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• Friday, July 4, 2008 11:00 PM

  Diomedes, Part Two

  I've read your letters. You're human. So am I, and I am every bit the hypocrite at times. Human, you know. No saint. I just keep trying. It's a goal, not a status.

  While I once again largely agree with the thrust of your post, I find it aimed at a particular group of people which betrays a certain prejudice which, as always, blinds one to the wrongness of others, who look or act or smell or sound a little more like us.

  I am a lifelong Republican and a congenital conservative -- in the mold of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Dwight Eisenhower, even Barry Goldwater late in his life. I detest what has become of the party of my father, and I think I probably addressed most of your points in my previous post to you. It is a very strange place I find myself in, racially mixed but outwardly whiter than white (so that I can conveniently say I don't give a rat's ass about race), a southerner who has been called "the consumate southern gentleman" without a trace of irony, and also a "bleeding heart conservative."

  I believe in punching the big guy -- but while he is alive and in front of me.

  So I would say I have to relegate turnip to the same status as many of my countless dear cousins, many of whom pretend to be white or honestly believe they are -- and why not? They pass for white whether they know they're passing or not. Maybe turnip's doing the same thing for all I know. If so, I feel for him. I certainly do feel for his ignorance, and I do call it that because I have no evidence that he is an evil person (if he is even a he). I have plenty evidence he is dumb as a stump, but apparently he knows that because of the moniker he uses.

  That's how I deal with people like turnip, but if I knew him or was related to him, I'd still show up at his funeral and I wouldn't piss on his grave. He is a fellow human, and we're all of us far from perfect.

  The problem is that some of us are actually evil. I believe in evil as a potential, which I have found to be a sticking point with many atheists and folks from thataway, because it implies something supernatural. It's just an argument I've encountered. Clearly you have no problem with the concept of evil. I'm glad. I only wish you didn't seem to believe it is confined to below the Mason-Dixon line.

  You said something worth repeating: "...civility is not about being kind to those who are like you... that's just tribalism." Amen, my brother. And tomorrow I will go meet once again with my tribe.

  Pray for me.

  —AJCalhoun Read AJCalhoun's other letters
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