The Informal Waffle House Survey….

It’s funny. No matter where you live and where you go there’s always somebody ready to jar you back to reality.

I was doing one of my periodic tours of the Waffle House chain, having stopped at about two dozen of them on my galavanting around the south, a place that has always been a fortress for regressive thinking combined with Christian certitude that everyone who wasn’t an Evangelical had to be a radical leftist who didn’t share their values….

Anyway, the food is good, loaded with butter and all the things that are bad for you, but it’s a great place to get the Southern Evangelical view of the world.

Of course, at that point, I believed that the whole world was embracing the debates between Obama and Hillary and the world belonged to the democrats.

But the Waffle House has a way of straightening you out fast!

This is the place where everyone said, “hello” and ever smoked so that a haze kind of extended over the place.

No more. Smoking’s out and nobody rushes to say, “hello” any more.

But the attitudes are pretty much the same although most behind the counter will admit that things are a lot harder and one has to work longer hours just to put food on the table.

Nevertheless, the conservative crowd still comes by and holds court.

The other day, during breakfast outside of Orlando, I happened to sit next to one of these self-appointed judges holding court with his cronies all around talking about how badly McCain has been pictured in the Orlando newspaper. And that led to a discussion about how the Iraqi war “was a long time coming….”

It was kind of amusing in a Baroque kind of way because I couldn’t believe that such throw-backs still existed despite all of the information that had managed to filter out.

But then I had to acknowledge that Republicans are mostly throw backs to another time who try to insulate themselves from the truth and hold to the view that anybody who isn’t a republican is some kind of radical “leftist.”

Last night, this was reinforced listening to the party where Bush and the press sang about its own unfunny view of the world including Katrina, Scooter, and the War, not for a second realizing that there was nothing funny about a single word as pointed out by both Chris Matthews who seems to have undergone a change of heart and Keith Olbermann who’s views have become kind of iconic to me…….

Both experiences helped convince me that we have our work cut out!


Les Aaron

The Committee for Positive Change….