Genre Fluid

Have I told you lately that contention makes me tired? Just when I think it’s possible to pause and enjoy a moment of relative serenity, someone lobs a verbal hand grenade that begs to be addressed. I’ve responded to such provocations before, except that I found myself taking positions espoused by those whom I’d cross the street to avoid. I recoil, aghast that I have to share the same soiled intellectual bathwater with them. Yet the people with whom I should be allied likewise fill me with alarm. Who am I, anyhow? Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my Inner Reactionary in my mind’s eye, sitting and whittling on the rude porch of his piney-plank cabin, the tattered flag of a much-lamented Lost Cause fluttering in the Magnolia-scented breeze. For a moment he smiles and is oddly congenial—and then I want to hurl my copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States at him. This creature isn’t me—yet he emerges and grins gapingly at the worst possible times. I can sense him taking the steering wheel when I have A Point to Argue. I have so argued, much to my discredit, and mail has come in. Kind readers suppose a gentle word of correction will set me on the right path. Nope. Genetic therapy might help, but the fulminating yokel is encoded somewhere in my strand of DNA. He is as much a part of my family tree as the stump. Lately, when hot-button controversies ris