What I Just Overheard in the Teacher's Lounge

I just sat in the teacher's lounge of my middle school and listened to my fellow teachers hold forth about President Bush, the war in Iraq, and politics in general. Naturally they all agree that Bush is evil, the anti-christ, a religious fanatic, well not really a true religious fanatic, but a phony pretending to be one, actually an evil schemer who started the war to allow Halliburton to steal the oil, but really a simpleton who thought he could bring democracy to a culture that is incompatible with democracy, well they are but it will take a long time and he obviously thought he could do it overnight because he's naive and really just schemed to do it for Halliburton anyway....

In other words, they leap from one cliche to the next, never noticing that the cliches and conspiracies are mutually exclusive, and they talk and talk without listening to anything but their own voices.

But this is what really got me: Several of them said that we should release Saddam Hussein, put him back in charge of Iraq, declare defeat, pull out, impeach Bush and try him for crimes against humanity. These are your kids' teachers. And they really believe this. As far as they can tell, there was no sectarian violence under Saddam because "He knew how to handle them." (The fact that Iraq didn't have a free press and they wouldn't have been reading the Iraqi papers back in the 1990s anyway seems to escape them.) They believe that we haven't helped Afghanistan rebuild, that we should have invaded North Korea instead but we didn't because there's no oil there, that we should have invaded Iran (despite the fact that there is oil there - presumably - and we would have no justification to present the sacred UN for that.)

In other words, these people are limitlessly arrogant, uninformed, and LOUD. I sat quietly until someone asked me a direct question and I told them that I think we did the right thing and that they are wrong to think that Bush had no idea it would take a long time to bring stability to Iraq, as he had said from the beginning it would be a long, hard haul. Let me tell you, once they realized I wasn't part of the chorus they started talking at me a mile a minute. They would just spout accusation after accusation and not let me say a full sentence back. Occasionally I'd ask a question, like, "Are you aware that the Johns Hopkins study that claims an Iraqi death toll of 655,000 used only 47 cluster samples, which is an abnormally low sample?" But for the most part, I couldn't get a word in. They just talk and talk like a monkey jumping from tree to tree. Welcome to publik skool.

When you are surrounded by group-thinking ideologues, direct confrontation is an ineffective tactic.

Instead, reverse psychology works rather well, especially if you use humor/wit.

So they think that we should put Saddam back in charge in Iraq, just go along with the gag by taking it one step further. Wink at them and say that Saddam is actually a U.S. citizen working for the CIA, and that we should bring him back to the U.S. to become President here.

That will force them to respond that it's a bad idea, that he's not a U.S. citizen, or one might even go off the rails with a comment that "he'd be better than Bush," etc.

And that's a good moment to let the whole matter drop rather than go into a verbal war when vastly outnumbered and on their turf...because they'll have to think about their disagreement with you later...and you will will have shocked a few of them into seeing the hypocrisy of not wanting Saddam in power here but wanting him in power over other people.

Think in advance of what you want to say, always with the goal in mind of humor and/or reverse psychology to such types.

They are *expecting* direct confrontation from you. Anger. Lashing out. Shouting. Turning and walking away. Flipping them off, etc.

Instead, you should laugh with/at them, and when you can employ reverse psychology (typically by simply exagerating one of their own claims), do so with a wink and a giggle.

And keep it brief. Speeches/rants are not effective in such situations.

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