I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein
take it. “Or with anything else,” I replied, and, nodding, he shot me a smile. We were now free to proceed with the entire range of shared assumptions, from the conviction that the President’s stimulus plan was most likely to stimulate disaster to the understanding that in The New York Times, you’re apt to find lies even on the sports page.
In places like our town, this is how we political deviants tend to find one another, via an array of subtle cues that amount to a secret code, the way Communists used to in the days when exposure could get them fired or worse. Of course, these days in Hastings, when it comes to being a Red, no problema, as the local signage might put it. A couple of years back, the main speaker at Hastings High’s graduation ceremony was actually Rosenberg son and HHS graduate Robbie Meeropol, now grown into a full-fledged activist himself, who to great acclaim denounced the “murder” of his “innocent” parents.
So, one can hardly fault those right-of-center types who keep their views under wraps. “Why get into arguments with people?” as one such guy put it to me, explaining his reluctance to go on the record. “Your kids have to go to school with their kids, and it just leads to no good.”
Never is this more true than around presidential election time, when every third car seems to sprout a Democratic bumper sticker, and, on the evidence, none were even printed for the Republicans. Then, again, the prospect of ending up at at a body shop paying a small fortune to undo the work of a vandal for social justice does have something to do with it.
In a place like this, you can be friendly enough with those who hold a worldview diametrically opposed to yours, but those who genuinely share your views are absolute gold, fellow speakers of a forbidden tongue. “You know how I think of myself around here?” laughed my friend Lary Greiner, in one of our frequent heart-to-hearts. “As a one-man conversation stopper. Whenever I offer an opinion in a roomful of Hastings people, the place goes silent. At the beginning, I used to wonder, ‘Is my zipper exposed? Is something falling out of my nose? Did I forget to put my teeth in?’”
My friend Tom Smart, like Lary a native Midwesterner cursed with common-sense values, recalls his first encounter with the local political sensibility at a neighborhood party. “It was around the time of Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court,” recalls Tom, a big-time Manhattan attorney, “and there were a bunch of women talking very agitatedly about Bork, because of abortion. So I listened for a while, and then I said ‘You know, Robert Bork is the foremost constitutional scholar of his generation. In fact, given his academic credentials and intellectual prowess, some people say he’s the most uniquely qualified person ever to be nominated to the Court.”
He pauses, smiling at his own naïveté. “Was I actually expecting a rational response? It’s hard to remember. Anyway, what I got was sputtering rage. It was like I’d said Hitler was a pretty good guy.”
Hey, at least it got said to his face. Several Christmases back, my wife returned in high dudgeon from a “charity fair” at a local church. It was one of those events where one could contribute to worthy causes in lieu of gifts, and Priscilla had just made a donation on behalf of African orphans when a guy standing nearby, a teammate on my softball team, offered a characteristic dose of progressive holiday cheer. “Boy,” he laughed, presuming that, as a woman, she shared his views, “Harry must really be pissed you’re doing this!”
Of course, the following summer, Priscilla’s own cover was blown, of all places, on the front page of The New York Times. It was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when she happened to be waylaid at the local train station by a reporter contributing to a roundup on the “shock” and “shame” and “anger” occasioned by the administration’s handling of the tragedy. “Priscilla Turner, 55, of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.,” read the story the next day, “said President Bush was being saddled with some unfair blame. ‘There is an instinct to be so negative,’ Ms. Turner said, ‘to wish for the worst, to anticipate the worst, to glory and wallow in the worst.’ If Mr. Bush had sent troops to New Orleans too quickly, she said, his detractors would have portrayed him as ‘going in with guns blazing.’”
What she’d actually told the reporter was that if Bush had sent in troops and even one looter had been killed, “you guys at The New York Times would have savaged him for going in with guns blazing.” But never mind. As it was, she was set upon that very afternoon by a neighbor, a woman we’d always thought of as placid and eminently reasonable, who spat out that if it was up to her, the President “would be strung up.”
As it happens, my wife is, if anything, even further to the right than I am. She’s a onetime Berkeleyite lunatic who now is on intimate terms with dozens of conservative websites. Given to sarcasm and slashing wit, she often comes off in private as a small-town Ann Coulter.
At long last, some of our neighbors were getting a taste of that. At a gathering soon after her appearance in the Times, I noticed her in animated conversation with one of our more intemperate liberal neighbors, and edged in closer for a listen. They were talking Native Americans, the liberal taking the conventional view that they were by definition good and noble, and that the appearance of the white man on these shores had been an unmitigated disaster not only for them, but also for the planet and every species of creature on it. “So,” my wife shot back, with the snort of derision I know so well, “you’d like to have kept them in the Stone Age, fenced the country off, and turned it into an aboriginal theme park?”
I suspect few of our neighbors any longer make the mistake of thinking she’s on their side.
So what’s the bottom line? As a conservative in a deep-blue enclave like Hastings, do you sometimes get to feeling pretty isolated? Damn right! Even a little alienated? You bet! I mean, in places like this, you’re constantly struck by your distance even from those you regard as friends.
For instance, there’s an extremely nice guy named Llyn Clague down the street, with whom I sometimes have lunch. Semi-retired, he not only has a name fit for a poet, but really is one, and quite gifted - or so I’m told by my wife, who actually reads poetry. Anyway, he’s not the kind of guy I’d ever thought of as at all political, until one day he handed me a poem entitled “Missing Bush.”
It reads, in part:
At cocktail parties, walking the dog, on the train - An instant bond, Even with strangers. Again And again - beyond Politics - a connection Between the insistent and the unresigned. An affection As much of the heart As the mind
Like an image reversed through a lens, Looking through Bush I see humans’ Potential. Scenes of kinder men, More generous women; Of reach out to one, or many, In trouble; A new Adam, rising out of the rubble.
As I say, I’ve never been a fan of George W. Bush - in fact, in the fall of 2004, I enjoyed sowing consternation and perplexity in the neighborhood by sporting a bumper sticker for the Libertarian candidate, Michael Badnarik, on our old and eminently keyable Chrysler. Nevertheless, my attitude in both 2000 and 2004 was far better Bush than the Democratic alternatives - and, just as much to the point, being a conservative in a town like mine tends to give you a strong, if silent, rooting interest in almost anyone your neighbors loathe.
During the campaign of 2008, the hostility toward me and my kind ran deeper than ever before. In opposing the Democrats’ frighteningly naïve and astonishingly radical candidate, we were seen as opposing not a man, but history itself. More than once, I saw animated conversations on the street come to an abrupt halt at my approach; and it wasn’t all that hard to imagine the tenor of some of the things said once I was past.
It’s at times like this that you find out who your true friends are. One is my buddy Brian, as gregarious and good hearted a fellow as you’ll ever meet. Having noted my rising apprehension as Election Day approached, the night the verdict was in, he left me a bemused but sympathetic message: “I tell you, man, personally I’m pretty excited. But I know how hard it is for you. So I want to let you know I’ve got your back and you can count on me to protect you from all those nasty liberals.”
That is more