Intolerant

I liked to think of myself as a tolerant person, but on close in(tro)spection I find that a thriving crop of intolerance has taken root in the fertile fields of my convoluted brain. The impetus for this in(tro)spection was learning, second hand, about a long lost friend, a highly educated scientist, retired but volunteering with a climate change non-profit –all to the good—whose husband is a continuing supporter of ex-Pres. Trump—all to the bad. Reportedly, the old friend sighed and said they simply don’t talk politics. 

Hearing this, my first thought was “how can she tolerate living with someone like that?” My second thought was, “I did.” For too many years, many years ago, my partner was a Nixon supporter who went into the closet after Watergate. We simply did not talk politics. Fortunately, for my sanity, well, for both our sanities, we went separate ways before Reagan ran for president. My third and subsequent thoughts were that despite my checkered past, I could no longer tolerate living with a Nixon supporter, much less a Trump supporter. It’s bad enough that a few family members still have Trump leanings. They live nearly two thousand miles east of Eden with two mountain ranges and vast desert separating us. I tolerate them for 40-minute Zoom sessions, and even then only if we talk about our less than idyllic childhoods. Or the weather. But even the weather isn’t safe. My fault. Too often I cannot resist a snide remark about climate change deniers. Or when a recent blizzard left many Texans without power, I casually mentioned that it was just a Chinese hoax. Or when they ask about California’s out–of-control fires, I can’t help but lament that we didn’t rake our forests.    

Examining the cerebral weeds more closely, I have come to realize that I am intolerant of most Trump supporters, especially the politicians. I’m not talking about not wanting to live with them. I’m talking about spending five minutes with them. That would be intolerable. What could we possibly talk about? COVID? Vaccines? I feel certain that some innocent remark would escape from my mouth, and there are many to choose from. Do you do your own research? Did you inject bleach? Have you read the study about the good and bad benefits of Ivermectin? The good is that it will cure COVID, and the bad is that it’s a dewormer and will get rid of your tapeworms, which means you’ll gain weight. Has your research shown that the microchips in the COVID vaccine make you an easy target for the Jewish space lasers?

During the pandemic, I have gotten into the habit of watching PBS news. Previously, I found all TV news programs intolerable, especially the happy ones. In the movie Take the Money and Run, W. Allen has an insightful scene about the worst possible punishment in prison: He goes into semi-solitary confinement with a non-stop-talking insurance salesman. That movie was made before the Trump phenomenon, and I can’t help but think that now the insurance salesman should be replaced by (choose any from the House or Senate) Trump supporter. Confinement with Trump himself would be akin to capital punishment, against which I am adamantly opposed. Recently, PBS news ran an interview with a Senator who was a rabid Trump supporter. He projected anger at everything Biden was doing, especially Afghanistan and the debt. When the far too moderate moderator tried to interject a few facts about Afghanistan and the debt during the Trump administration, he merely shouted louder and faster, while ignoring the questions. It was a two- or three-minute segment. I confess that I could not tolerate being with that Senator for one minute longer, not even remotely. I also could not tolerate the moderator’s pusillanimity. PBS may strive to be impartial, fair, and balanced, but how impartial, fair, and balanced is it to let some idiotic politician rant without rebuttal? Without insisting on facts? Perhaps the frustrated moderators rant and rave and kick their cats after such a surrender, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they take comfort in their comfortable-class moderation and generous paychecks.

We live in an age of alternative facts, some delivered with a semblance of reason by dishonest press secretaries, some shouted with but the slightest semblance of sanity by dishonest politicians and foolish followers. We live in an age of mass media which has become a super-spreader of misinformation creating a pandemic of algorithmic-infected minds. Like all pandemics, this one is no respecter of class, economic status, race, or gender (although the virus might have a certain predilection for the Y Chromosome). My lamentable pandemic-enforced television habits have shown me that I could not tolerate five minutes in a confined space with a large portion of the population: the Trump shills, shouters, and screamers; the Q followers; the Proud Boys, the Boogalo Bois, and all the good ol white boys; the trollers; the stalkers of members of local education boards; the stalkers of election officials; the stalkers of vaccine advocates; and on and on and on. I could not tolerate five minutes with any one of this large segment of America. I would not have a beer with them, share a meal, not even a cup of coffee and a doughnut. I just couldn’t tolerate those intolerable people. I might be able to nod my head to them as I walked on by, but I wouldn’t smile.

Good liberals, of which I am not one, claim to have compassion for those people who were left behind. I make no such claim. I believe that many were not so much left behind as stayed behind. The back seats of my seventh grade class were occupied by what I think of as the black-leather-jacket crowd. I confess that some might not have had black leather jackets, which were expensive and therefore rare in my lower middle class 1950’s neighborhood. That crowd sat in the back row and did not participate other than to mock a boy who seemed effeminate. They were all older, 15, 16, and 17, recidivists waiting until they were 18 and could drop out of school and get a job in the brewery or can factory. One of them, Richard V., was 17 and six feet seven. When we placed soccer in the schoolyard during gym class he was always the goalie for the winning team. I have a clear mental image of him standing at the goal line, tall and straight in his black leather jacket, his shiny black hair slicked back to a D.A. The field was only about 30 yards long and if he caught a goal attempt he could throw the ball through the opposite goal posts while we pre-pubescent dwarves fluttered uselessly around him, our upraised arms barely reaching his shoulders.   

Not only did the black-leather-jacket crowd sit in the back but they stayed behind. I had nothing against them. They usually left me alone. Once, in science class, one of them punched me in the chest because I gave a long and complicated answer to justify an incorrect answer. I was clearly boysplaining. Looking back, I take satisfaction in knowing that, while the teacher seemed doubtful, my abuser was too ignorant to realize that my answer was pure nonsense.

I confess that I do sometimes judge a book by its cover but my tastes have changed over time. For instance, as a teenager, I was a sucker for books with lurid covers, while as an old fart I find them ridiculous. Equally, as an unwitting refugee in the conflict between humanitarians who said that clothes did not make the man and clothiers who maintained that they, and nothing else, did, I sided intellectually with the humanitarians but practically with the clothiers. I judged, and still do, people by their clothes, somewhat. But these are snap judgments, like flash floods in ephemeral streambeds, soon gone, leaving only a trickle I can easily step over. Some of my best friends wear black leather jackets but do not sport D.A.s, not necessarily as a statement but because of a lack of hair. As a teenager, the son of good friends wore, even in warm rooms, a black leather jacket, not because he was a back-of-the classroom staybehind, but because he was Goth. He even dyed his black hair blacker. He was an honor student and now a Ph.D. Again, sadly, no D.A.

In my brief and undistinguished military career, I met many who had stayed or been left behind. It wasn’t always easy to tell the difference. There were kids who joined because they wanted to make the world safe for democracy by fighting evil communism in a far-away land they couldn’t find on a map. There were kids who joined because the mines, the breweries, and the can companies weren’t hiring, at least not their kind. There were kids who didn’t make it out of high school. There were a few kids, teenagers who never owned a toothbrush—one was appropriately but cruelly nicknamed Moss Gums. There was a Sioux whose teeth disintegrated when the army dentist began drilling cavities. There were the black-leather-jacket guys who didn’t look so intimidating in their olive drab underwear and their heads shaved. There were aggressive rednecks and angry Blacks. It was all new to me. I formed close bonds with a few, and, because I had no choice, tolerated many that I could not tolerate today, especially not certain officers who enjoyed their power over those kids.

I work with people who might have been left behind but had the will to not stay behind, not the tough guys in the back of the class deliberately staying behind, but refugees who fled intolerable persecution: women beaten and raped by macho partners; Mayan girls raped by macho ladino (non-indigenous) men who think they can rape indigenous women with impunity, which they can and do; lesbians raped by macho men who think they’ll make real women of the victims; gays or transgender persons raped by macho men who think they can do horrible things to gays; etc, etc. If you don’t see at least a glimmering of a pattern here, I don’t think I could tolerate your company for five minutes, nor could I take five minutes with a macho man. And I used to be one. Well, wanted to be one.

I no longer want to be a macho man. Now my fantasies are different. Now, I sometimes fantasize about hiring a sicario (hit-man) to go after some particularly egregious macho man. And I still claim to be opposed to capital punishment.  

Pondering still further, I see that my creeping intolerance has been on the rise since the previous century, even to the pre-Reagan days. The woman who replaced me in a group house in San Francisco had been a regular in what I called the backgammon-and-cocaine set in the North Beach barrio. Shortly before moving in, she saw the light and switched to another game-and-drug set, evangelism. I didn’t have to tolerate her long because I was moving out. I bumped into her a year or two later. Batting her eyes and playing the role of the all-knowing seeker of knowledge, she told me that surely all my archaeological experience had shown me that the bible was literally correct? Fortunately, for my sanity if not hers, my emphatic two-letter response ended the conversation and I went my separate way. However, I suffered lasting trauma. A year or two later, now into the Reagan Age, an old high school friend somehow tracked me down and told me he was coming to town and wanted to get together. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that my sleeping and waking hours for the week prior to his visit were disturbed by the fear that he had become a religious nut. On a trip to St. Louis I couldn’t help but notice an astounding number of religious-nut radio stations. I racked my brain for an excuse to get out of meeting my old classmate. Not that I was afraid of him, but I was afraid that my religious-nut intolerance would provoke me to a level of rudeness that would cause me many sleepless hours staring at the dark ceiling and thinking of the witty things I should have said instead of the witless things I shouldn’t have said. Fortunately for my sleep habits, he was neither a religious nut nor a Reaganite and I enjoyed his visit. 

I deny that I am intolerant of all religious people. Through the years I have worked with a great many and some of my best friends are religious. We seldom talk religion. It’s not a question of avoiding an incendiary topic or tip-toeing around a divisive subject as my long-lost friend and her Trump-loving husband do.  It’s more that we respect our differences. Well, perhaps some of the Nuns I have worked with simply bit their tongues while only occasionally easing up on the bite to tease me with gentle remarks such as I am not too old and stiff for kneeling.  

I do occasionally invade a church or temple to attend a baptism, confirmation, wedding, or memorial service, but I am reluctant to enter as a tourist. Whenever I do enter one of the great churches, cathedrals, or basilicas in Europe or Latin America to admire the architecture and art, I feel uncomfortable and out of place, as if I were in some stranger’s house. I cannot help but think that monumental architecture would be more admirable if it housed the homeless, and I feel as if I were in what should be some homeless persons’ house. There are many decent and tolerable religious people in the world, and I don’t want to accuse them of hypocrisy, but Christ did not preach in some monumental building. I don’t know about Mohammed, but I suspect that neither did he. Buddha sat under a tree.   

My intolerance cannons are not trained solely on right-wingers and religious fanatics. In the Reagan years I participated in many protests against our genocidal policy in Central America. I did community service a few times because of certain mass arrests and convictions for expressing my convictions. Community service was easily tolerable since I was able to choose service for an organization I approved of. The intolerable part was participating in long meetings in which many fellow arrestees and I plotted our legal strategy. The universal theme of the meetings was togetherness: any decisions we made, we should make as a unified group. We debated at nearly intolerable length about whether we should plead guilty and pay fines, plead guilty and go to jail to clog up the system, or plead innocent and go to trial to clog up the system. In one meeting, I sat next to a young gay man who kept ranting semi-sotto voce about a young lesbian who had the floor for what seemed a long time. No doubt the rants made it seem longer. The young man kept saying he found her and everything she said intolerable, which encouraged me to sympathize with her. When the meeting finally wrapped up with no strategy agreed upon other than the importance of unity, the young lesbian said that she would like to meet afterwards with those who wanted to plead guilty and clog up the jails, particularly women.  

I couldn’t tolerate any more of those meetings, pled innocent, was convicted, and did community service for an alternative energy cooperative that had a grant to insulate houses for poor people. The first house we insulated belonged to an affluent couple with a Lexus in the garage. 

I was recently at Smith College where I was tempted to deface a large white banner on a lush green lawn. The large, black words on the banner, “INTOLERANCE, HATE AND PREJUDICE ARE NOT WELCOME HERE,” were the cause of my temptation. I wanted to dash to the nearest paint store and buy a can of black spray paint and somehow replace the weak word WELCOME with TOLERATED. Had I done so, I would also have put a comma after HATE, to demonstrate my intolerance for serial comma killers.  

I could go on and on, and to many it may seem that I have, but the simple fact is that I am intolerant. I am intolerant of many things and many people. Judging by the political divisions in the country, I can proudly boast that I am intolerant of about half the population. I am not ashamed of my intolerance and do not hide it in a closet. I have long since given up any foolish attempt to scale the heights to enlightenment. I firmly and proudly proclaim that I have attained a solid footing of discriminating intolerance. I am on the smoothly paved road to contentment.