Right Wing Conspiracy Theories and the Southern Love of Absurd, Tall Tales

(Side Splitting examples of the political nonsense spewed by George Wallace, Lyndon Johnson and Ross Perot – and Abba Eben’s analysis)

By

David Gottfried

Today’s right wing loves to escape from reality and weave tall tales. They have cornered the market on hallucinatory lunacy, screaming:  Democrats and celebrities have sex with children and use their blood for satanic rituals (Bubba, we done always knew that Mick Jagger and Bill Clinton were devils), Jewish elites use laser beams from space to create wildfires in the SouthWest, the Parkland school shootings didn’t happen, Michelle Obama is a man in drag, etc.    

Of course, the propensity of politicians to lie doesn’t have anything to do with their political orientation.  But Southern politicians, like the weirdos of today’s right wing, have a predilection to tell lies that can’t fool anyone with any semblance of sanity.  For some reason, instead of telling lies that are plausible or shrewdly conniving as might a Richard Nixon, they like to tell lies that seem more appropriate for a bowery bum foaming at the mouth and defecating on the street. 

Consider these oldies but goodies from Southern Politics:  On the eve of the 1964 presidential election, Lyndon Johnson’s de facto chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, was arrested, in a YMCA men’s room, for propositioning another man.

The commentariat was beside itself.  The New York intelligentsia consulted their Freud and wondered what sort of mother Jenkins had, and the Bible-belting South consulted the blood and gore of the testaments.  No one was as hysterical as Lyndon Johnson.

According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, LBJ told reporters that the entire affair was caused by evil Republican waiters.   Our president said that Jenkins had been at a reception and that republican waiters put evil concoctions and drugs in Jenkins’ food which had induced temporary homosexuality.

Similarly, recall the hysterical antics of Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign.   Shortly after the Democratic Convention, Perot withdrew from the race; not long afterwards, he re-entered the race and had a tabloid-perfect rationale for his earlier departure from the race:  Lesbians, egged on by the Republican party, had planned to disrupt his daughter’s wedding and claim that she was a lesbian.

Also, I think the tendency for bombastic loony lying is embedded in Southern culture.  In the film “Tootsie,” the Dustin Hoffman character, who seems to be Southern, proceeds to regale her (In most of the film, he impersonates a woman) audience with an intricate, fanciful tale that rivaled the pathos of any yenta’s story.    

Finally, Southerners have verbal tendencies that remind me of what Abba Eben, the renowned linguist and Israeli diplomat, said about Arabic.  Abba Eban opined that Arabic lends itself to hyperbole and grandiosity.  Hence a battle is not merely a battle.  It is the Mother of all battles. Eban said that the Arabic language encourages speakers to be hyperbolic and to embroider their verbiage with fabrications. (He was a dove in Israeli politics.  He said that the Arabs have a bark that is bigger than their bite because of Arabic’s inflammatory properties.)   

Of course, Southerners speak English as we do, but their English is not the same as our English.  In the South, English has given us America’s best novelists and they prove that Southern English is a language of excitement, rage and adventure. 

Abba Eban’s ruminations remind me of George Wallace’s dramatic interpretation of the English language..  In his 1968 campaign, he said that the men in Washington were a bunch of “pointy-headed” bureaucrats who “can’t even park a bicycle strait” and that their fancy briefcases contained nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  When he extolled the common man, he drifted off into reveries of alliteration, claiming that he fought for the “Beautician in Beaumont” and the “Mechanic in Mobile.”