It was another of those “convergence moments.” I’m out having breakfast at my local supermarket restaurant, which is kind of a Rick’s Cafe for beautiful Edina. Everyone goes there.
And as I waited for my Denver omelette, doomscrolling through the news, three old geezers at the next table, two dressed in matching Elmer Fudd-red plaid flannel got going on politics. And in that same moment I came across the story of freshly-elected Minnesota state representative Walter Hudson, holding court at some local MAGA-naut Republican meet-up.
I’d never heard of the guy but listening to him speak I immediately consigned him to the over-stocked Rush Limbaugh wannabe hall of infamy. Basso profundo. Theatrical pauses. Repetitive phrasing. Yadda yadda. All the stuff that convinces the dull-witted you’re a serious guy in the know. (So corny … yet, after all these years, still effective.)
Alongside a dais of head-bobbers Hudson told the room, “You are equivalent to a plantation owner who enslaved Black people and forced them to work for you if you, today, as a medical professional or just a member of the populace, demand that your neighbor take a vaccination to keep you safe.”
A million-plus extra deaths later and these deep thinking, attention-hungry libertarians are still flogging the “tyranny” of … vaccines. Otherwise known as life-saving medicine. Talk about a stale playbook.
(Predictably, Hudson has a … talk radio show … “Closing Argument with Walter Hudson.” I haven’t seen the ratings. But I’m kind of imagining Robert DeNiro as Rupert Pupkin in Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy”, cos-playing a Johnny Carson-like star in his home basement studio.)
Meanwhile, the geezers, each nursing a lonely cup of coffee, were getting worked up. The most talkative and putatively most “informed” was well into a riff/lecture on the “out of control” crime problem … in Edina, presumably (it’s a free-fire zone, I gotta tell ya) … and how Democrats are responsible because of the way they “restrain” the cops. I can’t be certain because of the ambient clatter from other patrons, but I thought I heard him spout out a “50%” increase over the last few years.
The element that glued this together in my alleged brain was a passing exchange in a recent podcast between a bunch of political pundits. I think it was David Axelrod/Mike Murphy’s “Hacks on Tap”, but it might have been Charlie Sykes’ “Bulwark” show. I was driving and drinking coffee and eating a donut at the time so I couldn’t write it down.
The context was the latest example of cluelessness on the part of some too well known politician, which led to the question, “What would you say is the percentage of people who actually know what is going on? I mean really know and aren’t just best-guessing it?”
They were talking politics, but I instantly applied this to myself and my life experience and came up with the number, “Five percent.” Tops. Of people who truly know who is zooming who and why, and how all the thread stretched between pins on a wall actually connect.
The pundits more or less agreed on “20%” … of characters they knew and interacted with practicing or reporting on the political game.
Being pros, they would know better than me, but I still put 20% in the category of “that’s generous, kids.”
I won’t belabor this, but whether the conversation is football, art, street cleaning, fashion, cooking, dog training or bar stool philosophizing I am forever amused at people prattling on on topics they clearly understand in only the broadest and usually most cliched terms.
Now, The Dude once wisely said, “Well, that’s just like your opinion, man.”
It’d be nice if all opinions rested on a solid foundation of facts — “information literacy” if you will — but no one expects that. You think the sun rises in the west, or Donald Trump is one big hunka hunka burning love … fine. Opinion.
The bafflement, for me, sets in when guys and gals like Hudson, the House Freedom Caucus, Kari Lake, geezer pundits, more than a few film critics I read, financial experts and major investors in FTX, paranoid neighbors and so on insist they’re dealing with facts. Not opinions. Facts! Horrible, terrible indisputable facts! Facts that place themselves (and usually they alone) at the center of the axis of veracity and authority.
Obviously, as a blogger supremely proud of my opinion and bizarre transmutation of facts, I have to place myself among the 95% you and yours should carefully vet before accepting anything I say as … mmm … bona fide.
But in my defense, out of sympathy and respect for my usually bored and annoyed audience, I try … try … to qualify my gas-bagging and separate what I know and what I only think I know.
I count you as one having the facts, Brian, and I appreciate you so much. Your approach and facts helped me during the Covid years and is ongoing!
Like the bizzarro world of Seinfeld, or the parallel universes in the superhero comics, there are facts and then there are the Kellyanne Conway alternative facts.
“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire
Over the years, I have come to know a few people who have been in positions where they might really know what is going on…and the one characteristic that they all have shared is that none of them where ever shouting what they knew from rooftops. They all displayed a quiet confidence in their knowledge, and never tried to force their point of view on someone. And they were always open to listening. In fact, that is, I think, the key difference–people who know are more interested in listening than telling. That is, after all, how they got the information and knowledge in the first place.