dead eyesSo, on Saturday I was working as the time-keeper for a live radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds”. That meant that I came out on stage at the beginning of the play and at the end of intermission and counted everybody down, “Five minutes on my mark…Mark!” counting, counting, “Four minutes on my mark…Mark!” until the final ten second countdown.

Anyway, after dress rehearsal I went outside to have a smoke and I got to talking to a trio of women who were in Athens for a convention of nursing students.

“So,” I asked them, “Are you guys in the nurses’ union?”

All three of them looked at me like dogs hearing a high-pitched sound. Then I asked them what they thought of single-payer health care.

“Oh, no,” one of them said, “We don’t want socialized medicine. That would be a disaster.”

As I probed deeper into their belief system, I started to realize that while they were nice enough people, they were completely brainwashed by the pro-corporate, anti-union factions in health care who want nurses and other health care workers as uninformed and reactionary as possible. My questions like, “Who told you that you’re better off than unionized nurses in other parts of the country?” were not going over especially well.

“We just are,” one of them said.

The thing I noticed that while one of the women seemed interested in what I had to say, if skeptical, the second woman just stood there looking frightened and saying nothing, but nurse number three was clearly the Republican of the bunch. How could I tell?

Because the moment she started hearing information that she didn’t like, her face closed like a pair of iron shutters and her eyes got the dead, blank look of a catfish’s eyes. You know the look. It’s the look that tells you that no new information will be allowed to pass within.

It’s the same look in the eyes of Trent Wisecup (see illustration at the top of this post), the aide to Congressman Joe Knollenberger who was caught on camera telling a liberal activist that he’s “Anti-American”, “blinded by his hatred of this country”, and that he’s not an American citizen. Thanks for that, Sparky.

Nurse number three took a mighty pull on her Marlboro Light and said, “Well, the way I was raised…”

And I braced myself. Anytime someone in a political discussion starts in about How They Were Raised, they’re about to say something so breathtakingly ignorant that it’ll make your brain bleed.

“The way I was raised, you work hard, take care of yourself and your family, and you keep what you earn. I don’t work to pay for everybody else’s health care. It’s not my responsibility to take care of people who won’t take care of themselves, blah, blah, blasé-blah…” and a series of other Randian delights from the Conservative Canon of Self-Serving Rationalizations.

I know. Groan.

I resisted the temptation to say, “Well, darlin’, maybe you were raised wrong.” That’s the kind of thing you just don’t say to people in The South.

Instead, I asked them, “So, do you think it’s right that every non-millionaire in this country is one catastrophic injury away from financial ruin?”

They didn’t have an answer for that and our meeting of the minds came to an abrupt end.

We already discussed the other night how Conservatism is a brain disease, a mental glitch that keeps its victims from being able to think flexibly, empathically, or creatively. I guess a more pertinent question would be whether or not the Conservative Mind can be treated or perhaps even rehabilitated to full functionality.

We’ll get right on that, I suppose. We can have a telethon or something. Seriously, it’s for their own good.

(Image grabbed from C&L)

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