This guy is a typical conservative. His wife came up from a background of poverty, so he has no sympathy for anyone who lives in poverty; says they don't want to work.
And maybe this guy is a little more extreme than some conservatives. He seems to feel he shouldn't have to pay any taxes at all.
But like a lot of conservatives, when he argues, a lot of his facts are wrong. (I believe that these guys know that the arguments they use are incorrect. Conservative in the public eye, like politicians, do that, and this guy showed that he was doing it, too.)** He said that the property tax that he pays goes to our governor. I got out my property tax bill, and not one single item on there has anything to do with state government. It's all local and county: village, township, county, school districts, this district and that district. But nothing at all that said "Illinois."
These people are so accustomed to hearing, and parroting, common canards of the Right. They have no concern for what is or is not true.
He said he has no formal education, and that's uttered as a boast. Presumably education is a bad thing. I'm reminded of the days when I was a college teacher in a college town, in an otherwise rural area. When I had my haircut I'd hear the attitudes of the "townies" toward the university. We were faggots and commies who were there to subvert their wholesome, corn-fed offspring. They called us the "fuckalty."
And my painter reminds me of my father, who didn't know what he didn't know. Or maybe my grandfather. My grandfather always boasted about being a self-educated man. One day he gave me a problem to solve. I asked for pencil and paper, and in probably less than a minute, I had the answer for him. He was amazed. It was basically a rather simple problem in high-school algebra. But he didn't even know that there was such a tool. See, an example of not knowing what you don't know.
What does education do for people? Ideally, rather than just imparting facts, it also teaches critical thinking and has an influence on attitudes.*
And why do these conservative types, like my painter, glory in being uneducated, scoff at education and the educated? Maybe it's because they secretly know that education would disabuse them of a lot of their currently-held, incorrect ideas.
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*Update. On the subject of what a nontechnical education can do for you--a favorite subject of mine, see this link: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/05/26/oh-the-humanities-why-not-to-pick-a-college-major-based-on-a-s/
**Update (October 14, 2011). An example of how conservatives lie: This is from an article on Huff Post Politics:
A federal judge ruled in August that the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List had to stop making the claim on its website that "Obamacare" subsidizes abortions because the assertion is false.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
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