Columbia, South Carolina -- Life has its vicious contractions, ridiculous oxymorons, and hilarious impossibilities. Seldom, however, are they bundled together into one outrageous statement. Underestimating the mysterious mental illness residing in the evil brains of editors is a mistake. These people don't need drugs.
"Drop me a note or post as a diary or article or a series of stories on how to love a right winger," was my editor's latest light bulb of insanity, "Oh, and have a great day."
Love a right winger? Have a great day? Sure, no problem. Editors get their kicks in life by handing out impossible assignments to their army of helpless scribblers. And I just got mine.
OK, first one needs to start the day on the operating table, preferably with health insurance. You will need a lobotomy! But don't worry about lunch. With cognition ripped from your mental capacity, you'll have no complaints about lunch. Even the spinach! As for the sadistic nurses chatting away down the hall and ignoring your screams and incoherent begging -- what is left of your brain feels like it is being blowtorched -- no problem. Morality doesn't exist for you anymore, like it never existed for those nurses. Without the ability to think, your ability to make moral judgments has vanished.
But look at the good side. This opens up some interesting ramifications. Feelings such as compassion and empathy and love are now nonexistent. Thoughts like justice and freedom and progress are completely gone. You're no longer bothered by those things. You are now free! You are in the Land of the Free!
Within a week of your liberating lobotomy, you will have a stern handler leading you around the grounds of your new and very limited mental compound. You will learn to love the rough talk of your "brother." Although unable to understand why, you will accept everything wrong is your fault and that you need to be punished. And most important, you will accept without question -- no problem, since you can no longer question -- there is a compassionate and loving god who is thinking about you. Sure God is a hard if not brutal, will zap your entire family if you ever have the slightest sliver of the thought maybe God isn't always so nice, but you know "" although knowing is not really possible anymore -- God is always fair.
I'm sure that by this point you are following right along with me and understanding how we can love right-wingers. Simply cut yourself off from your humanity. This can be done on a hospital operating table or in a church pew or on the sofa watching FOX News. They all wield razor-sharp scalpels to reduce you to a beast in the forest of society.
In America today, separation from what makes us human is not really a problem -- well, for half of Americans. That half obsessed with religion and babbling on and on about Jesus Christ while getting their straightjacket propaganda through an ideological straw on one dimwitted TV channel. These are the Americans who year after year are successful "" stunningly successful, I should add -- in separating themselves from brain and morality as they walk around in a daze of hate and shit-eating smiles.
And now you know why Red America is called Red America. It's from the blood of the American operating table.
"I used to think, getting here at 7 AM, wow!" a short man with a black mustache says in obvious distaste, "Now I run here every morning!"
"We are all in the same trial and tribulations," says a heavy set man with tan baseball cap pulled low. "We are together in this, brother!"
"God is always here," another man says.
What I find most upsetting about these men is they look so normal, sound rational, even articulate. I can't see their lobotomies! No scares on the outside, only devastation on the inside.
"Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" a man dressed in a suit with a Marine Corps lapel pin asks walking past me. I look into his glowing blue eyes. "If the Lord tells you to do something--"
"I'm a heathen, sir." I snap back in nasal New York accent. "And I like it. Good day!"
Stewart Nusbaumer is a journalist and writer. He is currently on the campaign trail writing a book on the "endless campaign." He has written for numerous print publications and online magazines.
