"Strocked" Part I

Here they come, the new sons of liberty
Tuesday, September 1, 2009

By Carl Strock

I enjoyed very much the torrent of e-mails I received last week in response to the brief item I wrote about Rep. Paul Tonko's health-care town hall meeting in Bethlehem. I didn't attend the meeting but accepted the word of other media outlets that what occurred there was the same as has occurred elsewhere in our fair country, meaning large numbers of angry opponents of government health care turned out to boo, shout and otherwise disrupt the proceedings, a word that I have no reason to doubt.

Some of those who angrily wrote to me insisted that this was done in a fine American tradition of shouting and name-calling going back to the Constitutional Convention. Others insisted, oh, no, we didn't shout and name-call; we just asked questions. It was the other side that was disruptive.

But they all wrote, or else they called.

One fellow called from California to take me to task, and when I asked how he got onto me, he said he had been alerted by some "liberty-minded friends," which made my antennae quiver, since liberty is one of the code words of the angry and belligerent portion of the country that misleadingly calls itself conservative.

"We have an e-mail network like you wouldn't believe," he said. "Every single thing is watched ... the alert went out."

Indeed it did, from something called the NY Liberty Council, which urged recipients of a blast e-mail to call us. "This is where we can directly affect the media and their portrayal of concerned Americans!!" they said.

So we got plenty of calls and plenty of e-mails, and as I say, I enjoyed them all, from the few that were soberly discursive to the one that urged me to "get smart and fear God" and labelled me a "liberal" body part that I cannot identify in a family newspaper.

All had in common a hatred and contempt for the federal government that I find fascinating, since, as I have pointed out before, the same people who profess this hatred and contempt seem to be fully supportive of our government when it makes war (even on false pretenses), when it tortures prisoners, when it eavesdrops on our conversations (even in violation of the law), and so on, that is, when it engages in brutal military and police actions.

Several expressed surprise that I would excoriate the local police and the local school board, as I often do, and then tolerate government health care, as if to argue that if some branches of government overreach and are corrupt, then all must overreach and be corrupt.

But I have never declared any hatred of government on principle. They're the ones who do that -- remember their Founding Father's (Ronald Reagan's) famous declaration: "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem."

Stupidest thing I ever heard. Government is what distinguished the ancient Greek city states from the barbarians to the north, and it is still the distinguishing feature of civilization -- the orderly provision for the common good, with everyone chipping in.

But that is exactly what these new barbarians hate, chipping in. Paying taxes. It's what unites them, whether they are soberly discursive or sputteringly abusive. They hate making an orderly contribution to the common good.

I don't know how they imagine paying for the military and police state that they so admire, but that is just one of the little contradictions that they live with and not the greatest of their problems.

Their ideal, on the one hand, seems to be the lone ignoramus standing in the door of his cabin with a shotgun in the crook of his arm, scowling out at the world. A pre-civilized state.

But on the other hand, they applauded President George W. Bush's expansion of executive powers, and they uttered not a peep of protest at the National Security Agency bugging the telephone conversations of American citizens.

They don't talk about that. They talk about freedom, as President Bush did, who called it "a gift from the Almighty."

"I'll keep my guns, freedom and money. You can keep the change," declared a bumper sticker I saw the other day.

And that's what their freedom, or liberty, inevitably comes down to, when you follow it all the way. They keep their guns, and they don't have to pay taxes. It's never anything ennobling, never anything generous.

I'm not sure where the gun fetishism comes from, but it's an essential part of this angry, belligerent subculture that calls itself conservative.

Would you like a "conservative T-shirt"? That's how they're advertised online.

One says, "Celebrate Diversity," under images of a lot of different kinds of handguns. Yuk-yuk.

Another, modeled by a demure blonde, says, "I'd Rather Be Waterboarding."
Conservative humor.

They go berserk at the prospect of government providing health care -- "Forced charity is thievery," one declared angrily -- but they get a kick out of the near-drowning of prisoners.

They lecture me about Amtrak or "cash for clunkers" as examples of government uselessness, but they never lecture me about the weapons-of-mass- destruction hoax.

They protest that I call them selfish, but it goes beyond selfishness. It's more like an atavistic belligerence. I'll grab whatever I can for myself, and the hell with everyone else.

Don't expect me to pay for the health care of some unwashed illegal immigrants. What's mine is mine.

When government embodies and validates their selfishness and their belligerence -- Drill, baby, drill -- then government is good.

Well, they're not kidding me, ladies and gentlemen. They can send me all the liberty-minded e-mails they want.