Trouble

So the latest fashion among red-state limpdicks is apparently to stand around conspicuously close to Presidential events brandishing weapons, making much of the fact that they are within the letter of the law. This is basically the equivalent of the six-year-old who waves his hand in your face screaming “I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU! I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU!”

Personally, I don’t have a lot of trouble with the idea of firearms ownership in general. All mine are in the ancestral land rather than here, though, because quite frankly I don’t need them in a place where the majority of folks don’t want to shoot everyone like me. So what the hell is going on in these other places that people feel the need to suddenly just happen to exercise their rights in close proximity to an event that contains most of the things they oppose in one place?

If you remember my previous work, you know that there are essentially three political parties in this country: the Left, the Right, and the South. Until roughly 1964, these were conflated oddly, with most of the Left and the South under the umbrella of “Democrat” and most of the Right under the umbrella of “Republican.” The big shift was the move of the South from the “Democrat” label to the “Republican” from 1964-72, but also consequential was the shifting of everyone that fell under “Left” to the side of the Democrats. Don’t forget that in the Civil Rights era, a lot of the heavy lifting came from liberal Republicans in the Northeast (of the sort known in the early 80s as “Gypsy Moths”) working in concert with non-Southern Democrats. (This is also why the notion of “bipartisanship” is obsolete, with the ideologies having sorted pretty cleanly into two parties with little admixture outside of a few red-state Democrats – there’s a big difference between needing to rustle up 51 “Left” among both parties and having to get 60 Democrats, but that’s a tale for another time.)

In an amazing surprise,* there is a huge overlap between the most virulent health-reform opponents, the “Birthers,” and the population of aging rural Southern whites. This is a population whose doom is written clear as day: America is getting ever more non-white, the South is losing its influence over national politics, fewer than one American in five lives in a rural area, and they themselves – not to put too fine a point on it – are dying. As a cohort, the “South” is in its twilight; the people who voted reliably for Wallace, then Reagan, then both Bushes and finally Palin (note that the ever-so-shocking** “Don’t Blame Me” bumper stickers assert that the owner voted for “Sarah”, not “McCain) are seeing their world and society change around them – politically, culturally, the works – in ways that are insurmountable.

So those folks marching around with their Glocks and their M4-geries and ominous sign-waving about the “tree of liberty” aren’t just out there to decry “socialism” or try to scare people. They have the Southern disease, and are convinced that the world can be made to return to the way it was. They cannot succeed – ask King Canute about tides – but they can make things difficult along the way. After all, if you’re facing an existential crisis, you’ll do whatever it takes to rage against the dying of the light.

The problem is, the last time this particular cohort tried to make things difficult, 168 people died in Oklahoma City. After eight years when you could get bundled off by persons impersonating the Secret Service for having arrived at a rally with the wrong bumper sticker, I personally think that somebody needs to do a better job asserting that while an armed society is a polite society, a polite society frowns on continual public penis-waving. And if the Emily Post approach comes up short, well…the Feds have always got the hydrogen bomb.

(My actual thoughts on the forthcoming health care debacle will be coming along later.)

* WHOPPING GREAT HEAP O’ SARCASM WARNING

** WHOPPING GREAT HEAP O’ SARCASM WARNING PART DEUX ELECTRIC BOOGALEAUX