Bonnie Buqueroux (pronounced buckaroo) is a subscriber to my newsroom-l journalism discussion list who blogs at the Detroit News. Here's what she's thinking about today.
(OK, OK, so I made the numbers up and my math's not too hot. Remember that I'm the product of public schools.)
Before we explore U.S. voting history further, however, let's take a moment to define our terms. Who are these Boneheads and Assholes who are becoming an ever-larger percentage of the Disenfranchised Voters in the United States?
Typologies: Boneheads and Assholes
Since I don't have a particularly good handle on what a typology actually is (remember that public school thing), I'll just describe the typical Boneheads and Assholes we see all around us these days.
The Bonehead
Perhaps the simplest way to identify a Bonehead is by comparing them to the Merely Clueless. The Merely Clueless are basically sweet, decent and kind people who don't realize that they don't know anything. A Bonehead, on the other hand, sincerely believes that he or she already knows everything worth knowing.
* Research Protocol - Here's a simple test to tell the difference between a true Bonehead and the Merely Clueless. Challenge someone who is Merely Clueless - God created the Earth in seven days, it's the yellow crystals that cure cancer, SUVs are safer, George Bush is telling the truth about Iraq - and they will at least listen politely to new information. Keep challenging a true Bonehead, however, and they become red in the face and start screaming. A word of warning: males of the species can erupt in violence. Repeated attempts to make them to support their positions with anything resembling a fact can lead to injury. To summarize, the Merely Clueless may be educable, while a true Bonehead is not even trainable.
* Habitat - Obvious places to look for Boneheads include: fundamentalist churches, NASCAR races, pro-life demonstrations, Home Schooler Conventions, Promise Keepers and the Heritage Foundation. Boneheads thrive in places devoid of nuance, irony, ambiguity, metaphor, respect for people with different views and fresh ideas. Portray the world in terms of black and white/good and evil, with them at the center of the good guys, and you will undoubtedly find Boneheads aplenty.
The Asshole
Simple Assholes are easy to identify - just drive the highway at rush hour. But there are two important and discrete subcategories of Assholes - the Cultural Assholes and the Corporate Assholes.
Cultural Assholes typically specialize in specific as opposed to generalized hate. Think of the historical example of the late Sheriff Bull Connor of Mississippi. Some of you will remember him as the man who loosed the dogs and the water cannons on the civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1965.
Modern-day examples of Cultural Assholes include:
* Operation Rescue's Randall Terry (on abortion provider Dr. Warren Hern):
"I hope someday he is tried for crimes against humanity, and I hope he is executed."
* Rep. Rick Santorum (on homosexuality):
"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." In the same interview, he added: "In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."
* Rev. Pat Robertson (on feminism in a 1992 fund-raising letter):
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."
For a great example of a Corporate Asshole, it's hard to do better than Fox News anchor Brit Hume on the day of the terrorist bombings in London:
"I mean, my first thought when I heard -- just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, `Hmmm, time to buy.'"