Turning my nose up at conservatives

Ah, Twitter. Both blessing and curse. It’s a great way to find out what’s going on in the world. It’s also a great way to kill time.

I was doing the latter not long ago when a tweet from filmmaker Errol Morris, director of "The Fog of War," lifted me out of my own fog and reminded me how I had ended up at Twitter in the first place.

Blaring “It’s better to be feted than fetid,” Morris set my mind racing through all the ways it may not be better. It may be worse.  It may be no different.  It may be a choice I'm not prepared to make yet.  Either way, it was a dare I took seriously – it's fun looking for connections between seemingly random words, and it's surprising how often there is one. But comparing a gala with a stink that won’t quit -- not as easy as it looks.

I thought a few moments then shot back “if it’s blue cheese, you can have both.” Ok, Colbert I’m not.  But Morris had now hurled me back, if you will, to the post I was writing on Tea Party crazyman Carl Paladino, who sent New Yorkers a mailer last summer that reeked of more than his usual bullshit – it carried the smell of said bullshit, or some other smell still to be determined. (His henchman, Michael Caputo, called it “landfill odor". Close enough.) My post was based on a New York Times piece by Peter Liberman, a political science professor at Queens College, and Cornell psychology professor David Pizarro on the “psychology of disgust” and conservative susceptibility to it.

Reading this story, the jokes, puns and metaphors had flown so fast I could hardly catch them.  That's why I had run to the warm embrace of Twitter:  to sort out the many ways I wanted to say, in essence – please stop me -- conservatives stink. As in:  Whenever something stinks in Washington, I think conservative. Who knew it actually made me think conservative? Or, conservatism is a rotting ideology, which may, ironically, be one of its strengths.  You get the idea.  Feel free to add your own below.

Many words in the “smell” family had already come to mind, including stench, rank, funk, foul, fumes, fart, shit, as well as the reactions they often evoke—sniff, whiff, gag, retch, pitch, puke, chuck.

And of course the ever-conjugable -- in the original sense --Stink, Stank, Stunk, a la The Grinch.

But somehow “fetid” had eluded me.  Thank you, Errol.

My twitterlude over, I sauntered back to Paladino and his smelly mailer, which, bearing the headline “Something Stinks in Albany,” was infused with an odor that made its figurative slogan real.  It was sent to 200,000 registered Republicans in September after Paladino won his primary against party favorite Rick Lazio.  It took a direct shot at seven Democrats who have been under investigation in New York at one time or another.  But its real aim was more subtle, even subliminal.

Research by Pizarro and others have shown that people who are exposed to foul smells or anything that elicits disgust are more likely to take conservative views immediately afterward than those who were not.  

One study found that people sitting in a room with a foul smell made harsher moral judgments about fudging a resume, say, than people sitting in an odor-free room.   But a smell wasn’t even necessary; just thinking of germs, or anything that fights them, drew  more conservative responses.  People standing near a hand-sanitizer in one study had more negative views toward gay men than those not near it.  Even cartoon germs were enough to evoke a negative response, this time toward immigrants, in another study.

Pizarro theorizes that early man learned to avoid outside groups that could expose them to germs for which they lacked immunity. This evolved over time into a “behavioral immune system” – not only feces, vomit or other germ-carriers caused disgust, but also the odors, images, behaviors and even people associated with them.  

Conservative yet?

In Pizarro’s research, conservatives scored higher on a “disgust sensitivity scale” than liberals, who apparently are less revolted by the thought of drinking a stranger’s soda can than conservatives are.  Simple observation would tend to bear this out.  Look at the dress, or desk, of a conservative, and no doubt the words “tidy” and “fastidious” would come to mind, with “OCD” not far behind.  Most conservatives I know are neat freaks who wouldn’t think of letting a dish tarry in their sink overnight.  My dishes, meanwhile, jockey for room. Often, there is blood.  My father, a Rush Limbaugh devotee, is about as neat as a man can be while remaining straight.  My mother, nearly as conservative, minus the Palin boner, thinks he’s a slob. No scale can capture her disgust.

Besides literal disgust -- and, no doubt, liberal disgust -- the most disturbing aspect of these studies is the xenophobia that seems to lurk in our genes.  It’s like Juan Williams in microcosm – it may be in our nature to fear people unlike us, and these fears may be exacerbated, even encouraged, by forces beyond us.  I’m talking to you, Fox News. Yet, as humans, we also have the ability to stuff them back in, override them with reason, tell ourselves not to heed all our fears, but think them through. Our lizard brains work for us, not the other way around. Yet, that’s something I rarely see conservatives do, at least today’s Palinized breed that exalts flame-throwing over fact.

That is an irony in itself. The party that disdains science – global warming, evolution, genetics  --  is not averse to championing it when needed, particularly the softer variety. Who can forget the famous “RATS” ad created by Republican pitchman, and CNN propagandist, Alex Castellanos that used subliminal advertising during Bush’s campaign against Gore in 2000? Or the brilliance -- and enduring legacy – of Frank Luntz’ crusade to engineer the language to Republican advantage? There’s also the ever-sophisticated data mining that blends what we do and say and buy with how we vote.

So it’s both impressive, and scary, that the Paladino campaign happened upon the psychology of disgust, and found a way to use it.  It's also unlikely. My bet is there's a Luntz link here as well  – the guy who massages conservative brains with words is just clever enough to have read this research and applied it. Still, it’s a mystery.

So, the next time you're near spoiling sirloin -- especially the fetid kind --  don’t be surprised if you start feeling like a red-meat conservative.

 With luck, it’ll pass. Like gas.

Is there a mosque I can protest somewhere?