But this is Chico, too

When I entered the blogosphere about a month ago, I wrote that I’m not an “idealogue.” What I meant to say is that I’m not an “ideologue.” This wasn’t a clever or — depending on your perspective — lame play on words. I misspelled the word. I have a perfect excuse for my mistake. I offer it as proof that ideology isn’t part of my everyday vocabulary and that my aim is to question the value of “ideologues” — people who adhere to a particular political, intellectual, aesthetic, cultural or sociological party line.

My son Todd doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m a “pop liberal,” which to him is a type of ideologue. He thinks I react in knee-jerk ways to any number of issues — from illegal immigration, to minority rights, to business practices and economic policies. I admit I have some liberal ideas, but I resist his claim that I can be so easily pigeonholed.

For example, I don’t think I was a liberal parent. When Todd was a child, I washed out his mouth with soap whenever he uttered foul cusswords, and I didn’t hesitate to spank him whenever I felt he had seriously misbehaved. Just a couple of weeks ago I told him no card-carrying liberal would ever admit to having done that. Todd, who is now 20, said pop liberals would have been OK with corporal punishment back in the 1980s, but they wouldn’t be now.

But what about corporal punishment for criminals? I told him I support the death penalty. He said nowadays pop liberals are trying to convince people they aren’t soft on crime. I brought up a couple of other issues that I thought would prove to him that I’m not a hardcore liberal, but he was unmoved by my arguments.

Why does Todd insist on believing I’m incapable of thinking outside the party line? In many ways, he’s a liberal, but he shrinks from applying that word to himself. He’s no more comfortable with a label than I am. How did these labels become so much a part of our everyday conversation.?

Nowadays, everyone uses “liberal” and “conservative” a lot more frequently — and a lot more pejoratively — than they did when I was a kid. Ideological warfare has reached a level of viciousness that was unimaginable in the past — even during the tempestuous Sixties. For some reason, it has become far more necessary than it once was to adopt and assign these labels. The tendency has spread everywhere, including supposedly nonpartisan city council races.

Yes, it does take four votes to make things happen on the Chico City Council, but why have we become convinced that electing a bloc of similar-thinking people is the best way to get there? I’m not criticizing conservatives for running as a slate this time around. They are just acknowledging the dynamic that underlies these elections. It’s part of what everybody knows. It’s always clear who belongs to which camp. In every election there are always too many candidates who align themselves with one camp or the other.

In the last election, I made a point of voting for candidates whose views were as different from each other as possible. That’s my idea of a good slate. I’m looking for candidates who resist the conventional wisdom that they must be prepared to sing party line anthems in perfect four-part harmony. I want the four or more council members who determine the city’s fate to have their own voices. I want them to to be self-assured enough to sing solos. I don’t want to be able predict how they’ll vote on key issues months before they weigh in on them. I want us to elect people to the council who have the courage to step out of their own and everyone else’s ideological comfort zone.