Another America and Yet Maybe One America

Today I joined two friends on a tour of an area of the Southwest that despite its rural nature has more gun stores per square mile than any place in America, or at least it seemed that way. We visited something like eight or nine different emporia, some quite large, others quite cosy. Throw in lunch at a fabulously cheap Mexican restaurant of carnitas so tender you could gum them and still get every molecule of flavor and I'd say we had a grand time. Yes, yes, okay, it's true: my two buddies are real Gun Wackos.

And so am I.

Surprised? Why? Because you don't think left-wingers can be pro-gun?

Here's the difference between lefty Gun Wackos and right-wingnut Gun Wackos--lefty Gun Wackos keep it on the down low. We don't put "Protected by Smith and Wesson" decals on our trucks, or glue "In Emergency, I dial .357" in our kitchen windows. We don't wear combat boots and we don't bray in public about the arsenals in our basements or what bad asses we are. We don't cut the sleeves off our t-shirts and we don't drink that piss that passes for beer in this country and then demonstrate our power by crushing the thin aluminum skin. We don't particularly care for magnums when a Warsaw pact surplus round and breath control can make all the difference.

Not that I would paint all right-wing Gun Wackos with one brush. In fact, shocking as it may seem to read on this blog, a lot of them--in fact all of the people we talked with and dealt with today--were as nice as can be. Many are thoughtful and intelligent, even if we are completely at odds politically. Although Ann Coulter has her picture prominently displayed as the bony pin-up of the onanistic right, and "Hanoi Jane" Fonda's picture is posted in the urinal, and the attitude toward the disaster escalating to total armed apocalypse in Iraq is "complete the mission," and the characterization of liberals is hysterically narrow ("Annoy a liberal--work, succeed, enjoy life")--despite all of that, here we were in polite commerce and jovial conversation with people who might well brag about wanting to blow our brains out if they could read our minds. Politics never came up, as if we could smell each other's antipathies or assumed unanimity of opinion. Anyway, here was common fucking ground, man! Guns!

Let's face it. Guns are cool.

And liberals--who can be very cool--lots of liberals, lots and lots and lots of liberals own and enjoy guns...quietly.

So consider next time that the mousy bespectacled guy in the Prius with the bumper sticker that says "Buck Fush" might well be a well-trained, cool-nerved, mightily armed left-wing Gun Wacko. He's entitled to express his view openly. Let's all be polite. Let's engage in civilized discourse. Let's act like god-damned Americans and use the First Amendment as much as we do the Second Amendment and the other eight articles in the Bill of Rights. All ten are equally important, no matter what Bush, Cheney, or Alberto "Torture Boy" Gonzalez try to do. When they're all long gone--and us too, for that matter--let's hope that those ten amendments all carry the same weight as they were intended to, to both protect the individual and the collective, and to empower them to protect themselves if that dire necessity regrettably presents itself.

Whaddaya say? Can we all agree on that, as Americans? As Gun Wackos Indivisible?

There may be hope yet for this country.