I am “a particular kind of snot-nosed urban progressive,” but not because I live in the city. I spent many years living in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and I grew up in New York City’s shadow, but I’ve been in the leafy, wooded suburbs for almost a decade now. And I’m not snot-nosed because I don’t know how to blow my nose. I’m snot-nosed because I’m not too afraid to drive slowly through a black neighborhood and I don’t need a firearm to keep my terrors at bay. Or, in other words, I’m not the kind of guy who you’ll find attending the NRA Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. And I won’t be voting in any Republican primaries so my opinion means fuck-all to Jim Geraghty.
He’d like me and my ilk to just shut up already because we just…don’t…get…it, what with our fancy bachelor’s degrees. Anyone with an education more extensive than Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s isn’t a real American with real American balls. People like me “can’t grasp the hopes, fears, and priorities of GOP-leaning voters in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina . . . and Tennessee.”
When we look at the clientele at an NRA Convention it gives us the chance to engage in “smug eye-rolling, relished disdain, and incredulous scoffing that people actually live and think like this in the year 2015.”
I was thinking of offering up some kind of protest to this characterization of my reaction to firearm conventions until Geraghty brought out the big guns: “The Leadership Forum began with the national anthem, an invocation from Ollie North that mentioned Jesus Christ, and the Pledge of Allegiance.”
What is it with Ollie North, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Bible?
In September 1986, for example, he reportedly went so far as to provide secret tours of the White House to low-level Iranian operatives. In meetings in Frankfurt in October 1986, North tried to ingratiate himself with the Iranians by presenting them with a Bible inscribed by President Reagan.
Geraghty doesn’t mention whether North brought a chocolate cake with a key from a Tel Aviv bakery to the Nashville conference, but it probably would have gone over better with that crowd than it did with the Iranians.
While it’s true that I might actually enjoy a pasta dinner with walnut sauce at John Podesta’s home, I’m not exactly averse to “women in tight gold dresses,” “wait-staff [whose] necklines are low,” “barbecued pork” or “large sodas and hard whiskey.” I have had to give all those things but the pork up in my middle age, but that has more to do with knowing what my woman will tolerate than any kind of natural good sense. Maybe this makes me snot-nosed, too, but the thing that concerns me is how this hard-drinking womanizing real American image is inconsistent with the socially conservative message of the Republican Party. I may not know them, but do they really know themselves?
Let’s have Ollie North open his Bible to Matthew 15:7-9, King James Version, because that’s how they roll.
7 Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,
8 This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.
9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
I know. Too deep. Probably need a bachelor’s degree to understand it.
See how good I am at “relished disdain”?
Geraghty’s ultimate point is that Hillary Clinton and the political media covering the campaign share a “low, paranoid opinion of America’s gun owners” and “peer out in fear at the Americans who gather in Tennessee shooting ranges, hunting grounds, and bars, as if observing a strange alien species.” As a result, none of us really can know what resonates with the rubes and our nit-picking of Republican candidates is worthless.
This is only partly true.
Geraghty’s stereotyping of college-educated people who can write complete sentences is at least as skewed as any outsider’s view of the NRA conference in Nashville. And it’s not the guns and Big Gulps and halter dresses that we find so appalling and hard to imagine in the late date of 2015.
It’s more the stuff these people say about black folks and police violence and climate change and public education and immigration and human sexuality and Obamacare and the president’s birth certificate that we find to be so alien and unacceptable.
We could know these folks better, certainly, but we know them well enough to understand precisely why Republican politicians talk to them the way they do.
Although it makes me something less than a real ‘Murican, not being a Christian is almost a relief. It looks like far too much work. Mastering all that scripture to outsmart the next guy, it’s clearly a huge effort.
I believe this was the same NRA convention where Wayne LaPierre made these comments:
But yes, it was awfully rude of her to skip the convention.
A difference between educated “thinkers” on the right and left. The former seek to manipulate the “rubes” into supporting and buying crap to the detriment of the personal well-being of the “rubes” and all the other “have nots” in this country and around the globe. They use emotional appeals: religion, hollow symbols of patriotism, and the superiority of ignorance to education. The left has ethics that requires them to reject manipulating others for the benefit of the others. They seek to educate and enlighten the rubes as to the harm of the poisons their ingesting. It’s not contest.
No difference between the GOP and “thinkers” on the right. The Democratic Party generally falls in between the two poles. Leaving “lefties” in the difficult position of also attempting to educate their cousins when Democratic Party politicians, advisers, etc. are also serving up poisons. The two tasks are so exhausting that we should forgive ourselves for frequent lapses into eyerolling over the insanity and/or inanity of the rubes.
wonderful writing.
If one overlooks my typos and often clunky phrasing, I’m sometimes perceptive.
That should have been “It’s no contest.” Not It’s not contest.
The TPGOP members refuse to admit that they have changed. They are far more intolerant of people with different opinions. They push policies that hurt others deliberately knowing the pain it will cause. The party heads have decided to unleash the fast amounts of pure hat and rage their party members have for the rest of America. This has always been there hidden but spoke about in whispers in bars,churches and family gathers. They speak with disdain about those other Americans.
I know for I was raised off and on in the South, Georgia every summer for years with my father. All of my relatives there and neighbors and such have a saying that the TPGOP jumped upon it in spirit. That saying is, “The South shall rise again”. I have heard it all my life.
The TPGOP leaders have opened Pandora’s Southern box and all of the hate and rage is pouring out and the leaders have no way now of stopping it.
We liberals understand quite well the fears that animate the folks at the NRA convention. Your magazine and various other conservative media outlets do a spectacular job of cataloging, disseminating, and repeating those fears on an hourly basis. You’d have to be conducting a 40-year exercise in sensory deprivation to be unaware of the fears that animate the attendees at the NRA convention.
And what could be a greater homage to those fears and hopes than a verbatim quote from the likes of Wayne LaPierre, who is convinced that a Hillary Clinton administration would cover the United States in a darkness that Mordor under Sauron could only envy? LaPierre is your guy, Mr. Geraghty; care to enlighten us sniggering masses on just what he’s talking about? You can use big words, if you want. We’re educated elitists.
LaPierre is the NRA marketing honcho. He doesn’t have to convince himself or believe in anything — he just has to sell more guns and ammo to the rubes. His enemy is always whoever doesn’t support 100% or isn’t within the weapons industry.
The NRA was a reasonably strong political force by the late 1960s. With LaPierre at the helm it has become a goliath.
The monstrous LaPierrre is the smiling face of the “conservative” movement. What’s not to understand?
What he vomits out, they believe, verbatim. Show me one who doesn’t.
One of the “smiling faces” of the conservative matrix.
The most obvious reason why people should not have easy access to guns is that, when one is emotionally triggered and has a “fight, flight or freeze” response, the brain is flooded with hormones that shut off the cerebral cortex. At that moment, we’re in a space of diminished capacity, not thinking with our adult minds. From that space, people are likely to do anything.
I know this intimately because I’m a divorce attorney. I get to see people in places of reactivity all the time. From that space, they do not make good choices. In my years of practice, I’ve seen one suicide. Had a gun not been available, that client would likely still be alive and completely recovered from the pain of the divorce by now.
There was a study a few years back where subjects were placed in front of a computer and told they were interacting with other people. The people, at some point, would decide to play a game. They would pick captains and choose teams. The person at the computer would not get picked.
None of this was really happening. It was all simulation. But the subject was being observed carefully the whole time and their aptitude being measured. When they realized they weren’t going to get picked, their IQ would drop by, on average, 30 points.
If that’s what happens when one is upset by people whom one has never met, who one didn’t know existed an hour earlier, and who don’t in fact actually exist, imagine how much more impaired one becomes when upset by a close friend or family member. Easy access to guns is a recipe for disaster for that reason alone; not to mention the risk of children finding guns or accidental discharges or the occasional sociopath who kills with premeditation.
It’s a conundrum somewhat like how do we convert to public financing of elections when those in power are invested in the current system.
Guns are especially harmful to individuals and a society that favors violence as a solution to distress and barriers to getting what one wants. Sure, small children are punished when they hit another kid to get the toy he/she wants, but the punishment is administered by a larger person and usually involves verbal or physical hurt. Violence perpetrated by the “good guys” is prominent in the entertainment children consume. Cops and soldiers are “good guys.” So, we learn to fear that if the “good guys” (even when they aren’t good guys) don’t have guns to protect us, the “bad guys” will come and hurt us. We fail to imagine that no guns would reduce the aggregate level of violence and murder.
The faux down-hominess of Duck Dynasty America is, if I might be allowed to use one of those high falutin’ phrases, a false consciousness. It’s largely not rural, nor poor. It’s a Smith & Wesson sales pitch to a bunch of neurotic suburbanites.
In Real America poor voters are overwhelmingly Democrats.
In Real America 70% of households do not own a firearm.
in rural USA people go to college
I am genuinely curious about the potential existence of a point at which these people will realize that they don’t represent the average American and that in truth they are the ones who live in a bubble. And what happens when we reach that point?
I am a radical hippy socialist, and proud of it, but I have never once thought that I represented the average “real” American.
It’s not their sins that in their opinion will bring down the wrath of God on the United States of America. It is ever and always other people’s sins. Just ask Michele Bachman or Pat Robertson or Ralph Reed or Tony Perkins.
Sure seems like flying the Christian flag is big with Republicans this cycle. Prelude to a Crusade. And there ain’t gonna be no bonfire of the vanities.
It’s easier to be religious than to be moral.