Bush Like Me

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.

[From Issue 960 — October 6, 2004]