Michele Bachmann's Holy War
I recall skimming through this article around the time that it came out – skimming partially due to a short attention span, and partially due to the fact that it’s hard to even read about this stuff without pulling a Professor Farnsworth. But my friend Zach Alig just brought my attention to this paragraph, which is incredibly insightful and really gets to the heart of my frustration about dealing with with the Tea Party mentality – and I’d expect nothing less from the article’s author, Matt Taibi:
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
It’s an instinctive thing to dig in one’s heels when faced with opposition, but I’ve always assumed that a part of becoming an adult was fighting that instinct, even just a little. The question now is: how do you have a conversation or a debate with someone who only becomes further entrenched the more they are faced with contrary points of view?
