My Mother Learns The Word "Neo-Con"

[Plaid Adder]

I have occasionally posted here about my Republican father and my Republican brother. I talk less about my swing-voter mother, who identifies as a Democrat but has so far proven disturbingly susceptible to media bullshit, especially when it's delivered by the New York Times. (She loves Thomas Friedman's column, for instance. That angers me, but what can I do.)

Anyway, she has a herniated disk which is causing her great pain so she's spending most of the day sitting up in bed being bored out of her gourd. I called her yesterday to chat, and she starts telling me all about how this couple they've been friends with for 30 years came over for dinner last night and they were all talking about the neo-cons.

And she starts telling me how she looked "neo-conservative" up on Wikipedia, and she's read some articles about the neocons on Antiwar.com (I had to explain to her that it was a libertarian site, and then explain who the libertarians are and why Bush is driving them all bughouse nuts even though they normally are allied with the GOP), and she starts talking about the AIPAC and all these things, and I'm thinking, holy shit. My mother knows about the neocons and my father knows about the red heifer. Something is afoot.

Here's what I think this means, really:

My mother doesn't do alternative media. She's online, but she doesn't really use the web for news. They get the NYT and the Boston Globe delivered every day and they read the whole thing (or she does, anyway, now that she's bedridden). She also watches a lot of CNN and PBS (not much Fox News, thank God, though there is one Fox program I saw them watching while I was visiting). She and my father also read a lot of books. Their friends are probably a little more hip that way than they are; but still, my mother will not believe anything until it's ratified by the establishment media. If she's out there Googling the neo-cons, it's because the establishment media sources that _she_ reads are starting to talk about these things.

On the other hand, while I was visiting I failed to convince her that the NSA keeping tabs on our phone calls is a very bad thing. The struggle continues.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[Warpy]

1. The best I got from my pop was stony silence and a refusal

to discuss anything political. He was enthusiastically pro Stupid in 2000. He did confess he voted for Kerry in 2004. In other words, he realized I'd been right and he'd been wrong but he was damned if he was going to admit it.

Before my mother went blind, she was the more astute one politically. I remember her saying in 1968 during a Nixon speech, "If that bastard gets himself elected, we're going to see an impeachment." When her eyesight failed, her news got restricted to the Reader's Digest and the evening news on TV and her politics shifted accordingly. I do wish she'd hung in long enough to give me her take on Stupid. I'm sure it would have been vitriolic.

My pop taught me an important lesson, though, that good people get to be wrong. We hope they'll come around, but if they don't, it's their right.

[Minnesota Libra]

2. Hey keep at it - we are whittling away at the neocon/fundie...........

.....support more and more every day. Should be a lot of converted people by November:grouphug: if we just keep plugging away at each one. :bounce:

[MADem]

3. Send her links! Do her surfing for her...you might get her interested

in a wider palatte on the web!

[WiseButAngrySara]

4. You need to send her a link to DU's PNAC 101! ....n/t

[durrrty libby]

5. Two steps forward and one back….....still equals’ progress.

One can only hope such enlightenment is happening
all over the country.

[Lisa]

6. heard an interesting thing from a co-worker

Her fiance is French, and she was over there a few years ago, visiting her soon-to-be in-laws on a farm in Provence. They are in their 70s, don't have Web access, and rarely watch TV. But they must do an awful lot of reading on current events, because the mother started talking about how Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle give her nightmares! This was before Michael Moore's film came out, and my friend was asking me if I'd ever heard of those guys.

I remember a few people here on DU were talking about the Project for a New American Century, but this woman was miles ahead of most of us. She kept talking about how dangerous that group was, and how it was going to get America into terrible trouble. She remembers liberation in the 1940s ... and her dad told her about watching US doughboys marching along country lanes in WWI. That stereotype of France being jam-packed with America-haters is something drummed up by the "freedom fries" corps.

Anyway, I think about that French woman whenever I see the Bush cabal leering away on the news.

[Jack Rabbit]

7. So why does Mom think it's OK for the NSA to spy on us?

Curious minds want to know.

[Plaid Adder]

8. Her attitude is that privacy is dead, so who cares.

Since everything about us is available to everyone via the web these days, who cares if the NSA is stocking up info about our phone calls?

Basically it's hard to get her to see that there's a difference between the government having access to your private phone calls and private companies having access to it, or to understand that this government is not above harassing or blackmailing ordinary citizens and/or their political enemies with this information.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder