I’m going to speculate about Governor Walker who has impressed me with his Carrie Nation like zealotry. I noticed something odd about his eyes in a recent television interview. They looked as though he was averting his gaze from a reporter by tilting his head a bit. I’d noticed it before but this time it really struck me because I’ve known a couple folks who couldn’t look me in the eyes before. One was a sadistic member of my college fraternity. He caught hell for being odd as a pledge and doled it out with interest to pledges that followed him.
Another is Virgil Swing a former editor of the Duluth News Tribune. I like Virgil. He’s smart, and honest. He wrote a column a while back about having a disorder. I think it was Tourette’s syndrome which is better known for involuntary jerks and tics. I’ve never noticed Virgil’s tics but I sure know his aversion to making eye contact. This suggests to me autism spectrum disorder which in recent decades has been discovered to confer some powerful advantages which can more than mitigate its disadvantages. Its called “spectrum” because it is so varied that it is hard to pigeon hole.
The one common drawback to the syndrome is an inability to fully emphathize with others. In fact, human contact can be darned unpleasant for its sufferers and the reluctance to look others in the eye is strong evidence of its existance.
But Scott Walker does look straight ahead at people. I checked out a number of videos on youtube which confirm this. But as I looked closely at them there was still something odd about Governor Walker. His eyes looked unfocused to me or looked vaguely cross-eyed as though he was letting his gaze fall far short of the television camera or the person who was interviewing him.
My sense is that Walker is working very hard to make it appear he is looking at his interrogators but doing so without really looking at them. If so, its a neat trick and it probably has helped him immensely as looking people in the eye is a way of developing trust. Being unable to do this has caused many autistic people to be terribly stigmatized.
I can’t in any way criticize the Governor’s articulate speech. He’s direct and no nonsense. He’s also the most confrontational major Republican elected official out there which has led to an almost unprecedented recall campaign. If I’m right about his eyes, and its a big if, the Republican Party in Wisconsin is being led by an ideologue who is truly an ideologue and not simply a GOP panderer.
I’d be interested to know what people who have worked with Walker up close would think of my theory.
I should also note that my all-time hero Abe Lincoln had funny eyes. Reportedly he said he had been kicked in the head by a mule or a horse and it caused one of his eyes to go funny. You can clearly see this in his many photographs. But, you also get the sense he was boring into the camera with his eyes, at least one of them, and not averting his gaze. You don’t get that sense from Scott Walker.