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I blame George W. Bush's election for many ills, and, to that list, I can now add the fact that I have been publicly shamed for not owning a gun. My unwilling confession took place a month ago, while I was being interviewed by the right-wing radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. He asked me whether I owned a gun and whether I had ever owned a gun (in what seemed to be consciously McCarthyite language). Later, he proceeded with a lengthier inquisition into whether I had friends or relatives in the military. He asked a version of this question some half-dozen times. ("Is there anyone that you want to bring up, like your aunt or your uncle, or the guy down the street?") I volunteered that my next-door neighbor and friend is a naval reservist, but this failed to mollify him. "Do you know anyone who's been back and forth to Iraq and been deployed there?" he asked. Sadly, I was unable to produce any evidence for my defense. In the court of right-wing talk radio, I was convicted of being a blue-state elitist.
| In just about any court ... |
This is a very odd cultural moment we find ourselves in, where there is a stigma attached to not owning a gun or not having friends shipped out to Iraq.
I share his pain. I got teased all the time for not owning a gun, and even got dinged on my work reviews because of it back in Arizona....NOT!!
This isn't a moral question; military service is obviously admirable, but knowing people who serve is no more admirable than knowing people who donate to charity. It's a cultural question. Since Bush's election, and especially since his reelection, liberals have grown painfully aware of the cultural gap with the white working class.
Ya think it's finally sinking in? Nope, me neither. How DARE those peasants think for themselves!
The approved liberal posture is cringing self-flagellation. We brought the catastrophe of the Bush administration upon ourselves with our latte-sipping ways, and we must repent. Conservatives are gleefully pressing their advantage. Did you mourn Dale Earnhardt? Do you sport a mullet? Well, why not?
| I rarely hear liberals lamenting these things. I visit Kos, Atrios and Political Animal occasionally, and I don't think I've ever seen a liberal who cares about Dale Earnhardt, or who blames him/herself for any cultural gap. They blame the rest of us for not being as 'smart' as them (please note the BBC-style scare quotes). |
David Brooks, in his 2004 book On Paradise Drive, taunted blue-state liberals: "They can't name five nascar drivers, though stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country. They can't tell a military officer's rank by looking at his insignia. They may not know what soybeans look like growing in the field." Meanwhile, The Washington Monthly has recently published cover stories on how Democrats can save hunting and win the trust of religious voters. You don't see liberals taunting nascar fans who can't name the host of "Masterpiece Theatre" ...
well, at least not publically....
... or conservatives agonizing over their virtually nonexistent hemorrhaging support among intellectuals. Instead, conservatives have indulged in an orgy of reverse snobbery. Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review in the summer of 2004, asserted, with his usual insight, that liberals hate Bush because "he is an unapologetic twanger who likes guns, barbeques, nascar, 'the ranch,' and pick-up trucks." Actually, the pickups don't bother us, because we realize that Bush primarily rides in armor-plated limousines like most of us Democrats. But the barbequing is indeed a real sore point. Damn that barbeque-eating president!
In yet another nervous liberal attempt to placate the red-state hordes, The Washington Post recently started a blog called Red America. The blog's author, displaying a typical hair-trigger sensitivity to blue-state elitism, used his first entry to flay his Post editors for their unfamiliarity with the 1984 pro-gun action flick Red Dawn. He also proceeded to declare, "Red America's citizens are the political majority."
"There they go, rubbing in the 2004 election results again!!"
| WaPo managed to report the entire election without conceding this point ... |
Except that the blue states accounted for more than half the population in 2000. Conservatives cope with this inconvenient fact by redefining blue states as a few urban enclaves and making a fetish of the political map, with its misleadingly large, depopulated red states. To take a typical example, a 2004 postelection Wall Street Journal column by Daniel Henninger announced triumphantly, "[I]f you adjust the map's colors for votes by county ... even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but, between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely red." This is a persuasive point if you believe in the principle of one acre, one vote.
We don't, though it's a pleasing map for another reason: if the few goofy liberals who wanted to split off from our country actually did so, they'd eat for oh, about a week or so, until they realized that all the farmland was in Jesus-Land, and we weren't sharing.
But we recognize that most of the country is varying shades of purple, and for the most part reds and blues manage to live next to each other, work together, and get along just fine, until some snotty-nosed, whiny blue-bluer starts sounding off at the office water cooler or at a party. Then we red-staters are expected to grit our teeth and take it. |
Tom Wolfe recently took this analysis a step further, declaring that the blue-state elites are not part of the United States of America. "They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lives in between." I wonder if Wolfe and his fellow travelers realize how much their analysis is correct? mau-mauing of blue staters is, well, Maoist. Mao, like the contemporary American right, saw his country as divided between the great virtuous, patriotic interior and the decadent, traitorous coastal cities. Intellectuals--or, in the Maoist parlance, the "stinking ninth category," a phrase so pungent and catchy I can't believe it isn't standard at Rantburg Bill O'Reilly hasn't picked it up yet--were forcibly relocated from the cosmopolitan cities to the countryside to "learn from the poor and lower middle peasants."
The contemporary GOP, thankfully, has yet to imitate this practice, but my neoconservative friend Lawrence F. Kaplan has taken it upon himself. Writing in this space last year, Kaplan described how, after a lifetime of living in New York and Washington, he moved to a small town in Virginia, where, at last, he found himself among his ideological brethren. Delighted to leave behind his "soft-handed colleagues" at The New Republic, he reported that the national spirit indeed runs deeper among these simple village folk. "Dozens of them are serving, willingly and proudly, in Iraq and Afghanistan," he wrote. "In the breadth of their civic attachments, it seems to me that they, more than most of their critics, most faithfully embody the American ideal." And these unpretentious patriots welcomed him. Sort of. After an awkward breaking-in period, Kaplan was pleased to report, "No one pinches my fiancée anymore; no one charges me $500 to change the oil in my car; cops no longer pull me over for fun." Grain production is way up, and sexual assaults, price-gouging, and state-sponsored harassment have all plummeted, thanks to the efforts of our heroic peasants. I bet San Francisco and the Upper West Side can't match those achievements.
| Finally he got something right. |
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