Dad calls me a "conspiracy theorist"—pre-dawn screaming match ensues

[Lancer]

First of all, I am a 44-year old woman living with my retired father because I am on disability. He walks the floor every night wondering how he will pay this month's bills on his fixed income. (Yes, he voted for Kerry.) I woke up at 4:30, beacuse I was thirsty, and he was making breakfast.

Dad asked me, "what do you hear from the Democracy?," knowing I was probably up late reading this board.

I told him, "oh nothing, except it seems more and more obvious that this election was stolen. Hundreds of thousands of votes not counted, lost or tabulated incorrectly."

DAD: Oh, come on.

ME: Including several thousand in Carteret County (NC), in our home state.

DAD: I don't know why in God's name you believe everything you read on that damned internet. I thought you were smarter than that. You're always telling me something you picked up from God-knows-where (yes, something that later turns out to be TRUE, and I often heard it on the DU first!)

(This is where I threw a stadium cup full of chocolate milk against the kitchen floor.)

ME: No. I DO NOT get my information from some goth-wearing teenager named Jason from Minot, ND who spends all his time spreading lies on the internet when he is not looking at porn. (My apologies to kids who dress goth, are named Jason, who look at pictures of naked women and anyone living in Minot, ND.)

ME: (continuing) Karl Rove and the masterminds of this plot to make it appear that GWB received 8 million more votes than in 2000 are Nazis. Pure and simple. My gay friends are terrified, my black friends feel disenfranchised, and those of us on disability with astronomical medical bills are going to have to stop taking our meds or eat even less every month than we do now.

Our friends fortunate enough to have jobs in this country may not have them for long, and cannot feed or clothe their kids on $5.15 an hour. The war in Iraq is phony in every sense except that real young people are dying.

DAD: OK, so where do you get your news if not from these 'blogs'?

ME: (I list major news sources, Reuters, AP, NYT, WP, the Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, Congressional Quarterly, et. al. and remind him that bloggers are often faster at reporting the real news than the mainstream media.)

This wouldn't anger me so much if my father wasn't retired from a 42-year career in newspapers, where he was an editorial page editor. Back in the day when one had to physically pick up hard copies of newspapers to see what was going on in the world, Dad read DOZENS of papers every day from the US and around the world and even <<Le Monde>> in French.

He is computer literate, but no longer cares to be informed as he once was. He listens to NPR drowsily in the a.m., watches Dan and scans our local paper which is really hopelessly inadequate at covering even breaking local stories.

I may not be in the workforce, but I worked like hell for John Kerry. I use my time wisely to stay well-informed and to separate the wheat from the chaff. I know which internet stories are urban legends, which publications are trustworthy and which are crap. I also know the ring of truth when I hear it.

I concluded by saying (after I mopped up the damn chocolate milk) that since I was obviously fantasizing about the Fascists, that perhaps Dad would be delighted at the Supreme Court nominees GWB will soon recommend. Obviously, since GWB is surrounded by folks who are simply engaging in fraternity pranks, but who truly have our best interests at heart, we can expect a new era of heirs and assigns to Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. The troops will come home, and soon GWB will be eating paté with Jacques Chirac and rubbing chopsticks with Kim Jong Il in a symbol of global unity.

You tell me who's living in a dream world.

[UdoKier]

1. Even Walter Cronkite denies the JFK conspiracy.

And he would be a hard sell on diebold fraud. There is a certain kind of older liberal who chooses not to blieve what they don't want to believe about what our country has become.

[Lancer]

3. You're probably right about older liberals.

I expected Dad to change in many ways with age, but thought he would always stick to his political guns. BTW, taking my life into my hands here, I don't believe in any JFK conspiracy, but that's another topic for another day.

[UdoKier]

4. You believe Oswald as a lone nut gunman?

Wow. THAT is tinfoil hat stuff to me.

I don't pretend to know who the conspirators are, but the notion that Oswald alone cold have done that is preposterous.

[Lancer]

5. That isn't what I said, and it is not the intent of my thread

to reopen this story. Thanks.

[UdoKier]

7. You either believe there was a lone gunman or there was a conspiracy.

Feel free to not discuss it, but get your terms straight. If there was more than one person involved, it was by definition a conspiracy.

[mopaul]

2. very visual story

i liked it. i also like your anger and the way you handled the breaking point.

we all need to discover our breaking point

[SmokingJacket]

6. Don't blame your dad....

It's almost impossible to get your brain around what just happened. I feel like some of us can do it because we've been reading, reading, reading for the last two or four or whatever years, and have seen this bizarre THING happening: the death of truth.

Fact is, the electoral system is broken, and I hate to say it, maybe forever. The machines are made by a company with strong ties to one party, and we the people have no way of knowing what goes on in them without examining the source code, which is a tightly controlled corporate secret. Hello, WHAT??? Not a conspiracy theory, a FACT. Not only that, but absentee, provisional, and other kind of ballots are mishandled constantly because there's no consensus on how to deal with them. You have to trust the repubs not to cheat in this situation, because we've failed to make cheating impossible. Trust the party that lied to us about WMD, etc? Sorry, not me.

Your dad sounds too worried about his own situation to have absorbed the change that has occurred.

Frankly, all too many people are unwilling to seriously consider "tinfoil hat" because they're afraid of looking nutty. Don't forget what Hitler said about the Big Lie:

"All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. "

There you have it.

Sorry for the long post but your post really moved me.

[Junkdrawer]

8. Your Dad is not alone. NPR spends millions upon millions...

of dollars and a HUGE effort to present a "believable", comforting view of the world and the Bush Admin to once-informed individuals. It's really much harder work than simply getting out the truth. Hell, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now does that with a tiny staff.

And, as the world gets more and more frightening, a LOT of people will donate BIG BUCKS for just that kind of narcotic.

Human. All too human.

[Sugarbleus]

9. Lancer, I'm sorry you had to "duke it out" with your father..but

it's late, I'm tired.........and I had to laugh at your last paragraph...it's a keeper. LOL

Overall, your rant with dad was excellent. Hang in there friend.:hi:

[Awsi Dooger]

10. You had me at chocolate milk

I love chocolate milk! Couldn't read any further. I would have licked your kitchen floor.

And yes Oswald acted alone. Lock of all eternity. Dan Rather conclusively deminstrated there were four shots fired, one much earlier than anyone estimated. Vibrations on the Zapruder film that match pefectly. You can see the little girl turn her head in the infield toward the school book depository immediately. ABC demonstrated it again a couple of years ago with Peter Reynolds.

Once in a while the guy who bought the gun, tok a potshot at a diplomat a year earlier, fled the scene and killed officer Tippett before hiding in the Texas Theatre is actually the one who pulled the trigger. Bizarre theory, I concede. Much more likely two+ gunmen were able to simultaneously fire shots, and hit Kennedy in a downward trajectory in the back of the head and the back of his neck from a grassy noll at his lower front right.

[mopaul]

11. respectfully, bullshit

i've shot animals before, and when you shoot a man or an animal in the back of the head, the head shoves forward, not backward.

kennedy was shot from in front, not behind. his head and his brains went flying backwards. the killshot came from directly in front of the car, from a man whole cover that's still there today.

but it was so long ago

[Lancer]

12. Awsie, when did the perfectly ordinary, useful phrase

"conspiracy theory" become the exclusive domain of those wishing to dissect the John F. Kennedy assasination?

I simply do not understand it.

It's like saying that only what the Pope eats has a "catholic taste," or that Al Gore cannot get a "conservative estimate" on the cost of repairs to his car.

[Zuni]

13. The book Case Closed demonstrates pretty well it is possible

I was very impressed when i read it.

[HFishbine]

14. Lancer, what county are you in?

There were voting problems across the state:

http://www.wral.com/news/3891488/detail.html

[KansDem]

15. A DUer once summed it up rather nicely...

"All criminal investigations begin as conspiracy theories..."

I forgot who said it, but this statement will resonant with anyone who accuses another of being a "conspiracy theorist." I've used it a couple of times when so charged and it tends to shut the accuser up.

[Nederland]

16. Something you won't like

You tell me who's living in a dream world.

Answer: You are.

Perhaps when you're older you'll appreciate your Dad more. For now, I expect you just want me to fuck off.

[Tsiyu]

17. Girlfriend, YOU ROCK!!!!!!

Your post made my day. That's the spirit. We can't go back in our hidey holes.

And I bet you cleaned that mess up vociferously!


:yourock: :toast: :party: :toast: