Dusty corners. I would like to have a brain analogous in disposition to that of my ideal house - it may be nondescript, even a little seedy viewed from the outside, but is serene, light-filled, orderly, and well-furnished beyond the front door. What I do have is the opposite - a brain like one of those houses with a decent façade and a reasonably kempt front yard, whose interior is disorganized, with lumber piled up in the corner and books strewn about the surfaces of what should be a living room, unspeakable forgotten storage containers idling in the fridge, baskets of laundry on the dining room table, and thick layers of undisturbed dust. Occassionally a space is cleared, dusted, organized, and things accomplished. The room in which that space is made changes randomly.

A shade may be drawn in this process, allowing in a shaft of sunlight that illuminates something misperceived before, for in that untidy place the bulbs that burn out tend not to get replaced. Thus in one spot underneath a blown bulb was the memory of a bit of a radio show I'd listened to a few weeks ago. A young woman was admanantly insisting that it would be incorrect to label her as a liberal, for the reason that she was capable of understanding both sides of an issue. I scowled at the radio, indulged myself in a few "kids these days" eye rolls - exasperated that someone who came across as normally intelligent, engaged and curious was so careless and muddled in her thinking that she simply couldn't recognize that the statements "my considered opinions put me on this or that side of the political spectrum" and "I can understand and appreciate opposing views" have no necessary logical connection.

The host persisted, totting up her position on a defining roster of issues; all her answers put her firmly to the left. The caller persisted, refusing to take a label, for the reason explained above. I scowled some more as I pulled into the driveway, carped about it to the spouse while unloading groceries, then forgot about it.

But recently, as I was taking a general tour of the blogosphere and outlying punditry, ruminating on the theme of what stupid partisan hacks so many people seem to have proved ('twas a day for a grousy mood), it occurred to me that I had misjudged or misunderstood that young woman on the radio. Her refusal to accept an accurate label was not, as I had thought, a failure of logic, but rather the product of accurately observed empirical relations of facts in her surrounding political culture. Every person she knows who self-labels politically, I speculated, may indeed be a person who is incapable of understanding opposing points of view - never having been trained how to go about doing that, but to the contrary long encouraged in the habit of emotive responses restricted to the analysis of psychological motivations. Such people are an obvious feature of life, and I missed it; my apologies to the young lady.

Posted by Moira Breen at June 28, 2004 01:12 PM