Gut feelings

I recently spotted a local celebrity in the flesh, a woman who is a regular on the local fundamentalist religious TV station. She is something else, and her old-school bouffant hairdo is hard to miss. She was getting food and sitting down for a quick afternoon meal with her family.

The overhead music was playing, and I heard Lou Rawls' old 70s hit, "You'll never find another love like mine"... and just as I passed her, as we both gathered our napkins and silverware, I heard her singing along with Lou, "You're gonna miss my lovinnnnnnn"... and I was momentarily startled. She likes old disco, I thought, surprised. Did I think all the fundies were raised in caves or something? They share the same pop-culture as the rest of us, as separatist as they sometimes are.

As I heard the TV-evangelist sing along with Lou, I was filled with a sudden, unaccountable affection, possibly because I had previously only heard her sing bad gospel songs.

I also realized that being a professional fundie was her job, and it is possible she gets as tired of her job as the rest of us get tired of ours.

I turned and smiled at her, as she was singing the old Lou Rawls song, and she smiled warmly back at me. It was a nice moment.

~*~

My second recent realization is one that I need to chew on awhile... but I will share it with all of you nonetheless. You can help me nail it down, so to speak. To wit:

I live in a very conservative area, and as someone with radical politics and personal style, this means I have to possess a pretty strong personality to go against the grain of the majority.

If someone lives in a very liberal area, and has very conservative politics and personal style, they will also have to possess a strong personality to go against the grain of the majority.

My realization: I may be temperamentally more similar to the minority-conservative-in-liberal-area, than I am similar to the liberals around them. In a majority-liberal area, people can easily take liberalism for granted and don't often get very spirited about it. Thus, the liberals may be lukewarm liberals that in a conservative locale, would be lukewarm conservatives.

When conservatives emigrate to the upstate (and yes, they do, as if there weren't enough of them here already), they are excitable and revved up, like new converts. You can spot them. They take nothing for granted. They have arrived at Ground Zero of Tea Party Central--the Promised Land--and they are raring to go.

They remind me of myself, back in the day, when I got to Berserkley and thought I knew everything.

It's an unnerving realization that I first got whacked with upon reading Eric Hoffer's brilliant book, The True Believer (that all fanatics and extremists are more alike than different). But I never made the connection about geography before, and the concurrent personality types.

In a place where 'everyone' is liberal (Seattle, San Francisco), then an individual's liberalism will mean something very different that it does in a place like upstate South Carolina, where they will try to run you over for having pro-Obama/vegetarian bumper stickers on your car. Thus, the individual's response to political challenges will be very different. There is no need to be defensive when you are in the majority. It is interesting (and telling) to note how this political defensiveness is exhibited. What happens in one place, as standard and typical, would never happen in the other.

Example: During a recent group-conversation, I used the word "evolved." (Correctly, as in, "We evolved to crave fat and carbs"--this may have been, in fact, my exact phrase.) I used the word in a dietary context a number of times, and in each instance, two people in the room corrected my word choice, "created." We were not evolved to crave fat and carbs, we were created that way, by God Almighty. (Well, if we were indeed CREATED that way, why bother to fight it?)

I did not want to start a fight over Darwin at that particular juncture and in that social setting, so I allowed them to correct me, but kept right on using the word, too. And I realized, that kind of shit annoys me, and it's the type of thing that people living in liberal areas don't realize we have to put up with. And the conservatives don't realize it either. (I always wondered what William F Buckley thought of the dopey-fundie brand of right-winger, which he surely knew existed? Or did he believe all conservatives were yacht-club members in good standing?) In the same social situation, would the radical atheist from San Francisco just drop everything and jump in whole hog, and start preaching the Darwin gospel? I only know a couple of radical atheists here in the upstate, and neither behave in this fashion; I think the new arrivals might let a few things slide, the way the rest of us have learned to do.

And how does this influence us and our approach to what we do? Our politics? Our writing? The way we frame the issues?

Can you tell when a blog is written in a conservative or liberal area? How can you tell?

Just some ideas. Discuss amongst yourselves!



~*~


And of course you know I have been earwormed with the damn thing ever since, right?


You'll never find another love like mine - Lou Rawls



~*~

I heard the first two minutes of this old Devo song on the Weather Channel (!) of all places, played over and over during the weekend whilst announcing rain, and now I am earwormed to death with this, too.

And so, it magically becomes our blog post title for today.

Gut Feeling - Devo