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I went to a friend's house for a BBQ last night. One of the people there was the son of a famous jazz musician. I don't want to use his name, but his dad is so well known (although deceased) that even non-jazz fans would recognize him. I'm talking Bird/Diz/Coltrane level.
Anyway, the night wore on and I hear a political discussion going on. Everybody at this party fell somewhere on the left end of the spectrum--except this guy. He kept on calling the people he was talking to "socialists," which was odd, considering the topics weren't about economics, so I don't know what socialism had to do with it. Wasn't like anyone was calling him a "capitalist."
I didn't want to join the conversation, but I couldn't help myself. Once I did, I discovered that this guy doesn't think 1600 dead is a number to get worried about; Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples, and no worse than the hazing he underwent in the Navy; Saddam was really going to give bin Laden WMDs if he had them; the wars in the Middle East have nothing--absolutely nothing--to do with oil; that Shinseki was a fool for suggesting we needed 200,000 troops on the ground to secure Iraq; that the only bad foreign policy misadventure was Vietnam, and thus it was proof that we were doing the right thing in Iraq--
Gah. Just remembering all his garbage makes my head hurt.
He was good-natured enough, and a genuinely nice guy. My parting words to him as I left were, "You're full of shit, but you're a nice guy."
But what really gets me is that his father was such an icon. He composed pieces in the name of civil rights. If he were alive today, I have little doubt what his politics would be. And still, his son turned out to be a bonafide American Idiot, masking his willful ignorance with 'patriotism' and by calling people socialists.
Heh. Go figure. I'm going to listen to one of his dad's albums to try and erase the stink of his son's politics.
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