Читать книгу I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican - Harry Stein - Страница 7

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 as to how to deal with such frothing maniacs, but given the fact that this is Hastings - there was zero chance that the guy was armed, and, for 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 were riding into the city on the train, when he let drop a mildly disparaging remark about Obama - “Not really someone I fully trust with the economy” - then waited to see how I’d 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 reassuring than it probably sounds, since Brian once played football for UCLA. But just in case, I have an offer from another friend, a closeted conservative as concerned as I about the collectivist assault on individaul initiative and other looming threats to ideological pluralism. “Listen,” he said, when I ran into him a few days after the election, smiling but keeping his voice low, “we’ve got a big attic. If it comes to it, you guys can hide out up there, like Anne Frank.”