Confronting a closed Iowa mind

A 1970s high school friend reached out to me recently, unsure how best to deal with another shared acquaintance from that era. The acquaintance in question has in his twilight years gotten rigidly dogmatic to the point of unreasonableness. 

He is now given to strongly implying that all who disagree with his trumpeted ideological pronouncements are bigots beyond redemption and of horrible historical aspect. An inflexible opponent of President Trump and all he stands for, this shared acquaintance has even taken to ringing the hysterical 'Nazis' alarm bell currently popular with what Pat Buchanan used to term the 'beads and sandals crowd.' 

Of course, by throwing such references around for momentary political advantage, Left alarmists are cheapening the monumental horror they pretend to be cautioning against, as well as reprehensibly doing dirt to the memories of millions who were killed in the actual Holocaust.

But do not waste time searching for rationality or moral consistency in their ill-considered bleatings.

Now, it may well be that this shared acquaintance's 'I'm always right, no other view merits consideration' attitude may stem, at least partly, from his longtime residence in the hard-Left bubble of college town Iowa City, Iowa. He's perhaps surrounded by career university student/grey-beard Wavy Gravy types droning endlessly about dialectical materialism, Kierkegaard, and the supposed virtues of open borders and the Obama Administration.

And he is, apparently, proud of having adhered to identical prejudices since his long-passed days of callow youth. In some reckonings, recalibration and even outright epiphany are thought weaknesses to be disdained, not the sometimes logical products of intellectual openness and maturation.

Changing one's opinions can speak of reasonableness and strength. I've reconsidered old assumptions and found not all were valid. And I've looked to see whether particular opinions I espoused were in line with deeper values. Sometimes, I've adjusted my views toward that end.

A story: In the late-1980s, I went through a regrettable period in which I was ultra PC, challenging everyone on their conversational word choices, Once, when I had done that (needlessly), someone quietly told me I was being as socially unpleasant as the actual bigots I believed myself to be combating.

The irony? The guy who pointed that out to me was the shared acquaintance, himself; he is today doing the very same thing, seemingly unmindful of his own intolerance and unpleasantness.

His recent blasts in that regrettable tenor remind me of an old Lou Reed lyric: "You're still doin' things I gave up years ago."