I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein
to a Republican!”
This is the sort of thing known, in the liberal academy (or would be, were I of the appropriate gender and pigmentation), as a “hate speech,” and who’s to say that before the end of Obama’s presidency, it won’t become a federal crime? But we conservatives know how to take it - and far worse - in stride.
It’s anyone’s guess how many thousands of conservative cars got keyed in Blue states during the frenzied lead-up to Obama’s election - ours, for one, with $1,700 worth of damage. In Seattle, a local leftist weekly, The Stranger, actually pointed vandals in the right direction by printing the addresses and photos of local houses with McCain yard signs.
Then again, no auto-related expression of liberal rage compares with the experience of a certain Gareth Groves - and that wasn’t even around election time. One morning a few years back, Groves, 38, emerged from his home in the tony Northwest section of Washington, D.C., to find that someone had taken a baseball bat to the windows and body of his month-old $38,000 Hummer and a machete to the interior, and then, almost redundantly, etched on the side the words “FOR THE ENVIRON.”
According to The Washington Post, his neighbors reacted to this as liberals will. While some professed misgivings about the violence involved, others pretty much thought he’d gotten what he deserved. Reporting the story in a tone best described as bemused, the Post reporter pointed out that, after all, Mr. Groves’s was an extremely “socially conscious” and “environmentally friendly neighborhood,” one rich in Priuses and other hybrids, and since acquiring his gas-guzzling behemoth, he’d often been subjected to angry stares and hostile comments. Indeed, one neighbor, freely identifying herself by name, was moved to declare acidly that “he’s very proud of himself that he has such a macho vehicle. It belongs in a war zone. Send it to Iraq.”
Some might think of Gareth Groves as a poor schnook living in the wrong place at the wrong time or as a naïve fool for believing he could so heedlessly rile up the local enviro-vigilantes without paying the price. Lots of us know better. We see him as the exemplar of personal courage that he is, a free-market, free-thinking individualist amid the herd of independent minds: Gary Cooper in High Noon, contentedly ensconced in a seven-foot, 122.8 wheelbased steel and chrome horse.
My Home Town (and Keith Olbermann’s)
WHERE EVEN THE VILLAGE IDIOT READS THE NEW YORK TIMES
THE TOWN WHERE we live, the New York suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, is as attractive to the eye as its name suggests-a leafy hamlet, with spectacular river views and a little downtown area largely unchanged since the Fifties. When my wife and I, looking for a place to raise our two young children, came upon it almost twenty-five years ago, we couldn’t believe our good luck. A mere half hour from the city, it had the neighborly charm of the classic small town. Back then, it seemed every fifth car bore the same bumper sticker; although, in our urban cynicism, we privately smiled at the hickish boosterism, we fully endorsed the sentiment: “Hastings is a neat place to live.”
In most ways, it still is. There’s fireworks by the river every Fourth of July; the Farmers Market all year round; the sounds of kids sledding in Hillside Park on snow days; the crack of aluminum on Clincher softballs summer Sundays (guys like me, deluding ourselves we can still play, have a fiercely competitive over-40 league); there’s the fabulous library and an ever-enterprising local historical society. Crime is low and civic morale high.
Then there are the people. As always, it’s almost impossible to stop in at the Center Restaurant for a ham and cheese on rye and not run into two or three or four people you know. Wandering down the aisles of the A&P, you’re apt at any moment to find yourself catching up with someone about the kids, or bemoaning the stupidity of the Mets front office, or speculating about the new shop going in where The Office Ink used to be. How does the song go? “I love those dear hearts and gentle people, who live in my home town”?
But a word of warning: Don’t get onto politics. If you do, things between you and the dear heart and gentle person before you are likely to change.
To say Hastings is liberal is like saying Saudi Arabia is Muslim. While there are relatively few outright lunatics, there are enough lunatic fellow travelers that fitting in means accepting a lot of lunatic norms. In this and other ways, we are a suburban version of Manhattan’s Upper West Side - the very area from which many of my neighbors decamped in settling here. (Okay, so did we.) The place is chock full of mainstream media types, therapists, executives of do-gooding foundations, environmental lawyers, and, last but hardly least, the creative set - writers, actors, photographers, directors, set designers, and so on. The town takes great pride in these creative types, in many cases justifiably, but it must be said that they’ve brought with them the same love of intellectual diversity for which the Upper West Side is so renowned. To sum up: The hyperventilating leftist madman Keith Olbermann grew up in Hastings, and, boy, would he ever fit in these days!
To the casual observer, this might not be immediately apparent. The vast majority of my neighbors are too busy living their lives to waste much time on politics. They vote Democratic for the same reason they watch their diet and floss their teeth - it’s what smart, responsible, healthy, forward-thinking people do.
That is to say that when, at a neighborhood gathering, one of these people suddenly learns that your views deviate from everyone else’s on the war, affirmative action, big government, feminism, Jimmy Carter, the environment, multiculturalism, sex education, the reliability of The New York Times, the scariness of evangelicals, or (hell, fill in the blank), his or her face will register stunned surprise and deep confusion. You can almost see the wheels turning within and hear the electronic drone: Does not compute . After all, in most ways you seem reasonable; your knuckles don’t drag the ground. Yet the things coming out of your mouth sound so wrong - almost conservative. Which, as everyone knows (without actually knowing anything about it), is just another way of saying warmongering, racist, homophobic, not to mention terminally uptight and ready to wipe out every last polar bear for the sake of Big Oil.
But such a person will not hate you.
In fact, few such encounters end badly. After all, you, the conservative, are also a neighbor, and you otherwise get along fine. So the confused liberal will simply change the subject or, at worst, after an awkward pause, excuse himself to get something to drink. What will not happen is an actual exchange of ideas, since, by definition, your ideas (even if they were to be accorded that lofty status), are bad and dangerous.
But, then, there’s another kind of liberal you’re sure to run into, the fierce and angry lefty partisan, fairly dripping with contempt for everything you are and represent. These are far less numerous - over my more than two decades in Hastings, I’ve had no more than a dozen encounters with such people. Yet each encounter has been, in its own special way, memorably unpleasant.
I had a couple of such incidents during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Palin Derangement Syndrome took an especially brutal toll on local women. Then there was the one that occurred in the supermarket, around the time the controversy about waterboarding was at its height. I was on the checkout line, behind a huge bearded guy I knew slightly, because his son had once played on a baseball team I coached. So I nodded.
I could see him hesitate. Suddenly, he spat out: “You people disgust me!”
“Excuse me?” I asked, startled.
“You Bush lovers!” he said, his neck muscles starting to work and his face going crimson. “All that bullshit you put the country through over a little lie about sex, but you have no problem at all with torture!”
Of course, the guy had no idea what I thought about Bush (which happened to be not much), or torture, or anything else, and his pegging me as an Administration bitter-ender could not have been more off-base. But he knew I’d written a conservative book, so what more did he need?
There are assorted theories