The Art of Argument

There is a bar in Grand Forks that serves peanuts-in-the-shell in those little white paper boats. It’s expected that you throw the shells on the floor when mowing through your peanut-boat, so I’m sure it was incredibly gratifying to sweep at bar close; a person would really be able to see the results.

I was sitting in just this bar with a few friends and a few more friends of those friends (it’s always weird when that happens, like two universes clashing) drinking something exotic, like Guinness (that crazy semi-warm beer! So dark!!), and throwing peanut shells on the floor. One of the women with us fit the blonde stereotype pretty well, yet she had an inexplicably strong political opinion. She was a die-hard Republican.

Now, despite the fact that we were in Grand Forks (North Dakota being a notorious red state) and conservatism was the rule, not the exception, you’d have to know the people I was with to understand just how much of a cardinal sin it was to be a Rightie. Of course, one of my friends starts grilling her. Why was she a Republican? How could she?? Her answers were thus:

1. Everyone else in her family is a Republican, sooo…
2. She likes her gun and doesn’t like people who don’t want her to have it.

Well, the family thing is annoying but understandable, but we didn’t get the gun thing. Like a hunting rifle? No, indeed; she had a handgun.

A handgun? What for?

Protection.

Do you have this handgun on you?

Nope, it’s in the car (parked about three blocks away in scary “downtown” Grand Forks).

Okay, well…yeah. I sat back and started listening at this point. I kept thinking that if she had a gun for protection, she’d damn well better be packing it now because there’s nothing stopping me from breaking my beer bottle on the side of the table and lunging at her with it, but I’m a lover, not a fighter, and that’s beside the point. I didn’t have to say anything even if I wanted to because my friend lit into her for me.

The problem was I didn’t like how he did it.

My masters degree is in rhetoric and applied writing, and if you don’t know, rhetoric essentially means “the art of argument” (or, the art of bullshitting—either way, it’s handy). This doesn’t mean that I’m personally a skilled arguer, but it does mean that I have been trained to be critical of argument.

Obviously, I couldn’t help but be critical of the argument that was going on in front of me. Unfortunately, what it turned into was a full frontal assault courtesy of my friend on this poor hapless young woman. The problem was that she was going by personal opinion, and only personal opinion. My friend, however, wanted her opinion to be backed up by research, literally. He kept asking her where she got her information, where she read that, how did she know, etc. He couldn’t accept that her opinion was solely her own. Unfortunately, she came across as an ignoramus and he came across as a pompous ass.

This entire situation reminds me of The American People In General. You’re either an ignoramus or a pompous ass, and the ignoramuses won’t read a friggin’ newspaper and the pompous asses cannot accept the fact that even an uninformed opinion might have some validity. Neither one of them can keep their traps shut, either, which is the real problem here.

One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn during my short tenure in life is that it’s cool to admit that I don’t know things. Sounds simple, right? Yeah, right. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a controversial topic come up in different circles and there’s inevitably someone who says, “Woa, woa, woa, I’m totally not even GOING there” when, in fact, it’s not that they don’t want to go there because it might offend someone, they don’t want to go there because they probably aren’t all that sure and don’t want to admit it. Hey, I try to avoid conversations about Walmart because even though I know that there’s something icky about it, I only have some vague statistics to back up my feelings and those aren’t good enough to convince someone in a debate. Instead of admitting that I don’t really know why I don’t like it, I avoid the subject altogether. We’re a society of know-it-alls, and copping out is the biggest know-it-all thing to do of all because it is a pure act of ego protection.

So here’s my plan. The next time Walmart comes up, I will not run, and when I just don’t know something that I probably should know, I’ll admit it knowing that an uninformed opinion is enough and I can always research it if I want to. Perhaps being unsure is the greatest wisdom of all; at the risk of sounding like a tree-hugging hippie, it at least leaves the mind open to possibility.