06.09.12
Vindictiveness as American character
Joe Klein of Time mag has produced a column in which, as usual, he interviews American salt-of-the-earth in the south for ways to restore “common cause.” It’s worthless. There will never be common cause in this country. There never was.
The people in the interview imagine a place from their past, which didn’t exist. What existed was that they were on top or where they wanted to be and all those they despised then and still despise, the designated no-goods, were out of sight.
I doubt if there was ever any time when I thought there were a big bunch of American comrades who could could gather around a campfire and sing songs like at Boy Scout Camp. In fact, I hated Boy Scout Camp and the whole idea of the shared rote ritual and duty, always designed by someone else allegedly more knowing than you.
Strip away Klein’s musings, leaving only the quotes from the interviews, and it reads as nasty business, older whites who, as usual, want to have it stuck to someone else, usually of different color, religion, sexuality, or place on the totem pole — preferably smaller and powerless.
The picture of the veteran with the bald head, shaking his finger, tells you what’s in store.
Everyone not like me needs a kick in the pants so we’ll straighten up, fly right and work together:
Richard’s coffee shop and military museum in Mooresville, N.C., is a down-home place where veterans from all our modern wars gather most days to talk and feel comfortable in ways they only can among their fellow warriors …
Most of those who spoke with me were Vietnam veterans, and they were not thrilled with the way the country was going. When I asked them how they’d rate Barack Obama as Commander in Chief, they started to laugh, which I thought was unfair and disrespectful …
It turned out that these vets, like many I’ve met, simply didn’t trust anyone who hadn’t been through boot camp–and so their pool of acceptable leaders was diminishing dramatically …
“There isn’t an 18-year-old boy who doesn’t need to get his butt kicked,” added Nosker [the finger-pointing old white guy], “by someone in a position of complete authority.”
This theme kept coming up in meeting after meeting during my first five days on the road, though usually in less vivid fashion …
For the conservatives, the country had changed beyond their imagining; not just civil rights but gay rights (a contentious referendum recently banned gay marriage in North Carolina), and new ethnic groups that seemed foreign–the South Asians who all of a sudden seemed to run half the convenience stores, the Latinos who didn’t seem to want to speak English. Why, even the President of the United States was something strange, neither black nor white. For liberals, it was all about intolerance.
[Because it is about intolerance. The first two sentences of the paragraph are just that. Everyone — the ‘everyone’ being the gays, the ‘new ethnic groups,’ the people who don’t speak English — needs a ‘kick in the butt’ to get with the program.]
But we were all Americans, I’d remind both sides. How were we going to get to know each other better, find some common ground?
[A lot don’t want common ground with the people interviewed for the piece. Why should they? As a decent human being it would be reasonable to want to have nothing to do with the intolerant. Just because we’re all “Americans’ by birth isn’t much of a reason for coming together.]
“I went to a private school where the students did all the cleanup work ourselves, except for the heavy-duty plumbing and electrical work, and it created a real camaraderie. I just went to my 50th high school reunion, and that spirit was still there. And I’ll tell you what else, we didn’t have very much destructive behavior or graffiti in our school …”
I asked if anyone around the table was opposed to Obamacare. “I am,” said Terry Kinum, 69, a recovering alcoholic, retired from the Navy, who now works with addicted veterans. “I’m sick and tired of all these welfare and socialist-type Marxist programs we’re being inundated with.”
Yes, the Mitt Romney private school was so civilized fifty years ago. All the nice white boys and girls from the good families kept the place neat, clean and orderly. No riff raff allowed. For sure, it proved they were made of all the right stuff.
Another day, another first person piece — like grains of sand — on the people of good will at the coffee shop.
We had a saying for this man, even back in ’74: “Blow it out your ass.”