Consternatio

Yesterday, while walking the dog in town, I was across the street from our old post office building -- a nice 20’s era Carnegie-type edifice -- when I spotted a petition table in front. The first words on the poster I glimpsed were “Impeach Obama,” and only after I registered that did I see the photograph that accompanied the caption above: Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache. At that point, one of the young pea-brained, neo-fascist dudes manning the table looked over and gave me a shit-eating grin -- proud of himself and full of adolescent, testosteronical voltage -- and all I could think to do was flip him the bird. Which I did.

His reaction was to take offense. Imagine that.

What I did, in retrospect, was immature and even stupid -- who knows, he might have chased me down and beaten the crap out of me with a bike chain hidden in his camouflage cargo pants -- but it was instinctual and reflexive. What he did was equally offensive but backed by intention and forethought. He meant to offend. He thought he was cute as hell with his Hitler photo and his barely concealed racism (I want to know where these turds were when Bush was up late every night shredding the Constitution). He’d downloaded the petition from some Larouchian web site, no doubt, and picked the day to set up in front of the post office -- and in a dominantly liberal part of our little town, too. He wanted to provoke, and he provoked me into acting like a moron.

I’m not proud of it, but that I offended him for a split second gave me a burst of adrenaline and, maybe too, testosterone, though I realize that this kind of reaction is exactly what, on a larger scale, makes violent conflict the human mode of attacking disputes.

We see how well that goes. The Israeli raid on that humanitarian flotilla is just one recent example.