Flash: Politics inflame passions

Film at 11.

So it’s no news that people go a little nuts when it comes to sex, sports, politics and God.

Myself included.

After all we derive some sense of belonging and identity from each of these activities. We investing each of them with a sense of immediate and personal importance both because they have real world consequences and because, before we even realize it, we are hooked right though the gills.

And when we get our loyalties wrong, or find them under siege, or think our golden idols are going to be taken away from us, we freak right out.

Every con man ever born knows this heartless calculus by heart; knows that after the coup de grace, it is this alloy of pride in our own opinions and shame in being taken so utterly that keeps so many nice little old ladies from calling the cops after being skinned out of their life’s savings.

And (he noted in passing) it is precisely that same cocktail of emotions that keep so many Conservatives loyal to the Dear Leader and his epic failures long, long, long after it has become painfully clear to everyone else that their ideals have been sold out, their leaders are liars and traitors and they have been greased, fleeced and decreased by genuinely degenerate men who have done genuinely evil and treasonable things in their name.

This is the Great Lie that ticks like a bomb in their bellies. The terror they dare not admit, especially since most of the biggest, loudest, hardcorest of The Duped spent much of the 90s mocking and deriding Liberals for "falling for" Slick Willie, whose worst crime seems to have been lying about blowjobs.

So stipulated that politics can get all itchily and frantically into our blood and make for the strangest of bedfellows and belligerents.

Still, when you get this snip from a story from the Steinbeckish end of the socioconomic spectrum…

“FEBRUARY 25--Meet Jose Antonio Ortiz. The Pennsylvania man allegedly stabbed his brother-in-law in the stomach after the pair quarreled about their respective support of Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. According to cops, Ortiz, 28, stabbed Sean Shurelds last Thursday night in the kitchen of an Upper Providence Township home.”
…

appearing on the same day as a story from the F. Scott Fitzgerald side of town that featured swear to God these actual words… (emphasis damn well added):

“Socialite Bunky Cushing's annual St. Valentine's Day tea at the Ritz-Carlton drew nearly 100 businesswomen and society names, all dressed in red, but the blue-state alliances still showed.

Laurie Davis, 58, the outspoken owner of Lulu's at the Belle Kay, a clothing boutique on Lincoln Avenue, supports Mr. Obama and says she knows "who's touchy and who's not." Pointing to friend and Clinton supporter Vonita Reescer, Ms. Davis says, "She's someone I can tease."

and these…

"It's hard to be a Clinton supporter right now," says Margo Weinstein, 47, a partner with Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP. "It tests your political convictions when you're invited to a party at Oprah's house." She declined the invitation from Mr. Obama's most famous supporter: "It's like a sports fan wearing the other team's colors during the playoffs. It's not right."

Delmarie Cobb, a supporter of Ms. Clinton and a longtime Chicago political and media consultant, has debated publicly about the primary with Obama supporters but doesn't appreciate the intrusion of politics into more personal settings.

"A woman in my Jazzercise class was hitting me about Barack. I had to say, 'That's what I do for a living. I don't come here to debate politics,' " Ms. Cobb says. "All of a sudden, I've got to go to work in my exercise class."

you gotta figure that perhaps, waaay down in the American psyche, it is just possible some kind of extraordinary, boundary-crossing, once-in-a-generational energies are starting to bestir themselves.