[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 10, 2006]

Last night I pulled into a favorite frozen-custard stand and ran into a young acquaintance who works as a technician at the nearby theater whence I had just come.  I hadn't seen him for months.  I parked next to his Suzuki GXR and we discussed motorcycles for a minute.  

His companion for the evening was an attractive blonde who appeared to be in her early 20s.  She had a pleasant smile and told me she wanted to be a professional actress, though she had never acted before.  She was going to audition for a role in the aforementioned theater's upcoming production of "Rocky Horror Picture Show," which I thought to myself would be good for her because that show has no acting requirements to speak of.  

My acquaintance told me that his brother had finally been sent to Iraq.  I told him that I wished his brother good luck, good health, and success in killing as many of the bad guys as possible.  At this, the blonde became quite animated, though her smile did not dim.

"Why do you support murder?" she asked me.

"I don't support murder," I said gently, sensing where this was going.  "Are you suggesting that soldiers who kill to defend innocent people are exactly the same as the deliberate murderers of the innocent the soldiers are trying to defend?"

"Well, yeah, particularly since that idiot hired those thugs to fly those planes into those buildings," she said, as her escort for the evening grinned at me and rolled his eyes to suggest that he's seen her go off like this before.

"What idiot?  Bin Laden?"

"No!  George Bush!"

So I asked her, "Do you really believe that Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks?  You know that makes no sense whatsoever, don't you?  Why in the world would he do something so crazy to make himself look bad and make his presidency a living nightmare for himself, not to mention for the rest of the country?"

"I've read a lot of things that suggest that there was a conspiracy!" she said, at which point her friend added that he had a DVD that alleged a conspiracy and that he thought that there were some shenanigans on the president's part.

"If that were the case, I wouldn't be so sanguine about my brother's putting himself in harm's way," I told him, adding that for them to believe in a conspiracy would mean that they would have to believe a whole series of things that were so unreasonable and illogical that no rational person would think they could be true.

The blonde blurted:  "All right, then prove me wrong.  Prove me wrong RIGHT NOW!"

"Most conspiracy theories about historical events are wrong," I replied, "because they are too convoluted to be reasonable.  Conspiracies are difficult to prove, but almost impossible to disprove.  Many people believe that the existence of God is a conspiratorial idea made up by a bunch of humans.  Wishing doesn't make something so, and belief alone does not call God into existence.  But even so, there's no way I can prove that God does not exist."

The woman seethed through her smile and said that I was not taking her seriously, and it was making her angry.  Her actual words were the most profane available in the English language, and I suppose I should be grateful that she felt comfortable enough to hurl them at someone four decades her senior whom she had known for less than three minutes.

I said, "Now you're talking like a typical liberal with the personal attacks here."

"Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm proud of it!" she shot back.

"Well, please tell me, then, how Bush can be so stupid and yet mastermind such an elaborate plan with the aplomb of an evil genius?"

She actually tried to explain it by sputtering: "Well, then, you tell me why the United States never invades countries that don't have oil!  Just look at the oil prices!  They go up and down!  Don't tell me I don't think.  I'm the one who's a genius!"

I asked her whether she was a fellow member of Mensa.  She said that she had not taken the test, but some guy told her she was a genius because she can "set up a PHP site in six months."  Had I been smart enough to know what that meant, perhaps I could have said something more appropriate.  Instead, I asked her whether she thought she was smart enough to be President.  At that point the smile vanished, and she looked down at the sidewalk and said quietly, "No."

Then she picked right back up again and said, "But I don't think I'd be interested in doing that!

"I just think that we shouldn't put up with a President who stole both the elections he says he won.  Everyone knows he rigged those elections!  You can't tell me he didn't!"

"Sure I can," I said ever so kindly.  "There's no evidence that he did any such thing.  You're saying the same things about the election that you're saying about the 9/11 attacks, that they were both hoaxes.  Why would you want to believe anything like that? Because you like being miserable?  It's such a stretch of credibility to buy into nutty conspiracy theories that I'm amazed you can function day-to-day under such a cloud of irrationality."

It's difficult to make much headway with people who confuse thinking and nonthinking.  Both the blonde and her biker beau agreed that the United States was the "worst country in the world," in response to which I quoted Churchill on democracy and noted that we're the only country people actually wait in line to get into.  That did not seem to change their minds.   In fact, the blonde said that England was better, though she'd never been there.  

This exchange confirmed by observation that people who are liberal or leftist in their political views are more likely to believe what they want to believe.  Although "everyone believes what he wants to believe" is true to a point and even a cliché now, it's usually liberals who say it and live it.  In contrast, the people who are more "conservative" in their political views tend to believe in things not because they want to, but rather because their intellect tells them they must.  Their beliefs are based on evidence, and they are more likely to be "conservative" in their recognition of facts (i.e., they are less willing to "liberally" make facts up because it makes them feel good).  If new evidence convinces a conservative to change his thinking, then he will probably change his thinking.  Liberals can be persuaded by evidence as well, but they tend not to believe evidence that seems to contradict their artificial construct of the world as they wish it, and they tend to be too quick to believe rumors that fit their worldview before checking them out thoroughly.  They are likely to make up a conspiracy theory to justify the way they already think.  There are those who will say that if the words liberal and conservative in this paragraph were reversed, the statements would also be true.  I concede this to be a valid argument, but I still think that it is substantially truer the way I stated it.  Unlike most liberal haranguers, I do not hesitate to add that I might be wrong.

I must admit that it was fun talking to these two young, supposedly educated people about their country, but the longer we conversed the more like brick walls they seemed.  Besides, I had finished my custard, so I left, a bit depressed despite being full of sugar.