There’s a great courtroom scene in the 1992 film “A Few Good Men,” when Jack Nicholson, as a U.S. Marine colonel, fulminates against Tom Cruise, playing the young Navy lawyer who’s questioning him.
“You want the truth?” barks Nicholson, who has been lying. “Yes, sir,” replies Cruise. “You want the truth?” repeats Nicholson, who after staring at Cruise with even more contempt, roars “You can’t HANDLE the truth!”
I was reminded of this scene when President Trump’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway, recently broached the concept of “alternative facts.” We are now in the presence of an executive branch that wants us to turn away from the self-evident truths proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and swallow their “alternative” version. If we don’t, they evidently plan to cram it down our throats.
My head is spinning, my heart is aching, but meanwhile, I’ve also been trying to understand the mentality and motivations of the people who voted for Trump.
Much has been written, especially about the working class white males who evidently form his base. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s new book, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” is a well-researched study about one corner of our country, coastal Louisiana, that has nourished right-wing groups and voted firmly for Donald Trump. Hochschild went there in 2011 to study the roots of those groups.
What she found was warm Cajun hospitality, terrible environmental pollution and a group of people who seemed to be taking sides against their own interests. Over the course of five years, Hochschild grew to admire the residents’ toughness and kindness, but she also felt enormous sadness for the loss of their land, clean water and physical health to the pollution and manipulation of the local petrochemical industries.
She saw, among other things, the residents’ belief that these industries would provide good jobs, a belief that surpassed any faith the government might improve their lives.
I am not a sociologist, and I do not have contact with people in such dire straits, but I have been struggling to understand the few people I do know pretty well who voted for a president who so far has been, in one of his favorite phrases, a total disaster. These longtime acquaintances do not fall into the category of the people Hochschild studied, although they are all white males. I asked all three why they voted as they did, and I got some very different answers.
The easiest to understand is a high school friend, who became a born-again Christian. His first response, like that of the other two, was to say he didn’t want to talk about it because it would make trouble between us. When I pressed a little more, asking where he got information that he trusted, he directed me to a website run by Gary Bauer, a hard-right conservative politician who opposes abortion for any reason, opposes gay marriage and favors building walls. There is a kind of logic to my high school friend’s stance that I could follow, however much I disagree.
But the other two people really have me stunned. Both voted for Obama in the 2012 election. Both are highly educated, skeptical professionals — one a lawyer, the other a museum curator. The first said he liked Trump because he was a “builder,” adding that “A builder’s legacy is useful and enduring, even though there may be ugliness in creating the legacy.” He perhaps felt comfortable voting for Trump because he knew his wife was voting for Clinton.
The other man expressed a now-familiar hesitation to talk about it. When he did, this was his answer: “I voted for him. With reluctance but I voted for him. I refuse to abstain and I refuse not to vote. I could not vote for Hillary for all the well-known reasons. What did it was her labeling of us as a ‘basket of deplorables.’ … Not a great choice on either side. So my worry is: Why can’t this country do better?”
I’m wondering how those Trump voters are feeling now. I’ve asked, but haven’t gotten any response.
By the way, in the movie mentioned above, after Nicholson’s colonel is revealed to be a liar, court officers take him away, presumably for a court martial. If only.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net
PULL QUOTE: “I am not a sociologist, and I do not have contact with people in such dire straits, but I have been struggling to understand the few people I do know pretty well who voted for a president who so far has been, in one of his favorite phrases, a total disaster.”