The Early Morning Sirens

They went off just after 6 am, undulating wails continuing for three minutes or so, then stopping for a minute or two before recommencing.  It was still dark, and we lifted our heads off the bed to see if we could tell which fire station it came from.  Then we waited to see if the big pickups from up the hill would blast past the house, their flashing blue volunteer lights on the dashboard.  That would have meant Stone Ridge, or Kripplebush.  When that happens you can’t help it; you start to worry that it’s the house of someone you know.

Of course it’s unlikely.  We don’t know people who smoke in bed, or fall asleep on the couch with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and those are the most common causes of fire around here, especially at that hour.  The coal smolders in the mattress or cushion, until the acrid smoke awakens someone, or the alarm clock sounds and someone rolls over to turn it off and sees the tendrils of flame around the bedroom door.

It’s the late-day sirens that should concern us.  Then it’s brush fires that catch the edge of a woodlot, or move through the dried cornstalks of the neighboring field.  Or it’s an electrical fire, a snapping arc unheard in the noise of the floor sander or the table saw that overloaded the antiquated knob-and-tube wiring in the ceiling or walls, the insulation long rotted off the wires set too close together back some eighty years or so ago.  Most everyone with an old house has some knob-and-tube somewhere, even if the electrical has been upgraded.  The weekenders, probably not:  they had everything ripped out before they moved in, at the recommendation of a local contractor, maybe Brian, or Clint, or Kurt, or Will, who knew these clients could pay whatever it took for absolute peace of mind, and pitched the job accordingly.

The rest of us live in houses where the electrical has been upgraded haphazardly.  In the ‘50s and ‘60s, BX cable came in;  it was great for snaking through and around old plaster-and-lathe walls, with its flexible metal outer shield, also rodent-proof.  Later materials were safer, but not so resilient or adaptable to the complexities of old houses built in stages by country people without much money but long stretches of time available for home handiwork.

Still, there are places where it’s just about impossible to replace the wiring.  In the lofts that were once attics, long ago converted to bedrooms with bunk beds for children too many for the house, who grew up and left, moving to the cities or the suburbs, where there was work and possibility.  In the crawl spaces under the kitchens that were built ramshackle atop the clay soil and, after they’d done their initial settling, hunkered down and grasped the main house firmly, holding on more tightly with every coat of new paint on the outside, the work done by the owner or by a neighbor free to do chore-work between seasons, painters who would stop and get a hammer and nails to tidy up where things had separated, or who might add a length of 1x2 furring to close up the draft coming from the crack between parts of the house.

Even a skinny electrician, well-paid with weekender dollars, isn't eager to take on a crawl-space job.  First you have to check for mice, but also for possums and groundhogs and skunks who have taken up housing down there where it’s warmer and close to the compost heap or the apple barrels. Then there are the spiders;  grown men who wouldn’t think twice about brushing a hornet off their arm will pause before confronting the pale-white spiders who live in that eternal darkness beneath the hum and clatter of domestic life. Then there’s the standing water that accumulates, particular after a rainy fall or spring.  It’s not much—not enough to justify a sump pump or some complicated drainage plan, but when you are inching along on your back, with your toolbelt turned around and a spool of electrical wire between your knees, it’s not pleasant to feel the water seeping into your hair.

It’s not that regular electricians charge too much for this work. We’re talking about the ones who know you and have been out before to fix the strange little blackout that hit a ceiling fixture in the living room, an outlet in the hall, and the front door lamp, the crazy breaks that happen when the replacement wiring was done by expediency and not logic, wiring probably done by their father or uncle when they owned the business some decades ago.  No, they won’t even give you a price.  It’d be too much to do that stretch, they tell you.  It’s not worth it to you; as importantly, it’s not worth it to them. I refuse to charge you what it would cost to do it, they tell you.

So that little stretch of knob-and-tube stays there.  More than likely, they disconnect it, and they run channel along the walls, low and close to the baseboard, or down where the baseboard meets the floor, to power the outlets and the lights that once depended on that wiring down there. Most of us have that sort of wiring interspersed throughout the house—along the ceiling of the dining room, down from the upstairs hall light to the bottom of the stairs, or leading to the outside light that goes on when guests from out of town are coming in after dark and might run into the propane tank or just keep driving down into the drainage swale, thinking they’re still in the driveway when they’re definitely not.

But of course you don’t know who did the work for the previous owner, even if you’ve had the house for fifty years.  Maybe that owner himself, Mr. Pratt, or Mr. DeGraw, did the work, and he left the wiring hot while he was laying in the new channel, so as to have power continuously, especially as he was doing that work between chores and jobs that called him away, and that wire went to the toaster or the floor furnace or some other indispensable part of everyday life.  There are back rooms of houses around here, rumpus rooms and tool rooms and tack rooms and junk rooms, where the wiring’s still left, half-done, from 1953, the conduit and the outlet boxes piled in the corner, awaiting the attentions of a man dead for decades or living, barely living, in the county nursing home up in Kingston, the oxygen tank strapped to the wheelchair and the television eternally blaring, a premonition of purgatory, or hell. 

Even if it’s finished, there’s always the chance that he forgot to cut off power to the old line, or simply undid the connections at the electrical box, where some later owner, or some electrician called in for another problem, reconnected it to see if that was the quick fix to what might otherwise be a long and tedious search for the real cause.

Hornets build nests.  Groundhogs dig past the weak spot in the foundation and, if they’re confronted by a rotted piece of wire dangling across their next venture, they might gnaw it, or maybe just push it aside—push it enough so that, when the next rains come, and the crawl space takes on a little water, the puddle reconnects hot and ground, and the wiring sparks, again and again, against the three-hundred-year-old beam, softened by dry rot or carpenter ants, ripe as tinder for the flicker and the wisp of smoke.

Now’s the season when these things happen. Now, when the first frost is hinted in the silver sheen of the topcoating on the haygrass back toward the creek.  Now, when the dry leaves rustle as the bear comes in from the woodlot to steal the windfall apples beneath the tree furthest from the house. Now, when you look up from the firewood splitter to watch the phalanx of geese in their call-and-response arc across the grey sky. Now, when the groundhog moves from his summer home in the cool darkness beneath the unheated barn, and seeks a place where the heat of human comfort leaks down through the wideboards of the kitchen floor. Now, when the mice begin to look for every possible scavenge to insulate their winter nests.  Now, when the sirens wail at 6:08, as the sky’s just showing light, and we raise our heads and try to be sure just which station it’s coming from, secretly saying: it’s not us, I know that. I hope it’s not Harry, with the band saw set up in the dining room of the old farm.  I hope it’s not Patrick and Cindy in that new house they’ve rented, plugging things into unfamiliar sockets. I hope it’s not Jake. I hope it’s not Ike. I hope. I hope.

Those whispered secrets travel along the circuits of community.  They, too, are fragile.  Some are old, and frayed.  Some are new and untested.  Most of them are so ingrained in the everyday life around here that you don’t even know they’re there until the siren sounds and you bring them to mind, and heart, and prayer.

Political Geography in America: Part One

Political Geography in America:  Part One

If you don’t live in the US of A, and maybe if you do, the notion of American political geography is pretty opaque.  Hell, they haven’t even taught it as a separate university discipline since Mark Twain wrote a devastatingly witty satire on its vaporous imprecision.  No, actually, Twain’s satire concerned political economy and, when it was published in 1870, it was widely viewed as a send-up of celebrated authors writing without knowledge or even a trace of shame about whatever a paying editor might imagine would draw a readership.

Which is not to say that political geography hasn’t always been essential to understanding America.  But the best writers on the subject never mentioned the discipline.  They wrote fiction:  William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty on the South; William Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner on California; Ken Kesey on the Northwest states. Elmore Leonard has recently brought the strip-mining areas of Kentucky, western Virginia and West Virginia proper into stark relief. 

There is a demandingly difficult academic journal devoted to the subject.  Political Geography recently ran a scholarly article about “enclaves of abandonment,” places that were “resolved” by a political process that made life within them impossible.  One Indian spent his entire life in such an enclave, ceded to Bangladesh but far from its borders, leaving him an illegal immigrant to India whenever he needed shoes or fertilizer, never able to enter his legal state because his enclave was surrounded by Indian territory.  This is the subject of political geography—the ways landscapes and spaces lie at odds with, or bring into being, political institutions and systems.

   But most of the public writing on America’s political geography has always been, at best, shallow and simplistic.  In the later 19^th century, and then again in the 1960s, the recurrent distinction was between The South and The North. Having spent a good deal of the 1960s in West Virginia, which after all became a separate state by seceding from Confederate Virginia over the issue of slaveholding, I had no illusions that it held greater kinship with, say, Connecticut or even Ohio than Kentucky and Mississippi—except insofar as Mississippi had a far greater, if largely silent, black population.  In the ‘70s, I played guitar and pedal steel in Austin, Texas, while getting a Ph.D. in American Studies, and there the political geography was so fine in distinction that not just different bars on the same street, but different tables at the same bar, conformed to radically different political geographies. At Threadgill’s on a Saturday night there were two-steppers who’d voted the Communist party in 1936 and Houston corporate lawyers with manufactured tans and endangered-species cowboy boots moving side by side with Kinky Friedman, the Texas Jew-Boy. In one band, I was the only non-Chicano;  when we opened for Saul and Rueben’s uncle’s conjunto orchestra, there were long comedic passages concerning my dress, my hair, and my gringo-stupid inability to speak either Castilian or streetwise Spanish, none of which I could understand, as I spoke no Spanish.  In an earlier, ill-fated attempt to monetize my musicianship I played pedal steel in a C&W band so Christian that the other members couldn’t play past midnight Saturday, minimizing the bar-take, and refused to break down, move, load or unload the equipment on the grounds it was work on the Sabbath. Leaving me to do all the work but not receiving any recompense.  I first met Saul and Rueben coming home discouraged after one of those gigs, and followed some spectacular guitar playing into a shitkicker fratboy birthday party.  I wheeled in the Twin Reverb, took the axe out of the box, and became the band’s first and only White Boy. I grieve that band daily.

People said Texas was different, and Austin was different than Texas, but I knew better.  Driving down the first time, in a wornout VW squareback with the Twin and the pedal steel and about six guitars and a box of books filling the back, I had to stop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA for the night when a big piece of steel belt emerged from the side of the radial tire, causing everything to shake madly at anything over 45 mph. I had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line.  The only thing I knew about the South in the counterculture years I had learned from watching Easy Rider in a theatre in Paris in 1970, but it was dubbed into French, in a sort of muffled way and I could not follow the language. The South was where pickup trucks pulled alongside you and blew you away with a shotgun. Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA was a Merle Haggard song and I’d played it enough times to know the lyrics:

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
We don't take no trips on LSD
We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.

I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all

We don't make a party out of lovin';
We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo;
We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy,
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.

            At the time, I had hair about to my waist, and while I was wearing cowboy boots, they were the wrong sort (leather Fryes, well-worn) and my jeans had a zipper and a slight bell-bottom “flare” to them.  I was pretty sure I’d be sleeping in my car in the tire shop.  Instead, I met a very nice motel keeper and his wife, and had my first chicken-fried steak at the urging of everyone around me at the diner, who were thrilled to see a Yankee eat his first bite of what is still one of my favorite foods in the world.  After dinner, I walked out to the small park, redolent of newmown hay and irrigated alfalfa.  The next morning, I was introduced to biscuits and gravy, and also grits.  The tire shop gave me the new tire just over wholesale because I was a musician.

   Today the pundits still speak of Red and Blue States, which is something like hitting a soufflé with a hammer until the pyrex breaks and then declaring the concoction and the glass to be of the same family, since you could have called both of them dishes—before you went at ‘em. American political geography isn’t defined by state boundaries.  State boundaries are arbitrary and dangerous in much the same way the postcolonial African states were rendered arbitrary and dangerous—no attention paid to belief, to loyalties, to kinship patterns, to climate and crop and foodways.

If there’s a difference, between us and postcolonial Africa, it’s been in the ways that the democratic political system has, until very recently, forced not just compromise, but something more important—mutual learning among unlikely and unsympathetic groups.  In Evanston Illinois in the 1980s, the school board decided to move white children by bus to a predominantly black elementary school.  Until this time there had been, in the US, virtually no successful busing of white kids out of their neighborhoods, and this experiment had its typical sad future ahead of it—the wealthier whites would send their children to private school, the empowered white would whine and finagle their political representatives until quiet exceptions were made and their children were grandfathered back into the old school.  By some very happy coincidence, I went over to the school in question and met the principal who at the time was dressed in a light-up Christmas Tree of a dress, to which no fewer than six small children had managed to attach themselves.  She seemed utterly unfazed by this style of meeting a representative of the apartheid-loving white side of the town.  Then and there, I fell in love.  I grieve Clara Pate daily.

But I digress.  When I started going to meetings of the mostly-black PTA of the new school, I was treated with the suspicion, even contempt, I deserved.  These parents didn’t want privileged white parents barging into their lives, with their self-righteousness and their sense of entitlement and their ten-dollar words. 

I learned this the hard way, when the School Board announced that they were not going to increase the number of teachers or staff to accommodate the 100 or so new students due to arrive.  This was, of course, outrageous:  I had no idea that the Board members knew that when those two buses drove through the white neighborhood to pick up those 100 students, only three would get on:  Caroline Winter-Rosenberg, Rocco deFilippis, and my son.  At the time, I thought most of the kids would be on the bus, and by my lights, this was an invitation to overcrowding and cheapening of resources. I got up to speak about this, in an impassioned way, hardly noticing that all the black parents were looking at me as if I were perhaps the most naïve rube to have arrived in the Midwest since the Civil War. When I railed against the Board’s niggardly treatment, though, I heard an audible gasp and a rising torrent of response.  I was too het-up to hear what was being said until one parent got up and dressed me down for speaking of the nigger-treatment. It took me a good fifteen minutes to understand what had happened.  It took me six months before any of those parents would speak to me, and it was Clara Pate who took them aside and told them to get over it:  I was a professor and I used ten-dollar words when I should have used regular ones because I was an ignorant naïve rube, but I was good of heart.  I hope she was right;  certainly I have spent the rest of my life trying to live down my flaws and live up to her kind assessment of me.

That, my friends, is political geography in America. Boundaries matter;  when they are well-drawn, they confirm and amplify the strengths and weaknesses of the citizenry.  When they are badly drawn, perhaps something new will emerge:  something better.  Or something worse.

Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Loss of American Mission

I have been very busy this last couple of weeks at my new job as an American hero.  Last night, in the midst of a desperate firefight involving violent jihadists attempting to take over an abandoned Soviet missile site that was, CIA informed the SEAL commander, still weaponized, I carried a wounded medic on my shoulders, fording an icy stream while my colleagues provided cover with AR-15s and an RPG-launcher.  It was nighttime and my night-vision goggles turned the scene an eerie pixilated monochromatic green. Earlier, I had been heli-dropped into a Middle Eastern desert city—I was just a soldier:  they didn’t tell me what city, or even what country it was, just that we were going in after some bad guys.  With my radio picking up the chatter of my fellow grunts, I went house-to-house trying not to engage innocent civilians, though it seemed there weren’t any—even the young women hid machine pistols under their flowing robes.

When the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting occurred a few weeks ago, there was a brief silence from the shill-organization for the major weapons industry.  Most Americans have heard, though far fewer believe it, that the National Rifle Association is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the major American arms manufacturers.  That interruption in shrill declarations of a constitutional apocalypse soon to come from jackbooted federal gun-confiscators was a dead give-away to the power behind the organization.  No genuine American sodality could have remained quiet in the face of such horror; corporations, however, are not human and so they operate under the rules of efficiency found in algorithms and statistics about the depth and longevity of citizen response to actionable tragedy, and unrecorded phone conversations with the congressmen and senators they have bought and paid for.

For nearly twenty years, I directed and served as a principal faculty member for an international institute on American culture and life.  It was a vocation I happened upon, and it took a little time for me to realize just what was entailed.  Every summer, 30 or so teachers, teacher-trainers, university faculty members and education-ministry specialists would arrive for six weeks of intensive training on the current state of the study of the United States.  Early on, I and my colleagues thought it was our mission to provide high-order scholarly briefs on new trends in scholarship here in America.  What we learned was that this was not even remotely the job that needed to be done. As my friend and fellow faculty member Christian Messenger (great name for an Americanist!) declared, it was “our privilege to explain America to the world.” But even that wasn’t right.  We learned that the subject, the verb and the predicate of that statement were all laughably imprecise. We didn’t know America, at least not the America that came to be the subject of the Institute.  And so “explaining” was not a responsible activity.  Moreover, the world that sat around us in the blandly efficient classroom wasn’t a monolith, and it certainly wasn’t going to sit still and drink in our wisdom.

 

Our constituency arrived, over the life of the Institute, from almost every country on the globe.  We despaired of ever getting a Cuban, till one day Frank arrived;  not only that, but his cousin ran an excellent Cuban restaurant in Chicago, and Frank had already mapped out an itinerary for himself with the help of the surreptitious extended network of Cuban-Americans in the area. Was it Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan from which tiny Yana arrived, with only a pair of high-heeled slippers (despite our instructions to all to pack “sturdy walking and hiking shoes”) with which she hiked the Petroglyph Trail at Mesa Verde National Monument and managed to get herself left behind accidentally-on-purpose in a truck stop outside Gallup, New Mexico, where she was surrounded by handsome, cowboy-booted truck drivers with whom she demurely flirted while showing them pictures of her home country?

There were America-loving Provencal teachers and America-hating Egyptian school principals, and we quickly found ourselves baffled by the Americas of both.  They didn’t resemble in any way the worlds within which we lived—and we were a pretty motley crew of Americans:  a guitar-playing country boy with a Ph.D. from Austin, Texas, and a Peace Corps alumnus from New England via Ethiopia, and a political scientist who’d grown up in the high-rise projects in Chicago and was, with his wife and his mother and a few sisters, still fostering an average of ten kids at a time.  There was a lesbian economist and a neoconservative historian and a libertarian specialist on architecture and the city. Why the Department of State kept funding us, year after year, seemed a strange miracle to us.  We thrived under the first George H.W. Bush administration, and we thrived in the Clinton years and we thrived under George W. Bush and we thrived in the first Obama administration.  The Great Recession finally killed us off—we couldn’t build a program in Chicago that could compete with isolated state-college campuses in places we didn’t even consider for our road trips.  We had a good run of it.  We put the documents in front of our participants-- Dred Scott and The Declaration of  Independence and The Plow that Broke The Plains and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and The Great Gatsby and The Statistical Atlas of the United States.  We took them to black gospel churches and 4th of July picnics and corporate law offices.  They listened to Navajo hat'aali and James Brown and Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakam, whose Guitars, Cadillacs and Hillbilly Music was a favorite of the woman from Senegal who won our "how many languages do you speak" that year-- 1987, with a still-unmatched record of 27-- not counting a few dialects here and there. She was the first person to click Xhosa to me-- a language my daughter now speaks with some imprecision.

One of my jobs as Director was to serve as the teaching faculty member during the two-plus week tours of the U.S.A. that culminated each program.  Though there was a running joke that a lecture by me on the subject of the changing vertical ecosystems of the Rocky Mountain Plateau after a big Southwestern tamale lunch at a diner on the Res was the best way to guarantee a long nap, I grew to love the work of close observation as we passed through small towns and big cities, ranchlands and industrial parks, weaving together the fabric that was this country to which I had devoted my intellectual and creative life.  After it was over, the alumni of those Institutes that had developed close-knit and continuing virtual Institutes via Facebook and websites extracted from me a promise to continue my tourbus lectures. 

That was what began this series of essays.  I warned those alumni that I wasn’t going to go political on them.  That I would remain what I had always sought to be—a quizzical observer, pointing out the hidden significance of the details of everyday American life. 

When the National Rifle Association’s shill, a man named Wayne LaPierre, gave his stump-speech after the Newtown murders of small schoolchildren by an automatic-weapon-toting young man, I struggled to keep my promise. 

I am going to skirt as close as I can to the edge;  I’m going to use a deeply personal voice to keep from seeming to throw some academic weight to what follows. 

I was raised in the woods and farmlands of Connecticut.  My father came from Mormon rancher stock, from the foothill communities outside of Salt Lake City.  My mother’s family came from Mille Lac, Minnesota.  Every one of them owned guns, hunted deer and turkey with them, shot snakes and coyotes when necessary.  My grandfather’s World War I service revolver was in a canvas bag in the attic of my house.  My father’s service weapon turned out to be up there too—we found it when going through his boxes after he died.  I had a bb gun, then a pellet gun, then a .22 rifle.  My Boy Scout troop master taught me to target shoot, and I once won a turkey in a turkey shoot in North Guilford, Connecticut.  I was probably 13. The Bushes, Wayne and Wayne Jr., hunt deer on our farm, and we get a portion of the venison in return.  We are glad to see the overpopulation of deer, who infect the dogs and the people with Lyme Disease and wander into the road to cause bad crashes and who die of starvation or parasites:  we are glad to see it diminished, though not enough, by the New York State hunting season. 

Some years ago, a dear friend who is a bit of a gun nut took me to a range to shoot, after an interval of two or more decades of increasing rustiness at the task.  We were shooting at targets with pistols, and it was fun—a sport requiring precision and strength and intense concentration and an affinity between self and machine that’s not dissimilar to road cycling, though less demanding and less thrilling, by my lights.

But what struck me that day, and the days after that at the range, was that there seemed an inordinate number of fellow range-users who had what can most charitably be called paranoid ideation.  They were convinced the economic apocalypse was upon us and only a hoard of heavy weaponry would protect them.  They believed that jackbooted federal officials were conspiring to take not just their weaponry but their houses, their trucks, their children. They believed that crazy-haired black teen thugs were at any moment going to drive out of the city to rape their daughters.

All of them had very specific accounts of people very close to them who had been attacked in some way and saved from death or worse only by brandishing or actually shooting their weapons at shadowy marauders.  None of them could tell me just who it was this had happened to.  If they claimed it had happened to them, they couldn’t tell me when, or where, and when I asked, in what I thought was a tone that mixed curiosity and naivete, they became increasingly agitated and threatening. 

There are many documented cases where this scenario either took place, or was alleged to have taken place.  One site, gunssavelives.net has recorded over a thousand reports involving homeowners, residents, shopkeepers, carjack victims and vigilant citizens whose weapons killed, wounded, caused to surrender, or scared away bad guys.

But the count reaches back more than a year and a half. In 19 months, across the entire U.S. guns have purportedly beaten back the bad guys just over a thousand times. Around fifty a month.

There are two glaring problems with this statistic.  There are close to 115 million households in the U.S. Just in sheer numbers, guns have saved .00096% of households over an 18 month period. As important, the number of households saved is just about 20% fewer than the number of households in which a member was accidentally killed by a gun in the house.

There’s more to this.  If you read the stories in gunssavelives.net, you notice pretty quickly that the notion of salvation by guns is pretty flexible.  One homeowner shot a man whom he reported was attempting to break into his house;  he killed him after, he reported, the man refused to leave despite repeated warnings.  But an onlooker who had noticed the man earlier looking into parked cars and come out with a baseball bat to scare him away decided it wasn’t an issue-- the man was talking to his hand and yelling incoherently.  The onlooker then watched as the man approached and began banging on doors;  the last one he banged on was the one with the armed family protector on the other side. 

In report after report, home protectors provided the reports, often with no corroborating evidence.  Many of the cases read disconcertingly like that of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was talking to his girlfriend on the cell phone inside the gated community where he was living, and was shot in what a community-protector called self-defense. 

This is the issue of disproportionality:  most of the cases I’ve read in a random sampling of those on gunssavelives.net involved unarmed “home invaders”—read, burglars, breakin-thieves, or smash-and-grabbers—shot and often killed by multiple gunshots. 

And it is the reason, I think, that Wayne Lapierre, mouthpiece of the gun industry, broke the silence of the N.R.A. with a statement crafted entirely around the concept of “bad guys” and “good guys.”  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, Lapierre declared.  The disproportionality of gun use—unarmed, nonviolent criminals or even noncriminals mistaken for criminals and shot—cannot be allowed to stand.  The moral argument evens the score:  one bad guy/one good guy.

In fact, many of the stories on gunssavelives.net concern lone individuals heroically holding off more than one bad guy.  This is also very useful as arguments go.  It sets the shooter as the victim of disproportionality.  It defines the gun as the great equalizer, as it’s often called by gun advocates.  And it links often-sordid, trivial confrontations of today within the context of America’s long mythos of the Western.  Each one of these home protectors carries the mantle of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Gary Cooper.

Wayne Lapierre’s diatribe about the Newtown shootings focused on violent video games and movies that, he said, emboldened and incited bad guys to action.  I’m ready to grant that premise, on one condition—that Wayne Lapierre concede the corollary—that the shootings of unarmed people in the names of home-defense, that the accidental deaths and injuries of gun-household children,  that the numerous self-inflicted injuries by incompetent or inexperienced gun users, and the violent deaths of partners, spouses, friends and houseguests by gunowners: all be placed at the feet of the American mythos of the Western. 

Let’s return to that other, brushed-aside circumstance:  killings of family members by family members.  I don’t have good statistics on this at the moment.  What I do have dates back to 1995, when just around 1,500 households saw one adult member kill another.  As far as I can tell, about ¼ of these deaths were by firearm.  I don’t have statistics on the number of children killed by adults in their household.  I don’t have statistics on the number of forcible rapes by gun-owning family members occurred, either.  Or the number of children killed by other children in the house by a gun left there conveniently close in case of home invaders-- loaded and ready, in the bedside table drawer, or under the mattress or pillow, or on top of the dresser.

. 

What has emerged from my recent obsession with gun-violence data in the United States, is this.  There seem to be three broad categories of gun owner in America.  By far the largest consists of people like me, and like my neighbors:  gun owners whose guns are used for the purposes of hunting or, in some cases, recreational shooting—from target practice to skeet  to the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Shoot.  At the opposite extreme is a smaller but much noisier group of people who see the world as a place out to get them or theirs, and who view guns—big guns—as their only recourse.  This group believes itself to comprise the good guys.  What’s disturbing is that increasingly they are pushing those who don't embrace their vision into that other role:  bad guys. In their eyes, I'm a bad guy. I threaten them.  I need to be protected against.  Maybe, soon, I and mine need to be taken out.

But I'm not worried.  After all, there is my own recent change of identity, from bad guy to good guy.  I’ve achieved this magical conversion by shooting down dangerous foreigners, murderous children (Arabs, so it’s ok), bomb-wielding women (Muslim), and, most recently (in Call of Duty: Black Ops) buffoonishly incompetent African Negro rebels and marauders whose faces seem drawn from Amos and Andy as much as from Muammar Gaddafi or Idi Amin Dada. Playing those games, I appear to be embracing their strange, paranoid vision, in which Americans are always good guys and everyone else... well...

I do not see in these digital bad guy  faces any resemblance to my friends the world over—to Assam, to Yana, or Hiram, or Mohammed or Mamadou—men and women who teach small children and sullen teenagers and overly-materialistic university students and overly-obtuse graduate students, men and women who look at America as a place of failing promise, and who worry about us. 

Consider that, Wayne Lapierre.  All over the world, good-hearted people who love this nation and its heritage and promise are worrying about us.  They aren’t worried that we’re not fighting enough wars, or that our drones aren’t killing enough bad guys or that we aren’t going to enter a small, insecure nation and attempt to eradicate its questionable nuclear capability, or threaten and bully another much like it until it starves its people to death and decides to nuke Japan.  They aren't worried that we're losing our masculinity as a nation.  They don't think that, without our rocket propelled grenades in their nation's capital all will fail.

They're worried we've lost our way. They are worried that we’re caricaturing our own Constitution and trivializing its humanity-uplifting propositions while celebrating its long-outmoded trivial features. They’re worried that American toleration of rage and intolerance and paranoia inside our border is undercutting the very doctrine of skeptical tolerance at the heart of the American Experiment.

They're worried that it's not just a small marginal minority that has abandoned evidence-based thinking or critical thinking in the name of bizarre, Judeo-Christian-seeming  jihadist fundamentalisms, whether in Kiryas Joel, New York or Waco, Texas.  They fear our increasingly paranoid behavior at home and abroad has already destroyed our ability to set an example in the world for fairness, kindness, generosity, hope, opportunity, tolerance and welcome. They worry we have lost our way and they wonder how any other nation or civilization can take our place.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.  The eyes of all people are upon us.  So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world… We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till be be consumed out of the good land…

Therefore let us choose life

That we and our seed may live…

John Winthrop, aboard the Massachusetts Bay Colony ship Arbella, on the way to America, 1630