L'enfer, c'est les autres

"Hell is other people" 
                    Jean Paul Sartre, Huis Clos (No Exit)

Gail Collins recently observed that right wingers, Tea Party types, now most Republicans, are people from Empty Spaces. Anyone looking at an election map with all that red across the vast empty middle of the country and the blue states clustered along the coasts can see what she is talking about.  In those big, empty states, Arizona, Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, Texas, Kansas, Idaho, Utah, they don't like government because they don't much like other people, have no faith in other people, have had bad experiences in the company of other people, and are generally anti social. They can come in from the farm on a Sunday and sit in a church for some social time, but that's quite enough for the company of others.


When I left New York City after 8 years, I moved to a rural area of southern Rhode Island and I met a lot of people who lived on farms, or who  worked on farms or who drifted around farms and I thought, "These people are here for a reason."  They could not have lasted long in New York City. They'd get in fights, get arrested, be most unhappy.


I loved Thoreau in high school, that whole idea of man living by his own efforts, off the grid, in a shack he built himself on a pond. Thoreau is often quoted by Tea Party types.


But then my sister in law, who is a very smart woman, observed wryly over a martini glass, "Sure, Thoreau's okay, until you need to accomplish something that needs other people."


And that's the rub. 


If you don't care for automobiles or roads or healthcare or communications, phones, computers, electricity, sewers, plumbing, restaurants, movies, art, theater, ballet, pediatric wards, virtually all the things which have raised modern American life above the subsistence existence of farm life in the mid eighteenth century, you really don't need government or other people.


But the Tea Party and the off the grid people live in a fantasy about how sweet life  would be without other people.


Not even the Amish, who reject life with most other people, who wall themselves off and who do not ask much from other people, not even the Amish live like that.  The Amish believe in community. And community means governance of some sort. 


And that is the basic difference between Romney, the Republicans and people who actually believe in some government--The Republicans, Rush Limbaugh and the right wing sell a fantasy of un regulated life, which, were it ever achieved,  would return us very quickly and directly to the eighteenth century, or at least to a time in American life when life was hard and bitter and tedious and if any of those Tea Party people actually had to live that life, they would be the first people mewling and screaming for all the luxuries which community, government and other people provide.


I mean, can you imagine that soft, porcine Carl Rove hauling water up from the creek with his own arms? 


Now, of course, what Satre was really talking about is how hell would be finding yourself locked up with people you really hate. He was not saying just having to live with other people in general is hell; living with certain other people would be hell. But the Tea Party loonies, for them, it's simply everyone else, except maybe for a few like minded other misanthropes.


For me, it might well be the Tea Party loonies themselves. Imagine yourself in a locked room with Rush Limbaugh and Carl Rove.