While I was perusing the back posts listed under the The Situationist blog’s category tag for "politics" I happened to click a link looking much like any other. On the other side of it was a NY Times article entitled: "Across the Great Divide: Investigating Links Between Personality and Politics." It seemed unexceptional at first glance. Little did I know that it would change my life forever.
"Folk music and a collection of feminist poetry may well be dead giveaways that there is a liberal in the house," it began. The ancient text (February 12, 2007) was surrounded by numerous arcane images designed to tempt a reader from the target audience to click an ad: Paris Hilton, John F. Kennedy, theater tickets. How many such texts had I read over the years through progressively thicker lenses? Hardly the kind of thing to recommend continuing, but something drew me on, nonetheless.
Half way down the first page I came upon it.
A truth of the sort so fundamental and incontrovertible that the adept counts it among the few intensity experiences of the patient Gnostic journey from wild-eyed radical to left-of-center Progressive (or "utterly undecipherable probable extraterrestrial," depending upon whom you ask):
Dana R. Carney, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, who worked with Mr. Jost and Samuel D. Gosling of the University of Texas at Austin among others, found that the offices and bedrooms of conservatives tended to be neat and contain cleaning supplies, calendars, postage stamps and sports-related posters; conservatives also tended to favor country music and documentaries. Bold-colored, cluttered rooms with art supplies, lots of books, jazz CDs and travel documents tended to belong to liberals (providing sloppy Democrats with an excuse to refuse clean up on principle).
I felt a neuronal cascade comparable to a grand mal seizure. A demented laugh issued involuntarily from my lips. My own bedroom is a veritable data-bank of confirmation. There could not be the slightest doubt of the veracity of the finding.
My bedroom is a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The horizontal space long since filled, the books are climbing vertically: Dame Berner’s Book of St. Alban’s, Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, the Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism, the poems of Sumi, Palumbi’s The Evolution Explosion, Scott’s Hermetica, Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, Krauss’s Physics of Star Trek. I had to set up my library in a storage facility some number of years ago and palmetto bugs ate the bindings off the six volume Coleridge and most of the British Poets series but they still read as well as ever. The years have taken their toll as well. The binding of volume 1 of Rilke’s letters is hanging on by a thread, of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is gone altogether.
It is as much an organism as a labyrinth, actually. Cheap oriental area rugs now host the most recent expansion of shelves, are no longer moveable. To relocate an actual section of shelving would require a feat of engineering on a par with building the Hoover Dam. I move around in it like the blank space in one of those little plastic chicklet puzzles in which the player must move the pieces around each other to form a picture or put numbers in consecutive order. A two day excursion, through clothing hanging down like jungle vines, is required in order to reach the "travel" section.
In the far left corner is a 5’ x 5’ clearing with a table and chair. I call it Control Central. There, stacked vertically, are stereos and speakers, a television, a crisscross network of antennae, and DVD and VCR players. All are scavenged or the gifts of friends.
A print of Botticelli’s "Adoration of the Magi" (set actually in the ruins of medieval Rome) is poised above the air conditioner. Another, a detail from of Renoir’s "Boat Party", hangs high on the wall behind the chair. Lower down behind the chair, below the "psychology" section, are shelves of review copies from publishers seeking book reviews. A dozen clipboards, laden with drafts of poems, essays and reviews, hang on nails protruding from a giant bookcase mounted on rollers. To the left is a folding table upon which are loaded the twenty or so books I am reading at any given time.
From time to time (too often, that is to say) I sally forth, cursing wildly, toward the sound of a persistent knock at the door, where, more often than not, the caller first stands peering into the inexplicable world behind me, and then absently stutters out a question to the oracle of the place. The air conditioner for the hall isn’t working. Could you come fix it? A toilet’s overflowing in the lady’s room. Could you come fix it? My car is making a funny noise. Could you come tell me what it is? Do you think the new supercollider they’re building in Switzerland is safe? What’s a hadron? Is it a good time to buy a house yet? Do you have any food I can eat? Was Oscar Robertson really better than Koby Bryant? Where is Kazakhstan?
They travel miles at times, every supplicant going away satisfied with his or her answer... or almost every supplicant. For, until fate brought me before the ancient text "Across the Great Divide", one question, asked of me again and again for years, has left me silently shaking my head, stymied. One question went without an answer: "If Democratic policies are always better than Republican policies, why don’t the Democrats win every election?"
Suddenly, as I stared at the computer screen, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. The final question was answered. Henceforward, when asked I will boldly answer: "Democratic parents! For the sake of all that we hold sacred, stop making your children clean up their rooms!"
That said, I will turn and re-enter my room, beginning, as the door closes behind me, the long and perilous journey to rejoin Stephens, perhaps, in the Yucatan where we will return to our investigations.