Shortcuts

I have to confess that, while I decry various forms of stereotyping and profiling based on race and ethnicity and other suspect categories, I employ a number of shortcuts to help me navigate my social milieu.

One of these is that I try to see movies that Michael Medved hates. I will go to “V is for Vendatta” this weekend and spend extra money on concessions to reward the theater for showing it. I will do this mainly on the strength of Michael Medved’s disapproval. If Medved likes a movie, I am unlikely to see it. This strategy works pretty well.

Another shortcut is that when someone starts a sentence with “On the O’Reilley Factor last night….” Or “Rush said…” or “Sean Hannity reported…” or “Michael Savage…”, I immediately realize that I no longer need to keep listening to this person and that his opinions are not something that I should heed at all. Unless that person is a satirist or someone who has to follow these wingnuts professionally, I have come to affirm over and over again that the O’Reilley, Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage follower is an imbecile. No exceptions. This is as reliable an indicator of marginally normal intelligence as you could hope for.

In this busy world, you only have so much social capital to go around, and anything that weeds out folks who really aren’t going to be all that interesting or simpatico is a real edge. Motor vehicles can tell you a lot. Vanity plates are helpful. Thanks for marking yourselves. Bumper stickers can be good indicators since they can be either a basis for rejection or something that piques one’s interest. Ribbon magnets are highly suspect. Drivers of Hummers, Escalades, Navigators, Expeditions need not apply for admission to the Vache Folle social circle unless there is some mitigating factor.

McMansion dwellers will have a hard time cracking the Vache Folle social circle unless they have gigantic families and can show a need for the space. Otherwise, I can’t seem to make much of people’s houses. By the time you get to their houses, however, you don’t really need a shortcut since they have usually passed the early tests. Dog owners have a leg up right away; dog haters are out; ambivalence about dogs is suspect.

Your kids say a lot about you, especially the mouths as Jack Handey would say. Seriously, if your kids are really horrible and disrespectful of you, I am sorely tempted to write you off. I will at least know you are really, really lazy. I can live with lazy but not with the bizarre justifications for laziness as some kind of alternative childrearing philosophy. Surly and uncommunicative teenagers lose you points. I have a positive prejudice in favor of homeschoolers.

I wonder why we have so few friends?