From Common Dreams
By Robert Weitzel

This is not a parody. I swear. It’s all true.

Just so you’ll know that what follows is scientifically possible, I will acquaint you with a 2003 study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin.

The study found that conservatism can be explained as a set of beliefs and behaviors that result from a psyche controlled by fear, aggression, closed-minded dogmatism, and intolerance of ambiguity, compounded by mental rigidity and decreased cognitive complexity [dumbness].

Seriously, I’m not making this up.

This story is set smack-dab in the middle of the Wisconsin hinterland. But you will appreciate, once you’ve gotten to know a guy named Ron, that it’s really the story of our troubled world writ small. However, the spirit of the narrative transcends national boundaries and is no respecter of gender or race or religion or age or IQ. It is about Everyman and Everywoman and everywhere.

To begin, my essays appear periodically in a small weekly newspaper published by a liberal firebrand with a Molly Ivins’ sense of humor who does not suffer fools . . . including me, a fellow liberal, when I once wrote disparagingly about improvements to a local county road. I’ve often run into this guy named Ron on the op-ed page of this newspaper, though I’ve never laid eyes on the man. He’s not a member of our liberal cabal, by the way.

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