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S A L O N +|+ ILL HUMOR+|+ BY IAN SHOALES

Ian's instructive idiocies

Apparently, the conservative movement is falling apart. Newt is permanently besieged. Poor Bob Dornan, fairly or unfairly torn from his congressional seat, haunts Washington like an angry ghost. Michael Reagan has quit the GOP to become an independent.
Last month, according to the New Republic, at the first International Conservative Conference, session topics included "Why Conservatism Is Failing" and "Diagnosis of Defeat."
Conservatives, like their hippie enemies from the dreaded '60s, just aren't very good at being in charge. When they're not destroying each other for not clutching ideology to their bosom as tightly as they should, they're fighting over issues most voters don't even care about. They hate Clinton beyond all reason, for example, and believe Vince Foster was murdered. Their few vital issues are snatched up by the president as soon as they're out of their well-fed mouths. Poor Republicans have been reduced to lip-reading the banalities on bad videos of guys in suits drinking bad Democratic coffee, looking for evidence of minor crimes that everybody knows they themselves have also committed.
They did manage to destroy the notion of liberalism before they imploded. Now it looks like the notion of conservatism itself may be destroyed with them.
As we approach the millennium, and of course, a paradigm shift, maybe it's time to take a brief look back at these defunct types, the liberal and the conservative. What were these dodos?
Two anecdotes:
Back in the '80s, I was invited to speak at a "benefit" for Nicaragua. I wasn't any great fan of the Sandinistas, mind you, but I was even less a fan of President Reagan, Oliver North and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
The benefit was hosted by a Marin County psychologist, semi-retired of course, who'd donated his ranch-style home to the function, which I'd been given to understand would buy pencils or something for the suffering children of Nicaragua. Many white men with beards and women with Birkenstocks were in attendance.
I read my little piece, a well-spoken young man with slides gave a presentation on conditions, and then a musician and his wife came up and sang an awful song about the suffering children of Nicaragua.
Well, it turned out that this entire function was intended to raise money so this musician and his wife could produce a record of this song, and a video, a video, which in turn would be marketed to buy pencils or something for the, yes, suffering children of Nicaragua.
This would have been bad enough, and if I hadn't been such a wuss, I would have walked out right then. But it got even worse. It turned out that actual Nicaraguans were there -- they'd cooked a tasty meal for this gathering, and were all crowded into the kitchen like immigrants in the hold of a boat.
I picked up my tamale and ran out the door. As far as I know, the video never got made. And the children of Nicaragua, I suppose, suffer still.
Second anecdote:
The summer before the Summer of Love, I had my very first job, as a busboy at a lakeside resort in a Significant Midwestern State. One Saturday night at work, as I stooped in my white shirt and black bow tie, holding out what we called in the Midwest a "relish tray" for a table full of belligerent couples in their Sunday best, an incredibly drunk woman stubbed out her L&M and said to me, "Are you disenchanted?"
"I beg your pardon?" I asked, as politely as minimum wage allowed.
"Are you a member of the disenchanted youth?"
Not knowing how to respond to this, I politely and hopefully thrust the tray a fraction of an inch farther under her nose. Startled, she lifted her hand, causing me to tilt the tray. A dollop of pickle relish fell from its side, and she recoiled with a shriek. Her sullen husband, who'd been glaring at me during the brief exchange as if I were his own son gone wrong, now lurched to his feet.
"Get up," he growled at his wife, gripping her arm and pulling her out of the chair. She tottered backwards from him in her high heels, her arms windmilling to keep herself erect. She never lost the toxic expression on her face, however. (To her all things must have been disenchanted, even gravity.)
Her massive man, in thick black glasses and a dark blue suit, picked up her chair with one hand, grabbed my shoulder with the other, and dragged me away to a small flight of stairs that led down to a carpeted walkway and vast plate glass window overlooking the golf course. He threw his wife's chair down the stairs and me after it (and the relish tray, of course, which I had clutched to my chest like a life preserver).
As I rolled to a stop, my eyes grew level with the line of trees over the fifth hole. My forehead came to rest on the cool glass. Lifting my head slightly, I could see his reflection, as he stood on the stairs behind me. He shoved his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, and said, "Clean it up, you little punk."
As he walked away, I got up and looked at the chair. There wasn't a spot on it. My white shirt looked like a bad tie-dye job though, covered with (moving clockwise) pickle relish, French, blue cheese and Thousand Island dressing.
So, because of an imagined slight, I was not only expected to clean up this dickhead's mess, I'd somehow been blamed for it.
Still, I must admit I've taken something away from these bizarre experiences. To this day I've successfully avoided food service jobs, all Marin County social functions, rock videos and physical contact with belligerent Republicans.
In the hope of facilitating a fundamental paradigm shift, these tips for healthy living I here pass along to you.
SALON | Oct. 30, 1997

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