Invitation To A Beheading - The Public Undoing Of A Limited Mind

There was never anyone like Felicia Roberts, a woman of limited intellectual range but with a loud, irritating, harping voice that attracted attention.  She crowed, hectored, and badgered until her audience either gave in or walked out.  She had that kind of effect on people. 

What did she hammer on about?  Donald Trump, of course, an easy target but one that suited Felicia to a tee.  She could go on for hours about the man, his devilish moods, his hopeless ignorance, his racism, misogyny, and homophobia.  She harangued her golf partners, her tea party guests, her alumnae friends and all her neighbors.

The thing of it was that she fulminated in a a vacuum.  Every single one of her University Park neighbors had flown a Black Lives matter flag, posted Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs, drove electric cars, voted solidly Democratic, and loved Kamala Harris. 

So did all her wretched hawking was pretty much for her own benefit - like crows cawing on a telephone line.  She felt good about herself - she was doing her part to rid the nation of the beast in the White House. 

Her social group was as unalloyed and passionate about the progressive cause as she, her colleagues, and professional associates. She lived in a cocoon, her private playground, a congenial venue for sharing ideas and opinions. 

So Bill Baxter took her completely by surprise.  Bill was a Trump supporter - a man delighted with the President's outrageous persona - the glitzy, Baroque ballroom, the two hundred and fifty feet tall Victory Arch, the Field of Heroes, and the fancy makeover of the Kennedy Center - and equally thrilled at his turning back the woke tide and pursuing a definitive conservative agenda. 

He was an invited guest at the home of a third party for dinner given in honor of a local poet who had promised to read verses which she hoped captured the zeitgeist of the horrendous Trump years.  Bill was a colleague of one of the guests who suggested that he would be a good addition to the gathering, and, a gracefully aging, divorced middle aged man, he would make the perfect companion for the many widows attending. 

Now, Bill was recondite about his political views.  Better to keep them to himself, living as he did in the same lock-stepping neighborhood as Felicia. Expressing anything other than the received wisdom - that Trump was a destructive, divisive interloper, an autocrat, a boorish, lowbrow, bourgeois bottom feeder - would be upsetting to everyone. 

Not a week passed when he was not asked about the American flag flying over his front porch - not a little Fourth of July ACE Hardware throwaway but a proper, full-sized banner. That must be a symbol of his Trump support, passersby asked to which he simply responded that it was part of his patriotic family tradition - Revolutionary War veterans, DAR dames, and Philadelphia Franklin relatives. 

He was not lying, exactly, for it was all true; but because he could not show any more direct for the President without having eggs thrown at him, the flag would have to suffice. 

So, he was prepared to keep his own counsel at the dinner, keeping true to form and not letting on his partisanship; but after Felicia had finally dipped into the last of her vichyssoise and stopped talking, he had to respond.  Something about Elon Musk being a Nazi-saluting, racist anti-Semite simply required a riposte. 

In his best, most polished, practiced eloquent manner, he fashioned a reply that acknowledged Felicia’s concerns, agreed that Musk had indeed ruffled many feathers on his way up and down Independence Avenue addressing issues of waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy, but wasn't she - Felicia - wandering into dangerously offensive territory.  Where was the evidence?  On what grounds did she brand him as a racist enemy of the state?

Of course Felicia had never had to construct any logical arguments regarding Musk.  Everyone she knew knew that he was a crony capitalist, out only for money, himself and the establishment of a cabal of like-minded bigots.  

So looking quite thunderstruck, she bumbled and floundered, looking for the right reply; but since she had never been asked for proof - who needed it for God's sake when the truth was right there staring you in the face? - she had no ready answer. 

Bill waited until she composed herself and then continued on the in the same vein - questioning her attacks on Musk, Trump, Vance, and Rubio - the band of thieves assembled as Trump's henchmen to take over the country. 

As one absurd notion after another poured out of the woman's mouth the more incensed and offended she became, the more her motor revved up, and the torrent of invective and ad hominem attacks increased in intensity and volume. 

When she paused for breath, he added one more logical codicil to his argument, and sat back.  Let the woman rant on infinitum for all he cared, showing her true colors and her desperately addled mind to all those around the table.  

When she stopped again amidst an uncomfortable silence, she was flabbergasted.  The usual applause and amens were absent. The wind had been taken out of her sails.  She finished her diatribe and could think of nothing to follow.  No one jumped to her rescue.  Nothing about the World Cup, the NBA Finals, or tacking on the Bay. 

Not that anything Bill said in Musk's defense - his creation of a hundred thousand jobs, exploring space, on the forefront of cybernetic healing (brain implants to help the deaf hear and the blind to see), in the avant-garde of free speech - had any traction with this devotedly progressive gathering.  

It wasn't so much that he changed their minds, just that he showed Felicia to be a blustering fool. Progressivism was a passionate calling, for sure, and  some measure of invective and even exaggeration was at times necessary, but such unhinged, demented outbursts did the movement no good. 

Felicia looked like a drowned duck, feathers all wilted and sagging, quacker closed, eyes distant and unseeing.  She felt deflated, dispirited, and lost.  She would never be the same again.

'It just goes to show you', Bill said to a colleague the next morning; but after such a wild evening he could be excused for not finishing his thought.