The off switch in Deplorable thoughts

Had another Nathe blow-up last night. It didn’t surprise me. The fuse was lit the moment I allowed him to start talking politics. What surprised me was what caused the actual explosion.

Given the fact that every political conversation we’ve had in the past year or so has ended up with Nathe spitting out a vulgarity that’s supposed to make me dissolve into a puddle of unhappiness and then stalking out angrily, I knew where we were headed when we started.

About that word and many others belike - I can say them if I want to, if it serves a purpose in the point I’m making. I can hear them too and not be moved by anything but a feeling that the speaker must have a limited vocabulary in order to need to use such poor linguistic tools. I am not afraid of “offensive” words and usually use the actual words when talking about them, divorcing them from their power and emotional magic. But I am aware that you can only do that when your audience is known and like minded. Here, since I don’t know who is reading me and I prefer not to offend when offense is not intended, I refer to such words obliquely.

Needless to say, Nathe supports the current president. Nathe is one of the core supporters and cannot, will not, be shaken from his belief that the president is just being picked on. He forgives any foibles or faux pas as either proof of his maverick genius or simple missteps by a businessman learning the ways of politics.

Having a political conversation with Nathe is to be avoided whenever possible. When I allow him to force me into one (because he’s desperate to show me the error of my ways), I have to remember to disengage emotionally and realize that there is no real debate here because neither of us will be persuaded by the other’s “logic.”

So I let him talk, a lot, and I counter (calmly) now and again when he says something totally outrageous because he wants to be outrageous, because he wants to “win” by pissing me off. If I get angry, then he can decide I’m incapable of coherent thought.

I’ll admit, when I see him going there, when I see him just trying to make me angry, I take a guilty bit of pleasure in turning the tables on him. It’s not nice, but it’s where we always end up going and he always ends up stalking off. By his standards, I do believe this means I win.

By the way, when I say he’ll say anything just to be outrageous, I mean he’ll say just about anything. At one point last night he argued that Hitler wasn’t really a bad person, he was just a political genius whose methods happened to be at odds with accepted social norms. “Okay, so you reject the concept of evil and the idea that evil should be condemned and thwarted whenever possible - evil being, for instance, the systematic murder of millions of people,” was my comment. This was followed by a long explanation (slow methodical man-splaining at its finest) of how naïve and simple my thinking is.

Anyway, we talked for several hours last night, over dinner, before and after, and I managed to let him go on and on without letting him get to me. It was actually rather fascinating to hear him defend the president’s right to lie and the righteousness of his lying in the face of proven facts.
When the argument to defend the man is “You can’t listen to his words!” it’s obvious that the universe of alternative facts has been embraced and you’re talking to a pod person. It’s almost as amusing as it is frightening.

I finally stopped the crazy train, though, when he decided to start attacking our mother. Honestly, I don’t even remember what led him into saying “It’s like Grandma, and Mom to a greater extent, they were such master manipulators.”

Seriously?
He was going there?
Seriously?

I’m fairly certain it was because, after hours of my listening to him spew and not getting riled, he thought he needed a sharper knife to get through my skin, to induce the anger he wanted to elicit from me.

Like all the best incendiary barbs, this one was half true. My grandmother was an intensely twisted woman. I loved her, undeniably, but even from an early age I was aware of her constant emotional manipulations and elaborate guilt webs. So call that woman a master manipulator and I’ll let you have that one, but unless our mother happened to be totally schizoid in the faces she showed each of us, Mom doesn’t deserve the title.

But there are just some things that are so distasteful that I don’t need to allow him to take me there. I don’t have to.
If Nathe really has twisted up some dark feelings about Mom, I don’t want to know,
and if he’s just willing to say rotten things about her to win a “debate,”
I want to hear it even less.

I didn’t blow up, as I might have, or melt down as I was supposed to,
I simply and calmly asserted an unwillingness to discuss our dead mother in derogatory terms.
I made certain not to raise my voice or charge my tone.
I just said, “You can say whatever you want to about Grandma, but we’re not going to there with Mom.”
Because I certainly wasn’t.

And that’s when the boom occurred.
I was caught off guard by the vehemence of his reaction. It still baffles me that he immediately, absolutely immediately, lost it. Up from his chair, he started for the door, “That’s right, you have to pretend she was a saint.”

Well, no.
“She wasn’t, but we’re not going to continue talking if you’re going to speak of her like that.”

“Well, F you!” he shouted, using a few more letters and a lot more volume than I have written and he was gone.

I took a guilty bit of pleasure at the lovely quiet he left behind.
Perhaps I will have to admit it.
I, true to the blood of my maternal line,
am a masterful manipulator with a special talent to irk a certain man.
Whatever.
By his own rules, I do believe I won
again.

Last updated August 26, 2017