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.
