After the Blue Chip Republican Club, Feb. 27, 2006, at 7 p.m. at Monty's on Montgomery, I became the less verbose half an email exchange with a true believer republican conservative who was willing to be my new friend. My new friend, whom I will call "Mr. Tee," praised me for my even tone and willingness to talk rationally. Sure, why not?

What followed here (until March 10, 2006) was to be the foundation of what would  become a new section on the antiwar website. In this section I would reproduce our exchanges and respond as openly, fully, and accurately as I could, to actual emails sent me by my new friend Mr. Tee. If Mr. Tee could carry the day, so be it. It would be his words, complete and unabridged, and my responses, also complete and unaltered, as they occurred. My idea was that we would have a free flowing exchange and both of us would be out front with our agendas, opinions, facts, attitudes, and questions.

Mr. Tee was immensely willing to barrel on and on endlessly about why he and his are correct in every possible way, but he grew very negative about having his actual words shared in an internet-based context. His first reaction was not negative at all, but that changed after I rejected a supposedly humorous analogy of tax policy as drivel. From my perspective, suffice it to say that Mr. Tee really got his panties is a bunch by having his email rants (which he considers "private" conversations with me, his new friend) put on the internet.

Too bad. In many ways Mr. Tee epitomizes and exposes what I see as the pathetically paranoid, selfish, xenophobic, hypocritical thinking that appears to have been the winning formula of the "conservative" (a.k.a. intolerant self-righteous and reactionary) movement in the mid-west, and especially in the back country (read The Terrorist Next Door for more on that topic). I began without much of an agenda other than sharing our discussion was the website readers, but by the second week of the "conversation" I found I was  looking forward to letting Mr. Tee's words reveal, among many other things, the deep disdain for law and due process he and his ilk harbor, as evidenced by their embrace of Iran-Contra, Central and South American Death Squads, and the NSA spy debacle. (Actually, Mr. Tee hadn't gotten to singing the praises of the NSA yet, but that will surely come.) Then there was "Mr. Tee on Torture" -- here again, his own words would have damned him far more effectively than my paraphrasing could do. Hopefully I'll find time to get to that before too long.

So it goes. All you friends of Mr. Tee and friends of Ray will just have to rely on my general restatement of "things I was told by a true believer who prefers not to have the thoughts he sends me shared directly with the world" as part of this new area, Reactions, where I'll list all sorts of feedback I get (positive and negative) regarding the sign-of-the-times activities and political thought and expression.

Not that he came on to me or tried to buy me off or anything like that. There was no "private" stuff in any sexual or personal sense (the closest we got to that was a shared opinion on sexual harassment), no personal identifying information (like a CIA operatives name, or anybody's name, except for public figures), and no compromising information (such as wheeler-deals for fat cats). No, it was "private" more along the lines of "No one else should see it, it was yours and mine only, and you have no right to put it online."

Mr. Tee's perspective (and I am paraphrasing here) was that I was a sneaky ratfink liberal who betrayed his trust after he kept a promise to send me a picture for my website. So, even though I was really careful to not put identifying information about Mr. Tee in the post (other than his first name), he got bent way out of shape when I publicly quoted him completely, accurately, honestly, and fully.

When Mr. Tee first saw his emails on this website, his initial concern was that he wished he'd run a spell checker and been more careful with some names. I fixed those things, but after the tax analogy incident (to be included on the Reactions "Taxes" page, Mr. Tee wrote was that I was a sneaky liberal and should have at least asked first. The next email told me I'd committed a crime by posting email he sent me. Mr. Tee seemed to get worse and worse. (Maybe someone higher up was leaning on him, I don't know.) The blow-by-blow will be laid out on a separate Reactions page on Privacy.

Anyway, I apologized to Mr. Tee for his upset and offered to take his stuff down, which he then said was indeed what he wanted. If I'd known how wacko he'd get about his letters being used anonymously to give the tiny group of people who look at my website a tiny peek at the belly of the beast, I'd have skipped the direct quotes entirely and gone straight to paraphrase in the first place. But how was I to know? He seemed so intelligent, rational, and pleasant. I don't know, maybe he's a big wheel in some local groups and was afraid of being held up to ridicule by his other "friends." Whatever the reason, Mr. Tee's full letters are safe from you now. (Unless I publish them in book or something.)

So, please stay tuned. Mr. Tee has said he'll continue writing to me, but after he sees this, I'm not so sure. He's basically a decent fellow, I think, but he is in pretty far. If he does wake up from his particular nightmare sometime soon, I just hope he doesn't go off the deep end and harm himself or something. Imagine how crushed most decent people would be if they were to recognize themselves as willing supporters of murderous lying warmongers, torturing misanthropes, and incompetent xenophobes. When that happens, I hope he knows a decent therapist.

Still, even if poor, lost, paranoid Mr. Tee never writes to me again, I have at least 25 pages of his incredibly fecund output (packed with many of his favorite topics) to work through. Of course, given my many other activities and wonderfully full life, I may never get to all of it.

More fun later,

Ray

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Written March  10, 2006.