I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein
all his menace, he probably considered himself a pacifist-I felt comfortable showing him all the respect he deserved. “Hey, c’mon,” I said, shooting him the best mocking smile I could muster, “how else you gonna get the information out of those bastards?”
“You’re disgusting,” he sputtered, swiping up his shopping bag and stomping away. “You sicken me!”
“Know what?” I called after him. “You’re a really angry guy.”
He wheeled around. “There’s plenty to be angry about!”
Again, there is only a relative handful of people like this in our community. But here’s the problem: Like perpetually aggrieved leftists everywhere, they tend to be activists, and in a place like Hastings they are deferred to by other, lesser liberals for their passion and what is taken to be their command of issues. They play an outsized role in setting the tone for the place; they are ubiquitous in their angry letters to the editor in the local paper, their meetings against the war or global warming, and their appearances en masse at governmental meetings to push their agendas.
Why does this matter? They are self-anointed “good people,” and in various and often unexpected ways, the rest of us are obliged to live in their smug and narrow world. A tiny example. A couple of years back, the village decided to put up little placards marking local spots of historic interest - the site where Peter Post’s Revolutionary-era tavern once stood, for example, or the fact that the Village Hall was designed by the same firm that did the Empire State Building. Dubbed the “Museum of the Streets,” it was a lovely idea - except that when the signs appeared, they were in English and Spanish, never mind that our local Spanish-speaking population is extremely close to zero.
Of course, for local liberals, the bilingual signs served a political and (redundantly, since so often the two are indistinguishable) moral purpose. They were a reminder, in the unlikely event that anyone needed one, of where we, as big-hearted progressives, stand on the issue of “so-called illegal aliens.”
Oh yeah, and when the Hastings Little League was adding a minor league division, you think the new teams got named after big league clubs, the way they do it in other places? Are you kidding? Where’s the nobility in that? Stop by Uniontown Field or Zinnser Park on a lovely late spring afternoon and you’ll find kids in this overwhelmingly white, upper-middle-class town with “Barons,” “Grays,” and “Monarchs” across their little chests - teams from the old Negro Leagues.
If one allows it to be, this kind of stuff can be a constant, low-level irritant, an ideological mosquito impossible to kill. The local weekly doesn’t help. For instance, the lead story on the front page of a recent issue, headlined “Concert Aims to Help Heal the Planet,” brims with admiration for a twenty-two-year-old local singer/songwriter who “brought together local musicians, speakers, entertainers, and others” for a planet-healing concert and “then went door to door to local businesses soliciting donations for the concert.” Fine. Idealism in the young is indeed to be applauded. Yet it is more than a little off-putting that no one on the paper’s editorial staff would ever consider the possibility that, in fact, the very premises behind the global warming hysteria are open to debate. And one can only guess at the paper’s reaction - let alone that of Riverspa, Eileen Fisher, Green Babies, Black Cat Café, Sunnyside Florist, and Ivkosic Painting Corp., among other local donor businesses - if some idealistic twenty-two-year-old was going around soliciting dough on behalf of, say, a campaign against racial preferences.
One recent local election, the Republican caucus drew exactly four people, and they decided not even to bother fielding a candidate for either of the two trustee slots that would appear on the ballot. The same night, the Democratic caucus attracted nearly a thousand. Then again, the Dems had some pressing business, since the leadership had decided to get rid of two Democratic incumbent trustees for the sin of being insufficiently anti-development, and to replace them with individuals more inflexible in their dogmatic leftism.
It didn’t used to be this way in Hastings. Through most of the twentieth century it was primarily a factory town, with the chemical and Anaconda copper plants down by the river manned by first- and second-generation Slavs, Italians, and Poles. (Don’t bother looking for signs in any of those languages.)
Yet, for some reason, it also attracted lots of artistic types, at one point being home to both The Wizard of Oz’s Good Witch Glinda, Billie Burke, and to Frank Morgan, the Wizard himself. Over the years, there were also some notable leftists, including the legendary birth-control crusader (and eugenics enthusiast) Margaret Sanger, and Abel Meeropol, the composer of the anti-lynching classic “Strange Fruit.” Meeropol, with his wife, took in and raised the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after the couple’s execution up the river at Sing-Sing. Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, also graced our little town with his presence. So did the Nobel-winning economist William Vickrey-a subscriber during World War II to the monthly The Conscientious Objector, a complete set of which I now own, along with an array of other fascinating political material, thanks to a rummage sale at his home after his death.
No problem with any of that. In a town as varied politically as it was ethnically and economically, it was all part, as the diversity mongers like to say, of Hastings’s “glorious tapestry.” (Hell, back in the early Fifties, the town welcomed the teenage daughter of Hitler confidante Albert Speer, who spent a year here as an exchange student.) Hard to believe now, but when we moved to Hastings, the town had a Republican mayor.
Things started to change around the late Eighties. That’s when Baby Boom types - i.e., people like us - began flooding into the place from the city. As real estate went through the roof, lots of old-timers cashed out and left. Well, no, not all of them. Many have just kind of receded into the background, so that the gruff old guy with the Russian accent at the hardware store or the woman selling the homemade pierogies in the church sale are just part of the local color, like the Palisades.
In fact, there are probably a lot more conservatives around town than one would think from the local vote totals or the stuff that gets into The Rivertowns Enterprise. “I know plenty of people who agree with us,” confides one conservative fellow-traveler, a teacher who doubles as a volunteer fireman. “Most of the business owners in town, police officers, firefighters, electricians, plumbers, roofers. All those who have to deal with the realities that most liberals never face. And those people resent the shit out of those who now run the town and the schools, and tell everyone else what they’re supposed to think and do.”
No question that’s true. Some of the very best political conversations I’ve had in this town over the years have been with guys I was paying to get the toilet flushing and keep the ceiling from falling down. They always seem every bit as delighted to be having these conversations as I am - and, in light of my obvious shortcomings as a homeowner (which is to say, as a man), a lot more surprised.
Then again, given their respect for economic realities, when in other homes, dealing with other toilets and ceilings, most of them tend to keep pretty quiet about it. In Hastings as elsewhere, it is the rare tradesman who blithely mixes business with inflammatory politics. I actually thought I saw such an intrepid soul not long ago on Main Street, where I was stopped at a traffic light. She appeared from one of the stores, hauling some trash out to the curb, a heavy-set, middle-aged bottle blonde wearing, get this, a FREEDOM IS NOT FREE t-shirt.
“You’re pretty brave to be wearing that around here!” I called, as the light changed.
“Hey,” she called after, “I don’t give half a fuck what anyone thinks!”
Not exactly my style, but in these parts right-wingers can’t be choosers. I returned to Main Street later that day, hoping to find the woman and get her story, but no one had seen her or seemed to know who she was. It was like trying to hunt down the elusive One-Armed Man in The Fugitive, and after a while I began to wonder if she might have been a figment of my desperate conservative imagination.
Every now and then, I discover that some longtime acquaintance has been a secret political soulmate all along. It happened not long ago with a guy I’ve known casually for years through softball and Little League. We