Lee Wochner: Writer. Director. Writing instructor. Thinker about things.


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The scariest thing I’ve heard this Halloween season

On Saturday night, my wife and I went to a Halloween costume party. I knew one or two of her friends a little bit, but got to meet a lot of smart, interesting people — who were dressed up as Alice from Wonderland, a pair of breasts, a secretary from “Mad Men,” and so forth. It was a low-key affair with food, drinks and conversation. I had two beers then switched to water, so the wife could drink whatever she wanted and I could drive us both home if needed.

Long after most people had left, a new guest showed up. He was a youngish black guy, friendly, but not wearing a costume. He brought up politics — the issue I had strenuously avoided all night — when he loudly announced that he couldn’t vote for the “warmonger” Hillary Clinton, and so he was going to vote for… Jill Stein.

Then he proceeded to tell us why.

For the record, Jill Stein is a whackadoodle who supports all sorts of discredited anti-science theories. She opposes vaccination, but supports debunked “alternative therapy” medical treatments, which is especially distressing for a medical doctor, and doesn’t show the slightest understanding of how our economy or our national security systems work.

As he went on in his fervor for Jill Stein, he also wandered into other conspiracy theories, fashionable and not. If you hadn’t heard that the Rothschilds control the world; that the FDA is poisoning us as part of an experiment, or that (somehow) Mummer Gaddafi had had something to do with most of that (?) that you were just uninformed.

I couldn’t help drawing him out. I started asking questions, and getting straight-faced answers. Whenever I gently tried to rebut something, he replied that anything I said was just “philosophy.” “No,” I said, “it’s a fact. I live in the fact-based universe.” “There are no facts,” he said, “just philosophy.”

By this point, my wife was making serious frowning faces at me and jerking her head toward the door. But I wanted to hear more.

“I’ll tell you a fact,” I said. “If you put your hand in there–” I pointed to the fire pit we were sitting around — “it’ll burn. That’s a fact.”

“That’s philosophy!” he said.

I asked him to define “philosophy,” but he couldn’t.

I have to say, he never grew belligerent, and he seemed like a friendly, if animated, guy. He kept checking to make sure that we were okay — even while everyone else around the circle grew very uneasy at this exchange. At one point when he was afraid he’d overstepped because he caught my wife’s strained face, he leaned over to give me a friendly fist bump to show solidarity, even though he was somewhere in the eighth dimension and I was still on planet Earth.

Finally, when he said that Bill and Hillary Clinton had eight “hurricane machines” strategically positioned at various places around the globe, a young woman near me leaned in and said, “WHAAT? Why  would they do that?!?” Right-o, because the Clintons, if self-serving, would never wantonly damage their property.

At some point, I grew tired of talking to him. As the proverb goes, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will also be like him.” My fun exhausted, I agreed to leave when my wife strenuously suggested it again.

In the car, I said to her, “He seems like a nice guy. He’s not stupid — he’s done a lot of research and a lot of reading, just all of it bad. He’s just terribly misinformed.” Here was a guy who had seemingly read every crackpot theory on the internet, I told her — and believed all of them.

My wife looked at me. “You just met 75% of American voters.”

And that, less than two weeks before the election, was the scariest thing I’ve heard this Halloween season.

One Response to “The scariest thing I’ve heard this Halloween season”

  1. Dan Says:

    This was my wake-up call, written some time ago but still….

    http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=36581

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