Right Wing Nation

First, I’m not making any of this up. Not to be cliché, but you can’t make this shit up. Anyway, I thought this would help explain why I tend to cross myself and run for the nearest holy water font when moonbats approach — not that she’s the only one. She isn’t. More later. But for now, Mary is enough.

I used to work with Mary. She had about the most severe case of IWBAH (I Wanna Be A Hippie) Syndrome that you’re likely to see. Disheveled–purposefully so. You could tell that she looked at herself in the mirror every morning to see that she looked sloppy enough. Straight (it looked ironed to me) hair. Hippie denim skirts and birkenstocks. She made organic jewelry — okay, okay, I don’t know that it was in any way organic, but if it could be, it was. Severely pigeon-toed. Tie-dyed tops. You get the picture.

And worst of all (at least for those of you with this sort of experience), she was doing a Ph.D. in Folklore. Folklore is hands-down the most IWBAH, moonbatty, nutjob-infested field in academics. Far worse than English. Far worse even than Education. Folklore is the intellectual equivalent of finger-painting. Even anthropologists sneer at folkorists, and anthropologists are right up there on the IWBAH Syndrome scale, very near the top.

Like most in Folklore, Mary had been in the Peace Corps, and talked about it incessantly. She gave an interview to the campus paper, in which she said she was disappointed that they had indoor plumbing because she’d gone there to experience the authentic squat wherever you are life. That got her the name Mary “I wanted to shit in a ditch” from me. (And believe it or not, they put her interview from this paper up, so everybody could see it. Amazing.)

Mary was constantly spouting leftist clichés. If it wasn’t the rainforest, it was animal rights, or holistic accupuncture ear-candling new-age-y health cures, or auras and channeling, or Native Americans and getting back to Mother Earth, or global warming, or evil Republicans (and of course paranoid conspiracy theories). Always. Constantly. Never did anything but Pointless Liberal Factoids (TM, Ann Coulter) emerge from her lips, save when she was talking about work, and even then, she managed to work them in somehow. It was amazing. She could take any topic and work some kind of moonbatty insanity into it. There were days at work I’d listen to her and shake my head, wondering, “How does she do that?”

I learned early on there was no point in challenging any of the nonsense she spouted, because there was nothing rational about her, just emotional gut reactions. She believed anything, as long as it came from some ultra-leftist source. Anything. I held my tongue most of the time, but sometimes, she’d just get so on my only remaining nerve that I’d tell her she was full of shit. But not often.

I didn’t dislike Mary. I mean, you couldn’t. She was harmless. But she completely drove me nuts.

Okay, well, there were some things about her I intensely disliked. Such as her sense of entitlement. She was a vegan, of course, and tended, when she heard that I was throwing a party, to invite herself along. Just show up at my front door and walk in. And then, when she saw that I hadn’t prepared vegan crap for her to eat, she would chew me out about it.

I was insensitive.

I guess I was, because sometimes, I wanted to squeeze her neck until her eyes popped out of her head like grapes. Being chided for not preparing a special menu for her, when she hadn’t been invited to my home, that was one of those times.

Another one of those times was, well, anytime I had to listen to her for more than fifteen minutes. And when she got going, she tended to get nuttier and nuttier — and it didn’t help that people nearly as nutty would sit around and nod and encourage her. Like one day, when she was saying some nonsense (no, I don’t remember how she got there, I was trying to shut her out) about how the Bering Strait never existed, and were inventions of the evil Christian European imperialist capitalist evil white people whatever to oppress or whatever the so very in touch with nature Great Spirit worshipping Native Americans.

I turned toward her and said, “Excuse me? How did you get into grad school?”

Yes, I know. I shouldn’t have. But I can only take so much idiocy.

She sputtered for a moment, then just as if a switch had gone off in her head, she went back to spewing leftist drivel.

She once sent out an invitation to a Spring Equinox party, where we were to bring a poem we had written to hail the coming of the Spring Goddess and share it with everyone there. Right. Sure. Fine. Like I was going to go to anything like that.

Like I said, she was harmless. But as nutty as they come. She didn’t try to appear halfway rational.

I must admit that after a while, I did develop a taste for pressing her buttons and holding them down. Like every time there was a pitch-in. I’d take veal, and make a point of announcing that it was veal when she was within earshot. It made her blanch, and that was satisfying. She did start in on the poor baby cows in cages nonsense once, and I promptly told her that was the only veal worth eating and cows had no purpose other than milk, leather and food. She shut up, I guess unable to figure out what to say.

And once again, yeah, she was nice. But she was stupid as fuck, and a moonbat in a seriously nutjob way. The only originality of thought I ever heard from her was her conspiracy theories: she could come up with some you’d never near anywhere else, so crazy Mike al-Moor would be ashamed to repeat them.

She was by no means the only person working there who drove me nuts, but she does take the prize as the person who did it the most. Everything about leftists that really irritates me is wrapped up in her. She is the poster child of moonbats.

What I never could figure out, though, is why I seemed to be the only one who found her to be just intensely annoying. It’s not like there weren’t a handful of rational people there; but they never had the same reaction. One found it amusing, and being a joker by nature, would get her going just for the fun of it.

I often wondered about that there. Nobody else seemed to get nearly as irritated by foreign students who wanted to go on and on about why America was an evil bad place and their country was superior; at least, nobody else admitted to being as tempted as I was to ask them why the fuck they were here, if it was so awful. Not Mary, certainly. She would nearly orgasm just talking about how her students had denigrated the United States; I would have hated to see her in the classroom while they were doing it.

My hypothesis is that most rational people have an ability to build up a callous around these nutjobs, and I was born without the gene. It’s untested, but seems to explain it better than anything else I can think of.

But it wasn’t just her leftist nuttiness that drove me nuts. It was her stupidity too. She would say on her way to class that they were going to talk about gender roles, then storm back afterwards, insulted that her Arab and Korean male students did not toe the PC party line. Not once. Not ten times. Over and over again, as if she forgot between incidents, or thought that if she did it enough, she would get a different result.

And when she wasn’t annoying me, she astounded me: I just could not understand how anybody could be so stupid and gullible, or how anybody could swallow all that multiculturalist leftist babble. And she did, without question. She would read some article about some new Goddess-y healing service or whatever, and come in all excited about it. It never occured to her to question anything, if it came out of Mother Earth News, or the Hippie Times, or she heard it from one of her leftist buddies, no matter how bizarre it was.

Mary was the Queen of the Moonbats. She’s at some university down south now; I wonder how she likes it.

Next up: NAQ.