Marjorie Taylor Greene warns about Nancy Pelosi’s “gazpacho police.” Twitter and Facebook erupt as thousands point out that gazpacho is a Spanish vegetable soup meant to be served cold, whose name is probably of Arabic origin and is unrelated to the word “Gestapo,” which she clearly intended, meaning Geheime Staatspolizei, aka the Nazi Germany secret state police organization established by Hermann Göring.
MTG wants us to think of Hermann Göring when we hear about Nancy Pelosi, but instead, she has directed us to think about cold soup.
It occurs to me that deeply mocking MTG over this will never have the desired effect, either. You laugh at her for being amazingly ignorant, I mean incomprehensibly so, but all you accomplish is to show you think you are smarter than her because you are educated enough to know the difference between secret police and soup.
But that’s exactly what her message is. MTG is Sarah Palin on psilocybin. She wants everyone to know she’s ignorant enough to be Trump’s 2024 running mate. She knows Jewish space lasers set wildfires in California. She’s qualified.
If it hadn’t been for my education in the British science fiction TV satire Red Dwarf I wouldn’t have known that gazpacho soup was served cold. But on the other hand, it would never have occurred to me to substitute gazpacho for Gestapo. This is what I mean by the incomprehensibility of MTG’s mistake. She must have — somewhere in that mind of hers — had some knowledge of gazpacho, or how would it have popped out like that? What, is the gerbil taking time off from spinning the wheel to cook tomato soup and chill it? Unimaginable.
Speaking of the unimaginable, I’ve been thinking back about a lot of people I’ve met in my life that have stretched the limits of what I thought was humanly imaginable behavior. It’s a kind of reminiscing that can take you to unpleasant memories. When I’m not in the mood for ugly memories I think about my experiences in graduate school.
The thing about graduate school that made it special was there were hardly any Marjorie Taylor Greenes there. They got weeded out at the entrance. So the environment is much safer than one in which some nut case is running around finding Nazis in soup.
But even though there are few so ignorant, and even though you’re surrounded by people who can read, there are still outliers.
People probably expect when I remember mathematics grad school I generally think about heady conversations with brilliant fellow students about math and physics, astronomy, bugs, geology, socio-psychology — dredge like that. Well, maybe, here and there.
But what really springs to mind is exploding flatulence guy.
I met him in a café near the math department. He would sit with me even if the café was empty except for me. And he would have explosive flatulence every 20 to 30 seconds. Really loud. I never smelled anything, so I suspected he was a psychology student, using a Whoopee Cushion, and I was his guinea pig. Would I crack? Would I call out his explosiveness? Would I send him away? I did none of that. I pretended nothing was happening, and observed him closely. I made him my guinea pig. Stalemate ensued.
Another prize memory far, far, from MTG, was Narcissistic Surgery Student. This guy would sit next to me in the student union cafeteria and demonstrate his surgical skills in front of me by dissecting his fried chicken dinner with surgical tools. He acted like he was doing me a favor. “Look at my technique. Aren’t I great?” He wasn’t at all ignorant. He just never read anything but medical books. I wondered why he never dissected a cheeseburger in front of me, because I never had the fried chicken. What was the point? Was I a guinea pig? Should I have objected to dissection in front of me?
Then, there was European Train Schedule Guy. This was a guy who always talked about how he had memorized all of the European train schedules at that time. I should have guessed I was a guinea pig. It was a socio-psychological test to see if I would buy into that kind of BS.
This is what I’m thinking about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest idiocy. It’s a socio-psychological test to see who is stupid enough to buy that she is as stupid as she seems.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
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