens is, well, just un-American.
It's when Dick started throwing the F-bomb at us that I decided to intervene.
"If you don't love this f-----g country, you can f-----g leave it. Go back where you came from! I f-----g love America!..."
My wife, dejected, shut down and stared silently at the flame of the patio heater. Knuckle-dragger Dick hurt her feelings. His wife futilely attempted to reign him in, but the cafone was on a roll and wouldn't be stopped.
My last fistfight was in ninth grade geography class. Bob Ealey and I went at it in the back row as Mr. Waldo embarked on an enlightening discourse on Canadian regional economies. Bob landed a right hook on my nose, resulting in profuse bleeding and a one-way trip to the principal's office for the both of us. Since then I've been clean (except for one close call in college). Employing my diplomatic skills, however, I steered the conversation with Dick and Jane to a quick close and they departed. Truth be told, I wanted to punch him in the face. Such are the verities of one's working class roots.
Our contretemps with Dick and Jane is not so unusual in this age of rage we are in. Civil discourse quickly gives way to vitriol. And I'm not going to engage in journalistic false equivalency here. The rightward turn in our society has brought us a Republican party that is unrecognizable from that of a generation ago, the small government, fiscally prudent, strong military GOP that my father favored. It is today reactionary, racist-friendly, anti-immigrant, fiscally irresponsible and misogynist. Atomized news and social media have abetted this syndrome by providing echo chambers for left as well as right. But runaway myth and fact-free grievance dominate the latter. Dick is merely a captive of that world.
Dick and Jane ruined our wedding anniversary. I've promised my wife an anniversary dinner at which no strangers will be welcome.
Meantime, I've also counseled her to follow Brer Fox's example: "Brer Fox, he lay low."