Posted by
Keith Arnold on Tuesday, October 28, 2008 11:13:54 PM
I had an interesting conversation about an hour ago, with my barber.
I suppose I should say "hair stylist," or at least, I would if I weren't so old-fashioned. Once every five or six weeks, I stop in and get a haircut. She and I talk about travel, people, jobs, the city. One of the first conversations we ever had was about barbershop customers in general; she appreciated the fact that I wanted a real, professional haircut; half her customers, or so it seems, are kids (including adults who never grew up) who come in for the buzz-cut, the near-shaved look, the one that you associate with toughs recently released from prison, or who want to project the appearance that any job they would qualify for probably involved a car wash.
Today, she was a little hesitant to talk. She was hinting about politics, but didn't want to upset a customer whose political leanings she didn't know.
The two of us sort of danced around the subject, until finally it got through my thick skull that she wasn't going to to make a direct statement until I gave her a clear picture of my own stance. So I took a chance and laid it out that I wasn't hugely excited about McCain, but I was completely against Obama, and the one person on any ticket I was excited about was Ms. Palin, and I would be voting for McCain and Palin. She was immediately relieved, and gave me a smile. "Yeah, good," she said, "I like McCain."
I didn't understand everything she said; her accent still is strong with old-country inflection, and her vocabulary doesn't always come through, but as we talked, it was clear that she was very put off by two things: Obama's character, and Obama's policies. We talked in more detail, and after about ten minutes, the perfect question dawned on me. "Say, when did you come to America?" I asked. She answered that she had arrived in 2000.
You see, my barber immigrated here from Vietnam.
Her arrival here in 2000 made me aware that she experienced first-hand the regime that ruled over that country after the pullout of the Americans, and I asked her what it was like, and whether it influenced her decision. "Yeah, Obama is Communist," she answered. And she would know - she endured the despot Communist rule for over two decades.
As we explored it further, we narrowed it to several things she saw from the Communist government in Vietnam that she saw as well in Obama. There was the economic policies of destroying the wealth of the haves; there was the controlling statism of government dictating from the top; there was the harsh, oppressive treatment of opposing points of view; there was the use of minions as proxies to carry our the dirty work of the Dear Leader; there was the elitism of the Dear Leader and his inner circle of power, and contempt for the peasants; there was the predominance of evil and violent men in that inner circle.
My barber finished off with an observation. She said that America was very different from Vietnam. Here in America, she said, if you're willing to work, and work hard, you can earn anything. It's not easy, but there's nothing preventing a common worker from earning his way to success. In Vietnam, there is no opportunity for success or climbing to a better class. But she's afraid that if Obama is elected, America would change drastically. What she was saying was that Obama would turn America into a Communist Vietnam.
I don't know if she understands all the nuances of the political season or how much of all the issues she gets, and I had to puzzle out some of her statements to make sure I understood her. But I'm convinced that she gets the core of it, and she's got the experience to know that what she lived through back in the 1970's, she clearly recognizes when she sees it here, and means she is seeing clearly what half a nation of Obama voters either don't see, or are pretending they don't see, or worst of all, want to happen.