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A little something I kept a year ago - and it's now two years old...
Bush Like Me
Ten weeks undercover in the grass roots of the Republican Party
By MATT TAIBBI
I never felt any longing to go to Orlando, Florida. What I felt, in traveling south to volunteer for the campaign of George W. Bush, was an obligation. Let me explain by first saying something about the critics of our president. A great many of them like to laugh at George Bush for not reading books and for being uninterested in visiting other countries. But a lot of those same people are guilty of the opposite offense. They prefer to read books and travel abroad rather than actually getting to know their own country face to face.
These critics do a terrific job of mocking his mental deficiencies and dismissing his supporters as hapless morons, but they do not do a very good job of explaining the nature of his support. The few dissident commentators who bother trying to explain the Bush phenomenon seldom do more than reach for the nearest Marx-inspired academic cliche. They will tell you, for instance, that Republicans are a vast intellectual underclass cynically manipulated by the rich through a mesmerizing cocktail of yahoo enthusiasms, xenophobic fears and ancient superstitions -- and those same people will insist, if forced to offer an opinion on the subject, that one should feel sorry for most of them.
This is the wrong approach. As a professional misanthrope, I believe that if you are going to hate a person, you ought to do it properly. You should go and live in his shoes for a while and see at the end of it how much you hate yourself.
This was what I was doing down in Florida. The real challenge wasn't just trying to understand these Republicans. It was to become the best Republican I could be.
Republicans are everywhere, but everywhere is not a good place to look for them. For my purposes I wanted to try to catch them in their ideal habitat. That was why I chose Orlando. For me, it is hell on earth, the worst city on the planet, a place that would make me long for Kinshasa or Volokolamsk. But for Republicans, it is ideal: a scorching-hot paved inland archipelago of garish shopping malls and stadium-size steel-and-glass Baptist churches, a place with no nonhuman life apart from the caged animals at the theme parks, and an entire economy organized around monstrous temples to fake experience.
I arrived in early June, moved into a cheap hotel, called the local Republican office and offered to volunteer. They told me to come on by. So I went, arriving early on a Tuesday morning at their small strip-mall office on the east side of town.
My cover story was a travesty, an idiotic tissue of halfhearted lies. I said I was a New York City schoolteacher named Tom Hamill, in Orlando to spend a summer with a girlfriend who was from the area. It was the best thing I could come up with to explain my Northern accent, my lack of local connections and all that free time.
The story's only saving grace was that the truth was so much more unbelievable. Republicans are paranoid enough to expect a mole from the Kerry campaign, but I was far worse than that -- a dissolute, drug-abusing anarchist who reads the battle diaries of Vietnamese generals on rainy days, roots for Russia at the Olympics and once published an article titled "God Can Suck My Dick." I was, in short, the most offensive individual who could conceivably be planted in the campaign of George W. Bush. I was tempted to feel guilty about this. But in the end I figured that it was only fair. Since John Ashcroft has made it easy for FBI agents to infiltrate anti-war groups, it seemed to make sense that an anti-war journalist should infiltrate Ashcroft's party.
Orlando is the crucial city along a stretch of interstate called the I-4 corridor, a swath of central Florida running from Daytona Beach to Tampa. Home to 3.7 million of Florida's 9.3 million registered voters, it has the bulk of the state's undecided voters and is therefore the key to winning Florida's twenty-seven electoral votes. When I got there, I expected a teeming, ultramodern NORAD-style campaign headquarters, where I would have to work my way up a giant totem pole. But in fact what I found was -- nothing at all. For all intents and purposes, there was no campaign for George Bush in Orlando in early June. There was only one paid staffer, a central-Florida field director named Vienna Avelares, and a corner of a table at the local Orange County Republican Executive Committee. If the Republicans were building an electoral Death Star somewhere, it sure as hell wasn't in Florida.
The situation was completely disarming. Vienna, a gregarious Puerto Rican single mother who insisted on introducing herself as "Vienna -- like the sausage," seemed desperate. I had planned on doing a good job anyway, but after meeting her I had a genuine desire to help get things going.
After just a week of coming in every day like this, I became -- along with a young blond Sean Hannity fan named Ben Adrian, who also volunteered at that time -- one of the most important Bush people in all of central Florida. Within a few weeks, we would both be given keys to the office and offered full-time jobs.
Here I want to make a general observation about the social aspect of working for Bush. It's very different than it is working for a Democratic candidate. Corny as this sounds, it is much more egalitarian and brotherly than most Democratic campaigns. Almost every Democratic campaign I've seen has let itself be seduced by the Primary Colors paradigm -- the hip clique full of mildly sexually adventurous twentysomethings who have been working on their memoirs since high school and dream of that chance to wear Versace sport coats and crack jokes on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
If you've ever hung out with the Tricia Enrights and Joe Trippis of the world, you know that the operative vibe of the Democratic insider is wisecracking cool. It is not a reach to say that the ideological vision that mainstream Democratic politics has offered America since Clinton has been the supercool high school, the party of the popular kids. For all the talk about the Democrats being the party of inclusion, it really doesn't feel that way from the inside.
That's not true of all Democrats, of course. I thought it was very different, for instance, in the campaign of Dennis Kucinich. For the most part, these people were motivated by something other than ambition, and just being part of that campaign meant you were in a besieged minority, with the whole world out there laughing at you. Kucinich supporters stuck up for one another, because they had to.
You get that same besieged fraternal feeling in a Republican campaign office. There is no M*A*S*H ensemble-cast repartee. Nobody wears T-shirts that mean something, and nobody looks cool. As I would later find out, most Republicans hate "cool" ("They all think they're so cool and artistic," griped one woman as she watched Fox coverage of Democratic delegates arriving in Boston). Many of the parent volunteers I met were especially bitter because they think that cool is what liberals use to lure their children away. Which they might very well be right about, of course.
In my first month on the campaign, I did not meet many people who came into the office with the serious intention of working hard for the president. I did, however, meet a great many very lonely people who came in because they knew the Bush offices were the one place where they could share certain deeply held ideas without being ridiculed.
Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."
"You could just shoot them," I said.
"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."
He went on.
"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."
"That's where folks like us would come in," I said.
"Exactly," he said.
Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.
In my first six weeks on the campaign, I saw only one black person enter our offices. He was a recently released armed robber from Newark, New Jersey, who was the guest of a local female Republican politician. The ex-con was not particularly interested in Republican politics, although he did say something about wanting to hit Christine Todd Whitman in the face with a brick. I urged him to support the president, even though he couldn't vote. He didn't make any promises.
In mid-July a girlfriend came down from New York to visit me. I recruited her to help me with an idea I'd had to at least temporarily diversify my office environment. We decided that she would pose as a reporter for Vibe magazine, call our offices and ask whoever answered the phone if she could interview our "black volunteers."
"Penny" got my officemate Ben Adrian on the phone, and he instituted a frantic search that lasted several days. We thought at first that we might have a black professor from the University of Central Florida (sixteen miles away) on our volunteer list, but he turned out not to be available. Then Rhyan Metzler, the local Republican Party operative, gave us the number of an elderly man in Sarasota named Johnny Hunter.
As the chairman of the Federation of Black Republicans for the Republican Party of the State of Florida, Johnny was used to being called to this sort of duty. On the phone with "Penny," he explained that his job involved traveling around the state to meet people. "Wherever they need me," he said, "that's where I be rolling to." Finally, Ben came through with someone more local. He managed to persuade a thirty-seven-year-old Promise Keeper Christian named Lorin Jones, a phlegmatic fellow who was recovering from two brushes with congestive heart failure, to come in for an interview.
We scheduled it, but "Penny" never showed up. I wanted to be there for what I knew would be an excruciatingly awkward situation; the lone black volunteer, dragged into the office to show off to the media, surrounded by a bunch of nervously small-talking white Republicans waiting for the no-show journalist.
Exactly this situation materialized. The bespectacled Lorin sat surrounded by me, Ben and a few other folks from the campaign, and treated this anxious clock-watching crowd to a lesson in the vagaries of black urban existence: "My dad was a drinker," he said. "He cared about the bottle more than he loved us. But what my mom did was, she worked -- she was there in the afternoon; she wanted to see what we were doing in school.... "
"Gee," mumbled Ben. "I can't imagine the strength.... I'd like to meet her."
"I know what it's like to have a parent who'll put a belt on my butt," Lorin continued.
Nervous silence. Nods.
A few minutes later, "Penny" called to cancel, citing car trouble. Lorin hung in there for a few minutes. Our older volunteer coordinator, Don Madden, came over to chat; the two of them apparently went to neighboring schools in California. Don's school, Don said, was great at basketball, but, he said, winking at Lorin, "You were probably the only guys who could have beaten us."
Lorin laughed uncomfortably. "We were OK," he said. "We were pretty good. Our college was pretty good at basketball."
Then another staffer came over to say hi. He knew Lorin from past campaigns and asked if Lorin was planning on coming in to do phone banking. Lorin answered that he wasn't, that he was busy setting up a school-supplies giveaway charity event in his neighborhood. The staffer laughed.
"Oh, come on," he said jokingly. "I know how you people don't like to work." Lorin, who was halfway out the door, stopped at this. His smile disappeared. For a moment, he was genuinely pissed off. "We don't like to work?" he said. "That's all I do is work to make you white Republicans look good."
The staffer, a jovial guy who I normally liked quite a bit, said nothing and simply slapped Lorin on the back, laughed and helped him out the door.
"Good old Lorin," he said, going back to his office.
Vienna also chimed in after Lorin left. The two of them didn't like each other, having once disagreed at a community meeting.
"I don't like that guy," she said. Then she explained: "After that meeting, we really got into it. We were really shouting. He called me a spic. And so I said to him, 'Hey, I may be a spic, but at least I wasn't brought to this country as a slave. I was born here.' "
"Man," I thought, "We're just one big happy family."
I ended up getting to know Lorin Jones a little. He was an odd, sincere person who interested me largely because he was by far the most dedicated, effective and intellectually honest Republican volunteer the party had in the area, and yet the campaign more or less completely ignored him.
A devout Christian, Lorin supported Bush not only because of the social-religious issues, but because he sincerely believed that state financial aid had had a corrosive effect on the black community and that communities should support themselves through charity. He was the living incarnation of the "thousand points of light" idea. He ought to have been a poster child for Republican values.
"In my neighborhood, you can go up to anybody and ask where the black Republican lives," he said. "And they'll lead you right to my house. But they respect me because of what I've done."
And I saw this. At a function I would later attend in his neighborhood, I met several people who had been converted to Bush by Lorin. He was working round-the-clock for the president, but the campaign was just trying to turn him into another Johnny Hunter. "All they want me to do is start clubs," he said. "Tallahassee keeps calling and bugging me to start black clubs. And I hate that, because I think that puts us all in boxes. I think we should be going out into the community more."
Lorin believed that Republicans could win twenty percent of the black vote -- not the usual ten percent -- if they were smart about it. All they had to do, he said, was visit black churches and hand out fact sheets showing the Republican and Democratic stances on social and religious issues. "You wouldn't even have to campaign," he said. "You'd get an extra ten percent right there."
I must have heard him put forward that plan a half-dozen times, but no one did anything except smile and nod.
Some of the Republicans, however, were willing to help Lorin -- sort of. A smallish contingent of five YRs (Young Republicans) met Lorin in front of an Office Depot in a white suburban area one Saturday to man a booth for soliciting school-supply donations for kids in Lorin's neighborhood. They worked cheerfully throughout the afternoon, giving away hot dogs and helping Lorin get a good amount of stuff.
But when it came time a few days later to actually give away the stuff in Lorin's West Orlando neighborhood, none of the YRs showed up. I was the only white Republican who made it. It was a remarkable event. More than 200 people, mostly single mothers and their children, showed up at a funeral home called Gail and Wynn's to receive the book bags and notebooks Lorin had gathered to give away in one of the reception rooms.
I helped distribute bags to the children. "Vote for Bush," I managed to whisper a few times.
That day Lorin confided to me that this might be his last go-round with the Republicans. "I think this might be it," he said. "I think I might be done with these people."
During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office -- Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don -- were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.
I saw this clearly one weekend at a local gun show, where we were manning a voter-registration booth. I rotated with Rhyan and Vienna that weekend, and all three of us were quietly freaking out at the sight of all these fat weirdos from the sticks buying huge assault rifles and Confederate bumper stickers with messages such as IF I'D KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN, I'D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.
"Man, I'm glad I'm a socially liberal Republican," whispered Rhyan at one point, laughing.
It was late July, and a new recruit was talking in my ear -- let's call her Susie -- and she was an opinionated, middle-aged fundamentalist-Christian mother of five. Originally from West Virginia, she was working the phones for Bush and sounding off on humanity's declining morals and the agents of the international liberal conspiracy.
"Are you married, Tom?" she asked.
I squinted in apprehension, sensing a Jesus conversation on the way. "Uh, no," I said.
"My oldest," she began, "has a three-year-old and has been with the same girl for six years, and he will not marry her."
"Oh," I said, remembering to sound shocked. "That must really upset you."
"It kills me," she said.
"Does he not go to church?"
"Oh, occasionally," she said, sighing. "He will tell you right off.... He encourages her to go and to take their little daughter, and he tells you he's hopeful that God doesn't come, or nothing happens to him before he rededicates his life. But he's definitely not living a life that either honors God or is even pleasing to himself."
"You should give him those Left Behind books," I said solemnly.
I took a deep breath. Throwing out Left Behind -- that runaway best seller in which God comes to earth and literally yanks the believers to heaven, leaving piles of still-warm clothes and dentures behind with the condemned -- was like being a novice wizard and saying a spell for the first time. I wasn't sure it would actually work. It did.
"He won't read 'em," Susie answered seriously.
"He won't read them?" I cried, shocked.
"He won't read 'em," she repeated. "He doesn't like the way it makes him feel."
We talked for a little while longer, then Susie got up to go.
A half-hour later, the phone in the office rang. It was Susie, inviting me to dinner with her family. It was the act of a good Christian. I must have sounded lonely. "I'm making fettuccine Alfredo," she said.
I told her, "I love fettuccine Alfredo."
One of the great cliches of liberal criticism of the Christian right is the idea that these people are wrongheaded because they profess to know the will of God. H.L. Mencken put that one best, and perhaps first: "It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely."
These criticisms sound like they make sense. But I think they are a little off-base. The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.
But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.
Once you grasp this fact, you're a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.
Which brings me back to Left Behind. Who gets left behind? Nobody, that's who. How could they leave us behind? They couldn't live without us. Even their most intimate family meals would seem lonely if we were missing.
At first, the vacationing New York schoolteacher Tom Hamill didn't say much at the dinner table. Speak when spoken to, help serve the fettuccine, pass the white bread and margarine. Ask politely about her son's senior year at high school, her twelve-year-old daughter's home schooling, the job her husband lost two years ago -- or maybe it was five. Smile in placid agreement as Susie compares Massachusetts Democrats (like Tom's real-life mother) to Al Qaeda. A cozy family dinner in Anytown, U.S.A.
Dinner started at about seven. John Kerry was set to accept the nomination at the FleetCenter in a few hours. Dinner Table wondered if the terrorists would strike. "No, no," Susie said. "The criminals wouldn't attack their own kind."
"Hear, hear," I said.
I concentrated on my food. Grace was easy: Just hang your head. But once they moved into politics and religion, I began to worry that my silence was becoming conspicuous. Susie was shooting me searching looks. I noticed her husband, the wiry gray-haired dad with the slow voice and the henpecked posture, was watching me whenever I chewed. Like he was checking to see if I would swallow. Finally the discussion switched to the high school one of her sons attended; he had a couple of crazy teachers there, a mean lady and a guy with man-boobs....
"We have a transvestite at our school," I whispered, suddenly inspired.
Susie's husband and older son were still talking about the man-boobs teacher. "Whaddya mean, which one?" the younger said to his dad.
"We have a transvestite at our school," I repeated.
Only Susie heard me. "No!" she screamed. "Did you hear what he said? A transvestite works at his school!" She turned to me in horror. "Is he allowed to dress like a woman?"
Now I had everyone's attention.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "Totally normal guy, except that at some point, he started reading all kinds of . . . "
"Books!" Susie guessed.
"It's called possession," her husband said.
"Yeah, books," I said. "It started . . . he was reading Agatha Christie books at first, then he got really into detectives. Next thing you know, he's reading Nietzsche. You know, the German philosopher."
"The weirdo German!" Susie exclaimed.
Everyone was staring at me in shock.
"And he comes up to me one day and says, you know, 'Well, since there's no God, I might as well be gay!' "
"Oh, my God," her husband whispered.
"And he starts talking like this, and his appearance got more and more strange. . . . He started coming into work in drag. . . . "
"Oh, my God," the husband repeated.
"And his boyfriend would come and pick him up at school. . . ." I went on.
"Oh!" Susie shrieked, scrunching her nose, as though smelling rotting cheese.
"The thing is, I'm the one who gets in trouble," I said. "Like, there was this one little girl. I caught her listening to 50 Cent -- you know, the rapper -- and I started telling her about the torments of hell, and how she'd pay in eternity and all of that. And the principal comes up to me, and he's like, 'Stop, you're scaring the children!' "
"Oh, yeah," Susie snorted.
"And I'm like, 'I'm scaring her? Are you crazy? This girl is seven years old. She needs to know about these things!'
"We have kids now, because they know you're a Christian, they go out of their way to make your life miserable," I said. "I know this one guy. They'll take his Bible from his classroom and snort cocaine off it, right in front of him!"
Susie put her hands over her heart.
"They'll get suspended for a week," I said. "But then they're right back in there."
The table fell silent. The kids slowly started to slip away. Soon the only ones left were me, Mom and Dad, and a nearly empty bowl of fettuccine. Forty minutes in, my fork was still scraping the plate.
"Now this is good fettuccine," I said.
(Posted Oct 06, 2004)
Ten weeks undercover in the grass roots of the Republican Party
By MATT TAIBBI
I never felt any longing to go to Orlando, Florida. What I felt, in traveling south to volunteer for the campaign of George W. Bush, was an obligation. Let me explain by first saying something about the critics of our president. A great many of them like to laugh at George Bush for not reading books and for being uninterested in visiting other countries. But a lot of those same people are guilty of the opposite offense. They prefer to read books and travel abroad rather than actually getting to know their own country face to face.
These critics do a terrific job of mocking his mental deficiencies and dismissing his supporters as hapless morons, but they do not do a very good job of explaining the nature of his support. The few dissident commentators who bother trying to explain the Bush phenomenon seldom do more than reach for the nearest Marx-inspired academic cliche. They will tell you, for instance, that Republicans are a vast intellectual underclass cynically manipulated by the rich through a mesmerizing cocktail of yahoo enthusiasms, xenophobic fears and ancient superstitions -- and those same people will insist, if forced to offer an opinion on the subject, that one should feel sorry for most of them.
This is the wrong approach. As a professional misanthrope, I believe that if you are going to hate a person, you ought to do it properly. You should go and live in his shoes for a while and see at the end of it how much you hate yourself.
This was what I was doing down in Florida. The real challenge wasn't just trying to understand these Republicans. It was to become the best Republican I could be.
Republicans are everywhere, but everywhere is not a good place to look for them. For my purposes I wanted to try to catch them in their ideal habitat. That was why I chose Orlando. For me, it is hell on earth, the worst city on the planet, a place that would make me long for Kinshasa or Volokolamsk. But for Republicans, it is ideal: a scorching-hot paved inland archipelago of garish shopping malls and stadium-size steel-and-glass Baptist churches, a place with no nonhuman life apart from the caged animals at the theme parks, and an entire economy organized around monstrous temples to fake experience.
I arrived in early June, moved into a cheap hotel, called the local Republican office and offered to volunteer. They told me to come on by. So I went, arriving early on a Tuesday morning at their small strip-mall office on the east side of town.
My cover story was a travesty, an idiotic tissue of halfhearted lies. I said I was a New York City schoolteacher named Tom Hamill, in Orlando to spend a summer with a girlfriend who was from the area. It was the best thing I could come up with to explain my Northern accent, my lack of local connections and all that free time.
The story's only saving grace was that the truth was so much more unbelievable. Republicans are paranoid enough to expect a mole from the Kerry campaign, but I was far worse than that -- a dissolute, drug-abusing anarchist who reads the battle diaries of Vietnamese generals on rainy days, roots for Russia at the Olympics and once published an article titled "God Can Suck My Dick." I was, in short, the most offensive individual who could conceivably be planted in the campaign of George W. Bush. I was tempted to feel guilty about this. But in the end I figured that it was only fair. Since John Ashcroft has made it easy for FBI agents to infiltrate anti-war groups, it seemed to make sense that an anti-war journalist should infiltrate Ashcroft's party.
Orlando is the crucial city along a stretch of interstate called the I-4 corridor, a swath of central Florida running from Daytona Beach to Tampa. Home to 3.7 million of Florida's 9.3 million registered voters, it has the bulk of the state's undecided voters and is therefore the key to winning Florida's twenty-seven electoral votes. When I got there, I expected a teeming, ultramodern NORAD-style campaign headquarters, where I would have to work my way up a giant totem pole. But in fact what I found was -- nothing at all. For all intents and purposes, there was no campaign for George Bush in Orlando in early June. There was only one paid staffer, a central-Florida field director named Vienna Avelares, and a corner of a table at the local Orange County Republican Executive Committee. If the Republicans were building an electoral Death Star somewhere, it sure as hell wasn't in Florida.
The situation was completely disarming. Vienna, a gregarious Puerto Rican single mother who insisted on introducing herself as "Vienna -- like the sausage," seemed desperate. I had planned on doing a good job anyway, but after meeting her I had a genuine desire to help get things going.
After just a week of coming in every day like this, I became -- along with a young blond Sean Hannity fan named Ben Adrian, who also volunteered at that time -- one of the most important Bush people in all of central Florida. Within a few weeks, we would both be given keys to the office and offered full-time jobs.
Here I want to make a general observation about the social aspect of working for Bush. It's very different than it is working for a Democratic candidate. Corny as this sounds, it is much more egalitarian and brotherly than most Democratic campaigns. Almost every Democratic campaign I've seen has let itself be seduced by the Primary Colors paradigm -- the hip clique full of mildly sexually adventurous twentysomethings who have been working on their memoirs since high school and dream of that chance to wear Versace sport coats and crack jokes on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
If you've ever hung out with the Tricia Enrights and Joe Trippis of the world, you know that the operative vibe of the Democratic insider is wisecracking cool. It is not a reach to say that the ideological vision that mainstream Democratic politics has offered America since Clinton has been the supercool high school, the party of the popular kids. For all the talk about the Democrats being the party of inclusion, it really doesn't feel that way from the inside.
That's not true of all Democrats, of course. I thought it was very different, for instance, in the campaign of Dennis Kucinich. For the most part, these people were motivated by something other than ambition, and just being part of that campaign meant you were in a besieged minority, with the whole world out there laughing at you. Kucinich supporters stuck up for one another, because they had to.
You get that same besieged fraternal feeling in a Republican campaign office. There is no M*A*S*H ensemble-cast repartee. Nobody wears T-shirts that mean something, and nobody looks cool. As I would later find out, most Republicans hate "cool" ("They all think they're so cool and artistic," griped one woman as she watched Fox coverage of Democratic delegates arriving in Boston). Many of the parent volunteers I met were especially bitter because they think that cool is what liberals use to lure their children away. Which they might very well be right about, of course.
In my first month on the campaign, I did not meet many people who came into the office with the serious intention of working hard for the president. I did, however, meet a great many very lonely people who came in because they knew the Bush offices were the one place where they could share certain deeply held ideas without being ridiculed.
Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."
"You could just shoot them," I said.
"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."
He went on.
"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."
"That's where folks like us would come in," I said.
"Exactly," he said.
Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.
In my first six weeks on the campaign, I saw only one black person enter our offices. He was a recently released armed robber from Newark, New Jersey, who was the guest of a local female Republican politician. The ex-con was not particularly interested in Republican politics, although he did say something about wanting to hit Christine Todd Whitman in the face with a brick. I urged him to support the president, even though he couldn't vote. He didn't make any promises.
In mid-July a girlfriend came down from New York to visit me. I recruited her to help me with an idea I'd had to at least temporarily diversify my office environment. We decided that she would pose as a reporter for Vibe magazine, call our offices and ask whoever answered the phone if she could interview our "black volunteers."
"Penny" got my officemate Ben Adrian on the phone, and he instituted a frantic search that lasted several days. We thought at first that we might have a black professor from the University of Central Florida (sixteen miles away) on our volunteer list, but he turned out not to be available. Then Rhyan Metzler, the local Republican Party operative, gave us the number of an elderly man in Sarasota named Johnny Hunter.
As the chairman of the Federation of Black Republicans for the Republican Party of the State of Florida, Johnny was used to being called to this sort of duty. On the phone with "Penny," he explained that his job involved traveling around the state to meet people. "Wherever they need me," he said, "that's where I be rolling to." Finally, Ben came through with someone more local. He managed to persuade a thirty-seven-year-old Promise Keeper Christian named Lorin Jones, a phlegmatic fellow who was recovering from two brushes with congestive heart failure, to come in for an interview.
We scheduled it, but "Penny" never showed up. I wanted to be there for what I knew would be an excruciatingly awkward situation; the lone black volunteer, dragged into the office to show off to the media, surrounded by a bunch of nervously small-talking white Republicans waiting for the no-show journalist.
Exactly this situation materialized. The bespectacled Lorin sat surrounded by me, Ben and a few other folks from the campaign, and treated this anxious clock-watching crowd to a lesson in the vagaries of black urban existence: "My dad was a drinker," he said. "He cared about the bottle more than he loved us. But what my mom did was, she worked -- she was there in the afternoon; she wanted to see what we were doing in school.... "
"Gee," mumbled Ben. "I can't imagine the strength.... I'd like to meet her."
"I know what it's like to have a parent who'll put a belt on my butt," Lorin continued.
Nervous silence. Nods.
A few minutes later, "Penny" called to cancel, citing car trouble. Lorin hung in there for a few minutes. Our older volunteer coordinator, Don Madden, came over to chat; the two of them apparently went to neighboring schools in California. Don's school, Don said, was great at basketball, but, he said, winking at Lorin, "You were probably the only guys who could have beaten us."
Lorin laughed uncomfortably. "We were OK," he said. "We were pretty good. Our college was pretty good at basketball."
Then another staffer came over to say hi. He knew Lorin from past campaigns and asked if Lorin was planning on coming in to do phone banking. Lorin answered that he wasn't, that he was busy setting up a school-supplies giveaway charity event in his neighborhood. The staffer laughed.
"Oh, come on," he said jokingly. "I know how you people don't like to work." Lorin, who was halfway out the door, stopped at this. His smile disappeared. For a moment, he was genuinely pissed off. "We don't like to work?" he said. "That's all I do is work to make you white Republicans look good."
The staffer, a jovial guy who I normally liked quite a bit, said nothing and simply slapped Lorin on the back, laughed and helped him out the door.
"Good old Lorin," he said, going back to his office.
Vienna also chimed in after Lorin left. The two of them didn't like each other, having once disagreed at a community meeting.
"I don't like that guy," she said. Then she explained: "After that meeting, we really got into it. We were really shouting. He called me a spic. And so I said to him, 'Hey, I may be a spic, but at least I wasn't brought to this country as a slave. I was born here.' "
"Man," I thought, "We're just one big happy family."
I ended up getting to know Lorin Jones a little. He was an odd, sincere person who interested me largely because he was by far the most dedicated, effective and intellectually honest Republican volunteer the party had in the area, and yet the campaign more or less completely ignored him.
A devout Christian, Lorin supported Bush not only because of the social-religious issues, but because he sincerely believed that state financial aid had had a corrosive effect on the black community and that communities should support themselves through charity. He was the living incarnation of the "thousand points of light" idea. He ought to have been a poster child for Republican values.
"In my neighborhood, you can go up to anybody and ask where the black Republican lives," he said. "And they'll lead you right to my house. But they respect me because of what I've done."
And I saw this. At a function I would later attend in his neighborhood, I met several people who had been converted to Bush by Lorin. He was working round-the-clock for the president, but the campaign was just trying to turn him into another Johnny Hunter. "All they want me to do is start clubs," he said. "Tallahassee keeps calling and bugging me to start black clubs. And I hate that, because I think that puts us all in boxes. I think we should be going out into the community more."
Lorin believed that Republicans could win twenty percent of the black vote -- not the usual ten percent -- if they were smart about it. All they had to do, he said, was visit black churches and hand out fact sheets showing the Republican and Democratic stances on social and religious issues. "You wouldn't even have to campaign," he said. "You'd get an extra ten percent right there."
I must have heard him put forward that plan a half-dozen times, but no one did anything except smile and nod.
Some of the Republicans, however, were willing to help Lorin -- sort of. A smallish contingent of five YRs (Young Republicans) met Lorin in front of an Office Depot in a white suburban area one Saturday to man a booth for soliciting school-supply donations for kids in Lorin's neighborhood. They worked cheerfully throughout the afternoon, giving away hot dogs and helping Lorin get a good amount of stuff.
But when it came time a few days later to actually give away the stuff in Lorin's West Orlando neighborhood, none of the YRs showed up. I was the only white Republican who made it. It was a remarkable event. More than 200 people, mostly single mothers and their children, showed up at a funeral home called Gail and Wynn's to receive the book bags and notebooks Lorin had gathered to give away in one of the reception rooms.
I helped distribute bags to the children. "Vote for Bush," I managed to whisper a few times.
That day Lorin confided to me that this might be his last go-round with the Republicans. "I think this might be it," he said. "I think I might be done with these people."
During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office -- Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don -- were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.
I saw this clearly one weekend at a local gun show, where we were manning a voter-registration booth. I rotated with Rhyan and Vienna that weekend, and all three of us were quietly freaking out at the sight of all these fat weirdos from the sticks buying huge assault rifles and Confederate bumper stickers with messages such as IF I'D KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN, I'D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.
"Man, I'm glad I'm a socially liberal Republican," whispered Rhyan at one point, laughing.
It was late July, and a new recruit was talking in my ear -- let's call her Susie -- and she was an opinionated, middle-aged fundamentalist-Christian mother of five. Originally from West Virginia, she was working the phones for Bush and sounding off on humanity's declining morals and the agents of the international liberal conspiracy.
"Are you married, Tom?" she asked.
I squinted in apprehension, sensing a Jesus conversation on the way. "Uh, no," I said.
"My oldest," she began, "has a three-year-old and has been with the same girl for six years, and he will not marry her."
"Oh," I said, remembering to sound shocked. "That must really upset you."
"It kills me," she said.
"Does he not go to church?"
"Oh, occasionally," she said, sighing. "He will tell you right off.... He encourages her to go and to take their little daughter, and he tells you he's hopeful that God doesn't come, or nothing happens to him before he rededicates his life. But he's definitely not living a life that either honors God or is even pleasing to himself."
"You should give him those Left Behind books," I said solemnly.
I took a deep breath. Throwing out Left Behind -- that runaway best seller in which God comes to earth and literally yanks the believers to heaven, leaving piles of still-warm clothes and dentures behind with the condemned -- was like being a novice wizard and saying a spell for the first time. I wasn't sure it would actually work. It did.
"He won't read 'em," Susie answered seriously.
"He won't read them?" I cried, shocked.
"He won't read 'em," she repeated. "He doesn't like the way it makes him feel."
We talked for a little while longer, then Susie got up to go.
A half-hour later, the phone in the office rang. It was Susie, inviting me to dinner with her family. It was the act of a good Christian. I must have sounded lonely. "I'm making fettuccine Alfredo," she said.
I told her, "I love fettuccine Alfredo."
One of the great cliches of liberal criticism of the Christian right is the idea that these people are wrongheaded because they profess to know the will of God. H.L. Mencken put that one best, and perhaps first: "It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely."
These criticisms sound like they make sense. But I think they are a little off-base. The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.
But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.
Once you grasp this fact, you're a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.
Which brings me back to Left Behind. Who gets left behind? Nobody, that's who. How could they leave us behind? They couldn't live without us. Even their most intimate family meals would seem lonely if we were missing.
At first, the vacationing New York schoolteacher Tom Hamill didn't say much at the dinner table. Speak when spoken to, help serve the fettuccine, pass the white bread and margarine. Ask politely about her son's senior year at high school, her twelve-year-old daughter's home schooling, the job her husband lost two years ago -- or maybe it was five. Smile in placid agreement as Susie compares Massachusetts Democrats (like Tom's real-life mother) to Al Qaeda. A cozy family dinner in Anytown, U.S.A.
Dinner started at about seven. John Kerry was set to accept the nomination at the FleetCenter in a few hours. Dinner Table wondered if the terrorists would strike. "No, no," Susie said. "The criminals wouldn't attack their own kind."
"Hear, hear," I said.
I concentrated on my food. Grace was easy: Just hang your head. But once they moved into politics and religion, I began to worry that my silence was becoming conspicuous. Susie was shooting me searching looks. I noticed her husband, the wiry gray-haired dad with the slow voice and the henpecked posture, was watching me whenever I chewed. Like he was checking to see if I would swallow. Finally the discussion switched to the high school one of her sons attended; he had a couple of crazy teachers there, a mean lady and a guy with man-boobs....
"We have a transvestite at our school," I whispered, suddenly inspired.
Susie's husband and older son were still talking about the man-boobs teacher. "Whaddya mean, which one?" the younger said to his dad.
"We have a transvestite at our school," I repeated.
Only Susie heard me. "No!" she screamed. "Did you hear what he said? A transvestite works at his school!" She turned to me in horror. "Is he allowed to dress like a woman?"
Now I had everyone's attention.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "Totally normal guy, except that at some point, he started reading all kinds of . . . "
"Books!" Susie guessed.
"It's called possession," her husband said.
"Yeah, books," I said. "It started . . . he was reading Agatha Christie books at first, then he got really into detectives. Next thing you know, he's reading Nietzsche. You know, the German philosopher."
"The weirdo German!" Susie exclaimed.
Everyone was staring at me in shock.
"And he comes up to me one day and says, you know, 'Well, since there's no God, I might as well be gay!' "
"Oh, my God," her husband whispered.
"And he starts talking like this, and his appearance got more and more strange. . . . He started coming into work in drag. . . . "
"Oh, my God," the husband repeated.
"And his boyfriend would come and pick him up at school. . . ." I went on.
"Oh!" Susie shrieked, scrunching her nose, as though smelling rotting cheese.
"The thing is, I'm the one who gets in trouble," I said. "Like, there was this one little girl. I caught her listening to 50 Cent -- you know, the rapper -- and I started telling her about the torments of hell, and how she'd pay in eternity and all of that. And the principal comes up to me, and he's like, 'Stop, you're scaring the children!' "
"Oh, yeah," Susie snorted.
"And I'm like, 'I'm scaring her? Are you crazy? This girl is seven years old. She needs to know about these things!'
"We have kids now, because they know you're a Christian, they go out of their way to make your life miserable," I said. "I know this one guy. They'll take his Bible from his classroom and snort cocaine off it, right in front of him!"
Susie put her hands over her heart.
"They'll get suspended for a week," I said. "But then they're right back in there."
The table fell silent. The kids slowly started to slip away. Soon the only ones left were me, Mom and Dad, and a nearly empty bowl of fettuccine. Forty minutes in, my fork was still scraping the plate.
"Now this is good fettuccine," I said.
(Posted Oct 06, 2004)
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mind putting something this long in an lj cut?? kinda fills up my whole friends list... hehe
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I AM, however, thanking you for posting this, because it's given me a lot to think about as far as how I react and respond to people whose fundamental beliefs are so contrary to mine.
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I don't see any choices being denied here.
Sheesh.
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I join you in your "sheeshing."
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After I've read it, it's a pain in my butt to have to scroll past it again.
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But, you know, there's a great function that computers made after 1984 have; it's a graphical thing on the side of your screen called a "scroll bar." In the words of Wikipedia: "A scrollbar, or slider, is a graphical widget in a GUI with which continuous text, pictures or anything else can be scrolled, i.e., viewed even if it does not fit into the space in a computer display, window, or viewport." Isn't that amazing?
Did you know that at one point Scroll Wheels didn't even exist? We had no CHOICE but to use the scroll bar! Like animals!
Furthermore, your Scroll Wheel also has an amazing function! Try clicking on it, and you will find that you can drag the mouse downward and the page will scroll along with the movement of your mouse, saving you valuable turns of the wheel!
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I cut-tag my longer entries so that people have a choice as to whether or not they want to read them. We all have people on our friends lists that we're closer to than others - some folks we want to read everything they post, and some we only wnat to read certain subjects, updates on their actual life, or such. I don't assume that everyone wants to read every post I make. Some of my friends read from work, or have a huge friend list, so have asked for cut-tags. I respect them, so I do it.
Cutting long posts is about being polite to others, respecting them, giving them the choice instead of making it for them.
There is nothing wrong with asking other people to cut really long posts, as long as it's done politely, and I didn't see anyone who'd requested a cut do it rudely.
It's great that you scrolled past it and came back, but it doesn't matter whether or not it was easy, we're talking about whether you should have to.
I do think it's a great article, and I'm glad that Donna posted it. I don't have a problem with the message.
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And I don't know you... but I saw a comment saying how you weren't given a choice about reading the item... so that was the only basis I had on your comment.
On top of which, you were replying to my EXACTLY comment which was a comment to another person's comment. You went out of your way to post on my comment... so don't act like I just came over to you to harass. I posted my thoughts and you posted that dumb-ass argument at ME and I called you on it.
However, I will be scrolling past anything else you write to me on this matter.
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Only when the post is to a community. I'm of the mind that my blog is *mine*, and that if people don't want to deal with the length or content of the posts I make, there's a very simple way to deal with that.
I'm not speaking for
we're talking about whether you should have to.
No, we're talking about whether or not the poster should have to, just because someone happened to add them as a friend. I don't think it's very polite to demand someone conform to a particular behavior pattern simply because I put them on my f-list.
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Not only did this get cut-tagged last year when I found it, it was also stored in a private-locked post.
Not anymore.
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Using cut tags is about respect for your audience. It doesn't matter where you're posting. It's entirely the poster's choice whether to use them or not, but personally, I would hope that people aren't so self-centered that they have no consideration at all for the feelings of those they're expecting to read their posts, particularly when most of them are supposedly friends.
I haven't seen anybody here demand a cut tag. All I've seen is polite requests. I will admit, that three requests right off the bat is perhaps a bit overboard (if I were going to ask for an lj-cut and I saw that one or two people had already done it, I might have been inclined to hold off, at least publicly), but that still doesn't amount to some sort of "force". The insinuation in several of these replies that friends, possibly good friends (I don't personally know), of the poster are somehow not allowed to make a polite request of them, ANY kind of polite request, seems to me to be the height of arrogance.
I personally don't consider myself a good enough friend of kyburg to make this sort of request on my own behalf, but had nobody else done so I might have been inclined to make the suggestion on the premise that I know her to be the sort of person who actually cares about other people and, knowing that this sort of thing can be rather annoying for some people out there, she might want to be nice and save her friends some annoyance (which in general I think everybody could do with less of).
If nothing else, it's arguable that it would have been beneficial to use the cut tag simply to avoid this whole (rather pointless) argument on the subject overshadowing the real point of the post (has anybody else noticed that of all the replies to this, only one (so far) has actually even addressed the content of the post?). This seems to rather undermine the argument that not using the cut tag somehow makes people more likely to read it, because even if that's true it seems pretty obvious it also makes it less likely people will pay attention to it because they'll be distracted by the whole cut tag issue instead.
Personally, I would have been far more likely to read it (I actually still haven't) if kyburg had said "Read this, it's important" followed by a cut, because I respect her opinion, and because I'm far more likely to respect the desires of somebody else if it appears they're being considerate of me too.
Really, can't we all just be a bit more considerate of each other and try to get along?
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/10/14/poll.rude.ap/
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I can't speak for
It's not a question of being "self-centered". As far as I'm concerned, if you add me to your friends list, you're electing to see what I post. If you don't like it, buh-bye. I don't like, nor do I accept, the patent insinuation that it's somehow rude to use my blog as I see fit. You don't get to impose your viewpoint or even have an expectation that your viewpoint will be considered just beacause you've added me to your f-list.
I think it's extremely rude to ask people to make changes to how they comport their own posts in their own blog. You're a guest, and should act like it. The best part about being a guest is that you can leave at any time if you don't like the accomodations.
I'm so bone-tired of the idea that people who don't act like they have to keep the rest of the world happy are rude. It's bullshit and I refuse to tolerate it. Being rude, by definition, implies that somehow there was an intent to be irritating or offensive to you. Don't think for a moment that because I do or say something you don't like that it's somehow targeted at you. I just don't care what you think.
In short, I obviously don't share your viewpoint about the issue of respect and your audience. As far as I'm concerned, it's my damn blog, and everyone else has two choices- like it or lump it. Those in the latter category are free not to deal with me.
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What's less respectful? Posting a long post without a cut or demanding someone cut their post so that you don't have to read it?
And the fact that you post an uncorrelated article about an increase in rudeness nationwide, you know, to further back up your point on the ever-important "lj cut" issue? How fucking self-righteous of you.
Personally, I think it's rude to demand someone else change the formatting on what amounts to a journal they are -allowing- you to read--especially when you don't say anything about the (very interesting and cool) article at all; it's even ruder to chastise the journal owner for not showing their friends-listed reader the appropriate respect.
It'd also be rude for me to call you an egocentric, self-righteous prick. Good thing I'm not about to do that.
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Boy, how intelligent is that?
I sense a post on this stuff tomorrow. It needs to season for 24 hours.
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I made no demands of any sort (in fact, as I mentioned, I haven't heard anybody make any demands). I, in fact, did not say anything directly to kyburg at all. I was addressing other people who had posted comments, which happened to be attached to one of her posts.
I did not "gloss over the entire thing in order to post a comment". In fact, upon seeing the size of the article, my first reaction was to look at the comments to see whether other people had brought up the suggestion of a cut tag because, as I mentioned before, I had thought it a suggestion that kyburg might be interested in hearing given what I know of her general consideration for other people. I then found a long discussion on the topic including some statements which I considered worthy of additional commentary.
I believe given the large amount of discussion on the subject and multiple posts made with contrary arguments that my contribution to the discussion was relevant and appropriate, you may disagree, which is your prerogative, but in that case fanning the flames with a (reasonably inflammatory) response doesn't seem like the most responsible course of action to me.
Unfortunately, your response seems to indicate that you've completely missed the point I was trying to make, which is that, in my opinion, we really should all just drop the issue, try to be nicer and more considerate to each other, and not be so caught up in ourselves and perceived slights to some god-given right to ignore and aggravate the others around us.
In any case, I've said my fill, this conversation seems to be degenerating rapidly, and I suspect there is very little likelihood of swaying your opinions in any case, so I will likely not post anything more in this thread. Please do not take anything I've said here as a personal attack, demand, rant, or anything else on you or anybody else here, as that was never my intention.
I just wish I knew why good people couldn't be a little nicer to each other once in a while, that's all..
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This is a great article. Thanks for posting it.
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I think if it shows anything,
It's all people--some just grew up with a set of circumstances that drew them to other conclusions than I grew into. People are still people, and deserve a certain amount of respect--be they Liberal, Conservative, or non cut Lj posters.
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I must admit, for some time I've shared some of the author's belief that the reason the Democrats continue to fail is because they're too caught up in their own vision of what politics should be about to understand a lot of realities about the political world they're actually sitting in the middle of. The point about "it's about the argument, not the truth" is also particularly interesting.
Some good thoughts
Perhaps the worst thing in human civilization is the need to group together against another group. People like conflict, and in this country especially I've noticed people like to feel better somehow. Be it moral or intellectual superiority, in the end it's the same feelings, just at opposite ends of the spectrum. Ironic and sad, really...
I don't like politics and religion simply because people get caught up in their ideology and forget to look at people as simply people.
I'm going to ignore the whole ZOMG LJ CUT!!!!!1111!! thing except to say that the thread was quite entertaining. Good show, y'all, fight the good fight and all :o
Re: Some good thoughts
THe odd thing, is that we each view each other as basically opposed to the freedoms WE worship.
After the workout I had this weekend, what with working the remote for the TV when the X-Files was on two stations at the same time, and the resealable packaging on my Doritos, I am completely spent, and in no shape for scrolling past a whole article. Have I not suffered enough?
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