Sewing Seeds of Discontent

He's fifteen. Not brooding. He has a warm smile. For a kid whose parents just divorced, he's surprisingly pleasant, which comes as a great relief since we are going to be on a business trip for eight days.

We just met and are standing at the airport gate waiting out a flight delay. We are in the same group of business people and their families about to take an eight-day trip. He and I are in the "families" category. Outsiders.

Relieving the boredom of an interminably long delay, we chat. At one point, the kid boasts in a half-joking manner, "I don't read books." Shocking, I deadpan.

His wingnut daddy - who happens to be one of my wife's slightly more esteemed coworkers, not to mention my client - interjects to make sure I don't get the wrong impression. "But he reads a lot on the internet."

"Sure he does. Don't worry, man," I say to the patriarch before switching to the kid. "Nobody has to read a book to be successful in this culture. Hell, reading the right ones can be highly detrimental to your career."

"This guy," he says to his son, "is, like, waaaaaaay left. He thinks John Kerry is a conservative." There is little doubt my reputation has beat me to the initial introduction to his kid.

"It's true," I tell him. "And I'm the only liberal you've ever met with an arsenal." Most of the guns in my house are my brother's, but since millionaires living in tiny trailers lack space for gun cabinets, and I provide the real estate for his firearms, coins, arrowheads and various other sentimentalities. I don't explain this to the kid.

We talk about guns and make small talk, his eyes traveling nonchalantly from my straw cowboy hat - my Meskin' hat, shaped by wire into a form that few white men would be seen in - to the gothic half-cat, half-reptile, half-something else succubus inked on the outside of my calf.

Throughout the week, we often talk about music. To his credit, the kid is not bound by one or two genres, although his taste ranges from pedestrian to loathsome. I am especially critical of the Nashville hacks on his MP3 player. "Boring. Formulaic. Fake." He never seems to know if I am yanking his chain (I am) or being 100% honest (I am), but the kid never closes the door. He likes the idea that Gordan Gano of The Violent Femmes wrote timeless masterpieces that perfectly represented the male teen experience - or at least, a good deal of mine - and that he wrote these songs while he was still in high school, which was what made them so raw and true.

The kid never heard of The Violent Femmes. I sang a few lines of Blister In The Sun and he said he'd heard it once or twice, but, where or when, he wasn't sure. "That's just the tip of the iceberg," I tell him. "You have to hear the all the songs on the CD to appreciate just how good it is." I recommended he listen to it alone. Loud.

I'm like an exotic animal at the zoo, both to the kid and his father. Wingnut Daddy can rarely resist the temptation to talk politics. He finds it hard to believe people like me still exist, and he loves to espouse all kinds of rightwing dogma in the constant search to see if we have anything - anything at all - in common. Mostly, we share a fascination with hallucinogens, although he is now terrified of them (not surprisingly, since serious introspection is a conservative's greatest fear), while I am just bummed I don't have any.

Day Seven arrives in a flash. We are all exhausted. Sleep deprived. Aching feet. Ready to go home.

The kid and I are waiting for the doors of the hotel to open for breakfast, a vitally important meal because of the brutal pace of the trip. By this point, he makes good-natured, half-wit jokes about my political leanings, and I reciprocate. He hates Jon Stewart - way too liberal, says the kid - and seems surprised to learn I ain't crazy about Saint Jon, either.

"I just think he's a pussy," I tell the kid. "That George Tenet interview was the most horrifying thing I've ever seen on television."

He loves Stephen Colbert. "Smart guy, huh," I reply.

"Very. Man, that guy is hilarious. I know he's a liberal, but..." His voice fades like the end of a song.

The kid waxes conservative on some other subjects, among them the French. "We saved their asses. What did they ever do for us?"

I give him a pitiful look. "I think the name Colbert is French."

He tries not to appear embarrassed. At fifteen, everything is a game of gotcha.

"Ever hear of The Statue of Liberty?"

Silence.

"Maybe you need to ask yourself why you believe the things you say you believe instead of just casually accepting them as having a factual basis," I tell him. "Get back to me after you read de Tocqueville. Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. You don't read books."

He says he never heard of de Tocqueville and I say too bad the guy didn't have a MySpace page.

I ask him to name something decent about conservatism. "Taxes" he says. "You say conservatives only care about ourselves and don't care what happens to poor people."

"Yeah. Except for the poor people who also identify as conservatives. Those folks are just scared. Scared because they're told by the rich conservatives that what little they have - whether it's their guns or their Mason jar of cash buried in the backyard or their religion - is in imminent danger of being destroyed by Evil Liberals."

"What about the fact that, because of us, poor people pay less taxes."

"Really poor people don't pay income taxes. When you're demanding more tax cuts, who does that benefit?"

Silence.

"Here's a Big Lie I'll bet you accept as fact: The Liberal Media."

"Oh, man. For sure."

"Those blowhards on FOX?"

"Not them. By the way, I hate O'Reilly."

I tell him even people who like O'Reilly hate O'Reilly.

"So, you really believe the millionaires - the millionaires and billionaires - who own and operate the corporations controlling broadcast and cable networks are liberals? You think they wouldn't tell a lie or two to suck up to power and keep what they've got and even pay fewer taxes while they're doing it?"

The kid forces himself to say aloud it's a possibility.

"Here's the deal," I tell him. "It isn't enough to advocate a position or policy or say you're this or that just because The Other Side is against it or just because everyone you know says you should." I expect a protest, but it doesn't come.

He sighs. There is a slightly troubled look on his face, one he does not want me to see.

"I ain't saying you have to know everything to form an opinion. But you have to at least make an attempt to learn something besides what other people are telling you to believe. Because if you don't, you're a tool. You're the easiest thing in the world to control - for other people to use you like a dolla dolla bill, y'all.

The kid smiles a little, but it isn't a happy smile.

Amazingly, I still haven't lost him.

A Chinese man opens the door of the restaurant, where our final breakfast together - him and his dad; me and my wife - awaits.

"I ain't saying liberal good, conservative evil. Liberals are suckers, too, and I tend to give 'em hell even worse than you guys. But what you need to understand is that what you call conservative is the dominant culture. And no matter who wins this election or that election, unless Earth gets hit by a comet the size of the moon, that ain't gonna change in your lifetime. Because, in America, it's all about the money."

We make our way to the restaurant, but before we get there I stop. "I forgot to tell you something. The last thing." The kid pauses and turns around.

"All that shit you believe that ain't true?"

"Yeah."

I lean in to tell him a secret: "You believe it because you're brainwashed."

"I'm not brainwashed," he says defiantly with a nervous smile that doesn't match the response.

"How would you know? You don't think people who are brainwashed actually know they're brainwashed? If they knew it, they wouldn't be brainwashed, would they?"

He thinks about it in silence.

I tell him not to feel bad about it. That he's only fifteen. "And when enough people regurgitate the same shit day in and day out - whether its on television and or at school or at the dinner table - it is human nature to become convinced those things are true. It's called conventional wisdom. And the worst thing you can do is accept it as truth without making an effort to find out for yourself. Because sometimes people are lying and looking for a tool, but, most times, they're just plain wrong."

The next day, daddy wingnut and I are drinking beer at a sidewalk cafe. He tells me the kid thinks I'm the coolest. "My reward for avoiding the Dockers Look," I reply, hoping my blush goes unnoticed.

He laughs and says, with some amusement, "After breakfast, he told me, 'Dad, Arvin said I was brainwashed!' He was really flustered. And, of course, I asked him, 'Well, what were you two talking about?'"

A big smile spreads across my face. "What did he say?"

"He said, 'I can't even remember, Dad.'

"I think it was tax policy," I said.

Laughter rang out from our table, echoing off the brick and glass, spilling into the parking lot. We ordered two more beers.