There is a rental property just up the street from my house. The current occupants are frequently seen hanging out on the front porch smoking, and sipping Yuengling Lite, in even the coldest weather, I suppose because the landlord doesn’t allow smoking in the house. From this perch along the main road, they heap profane abuse on passers-by (including a friend of mine who had the temerity to park in the street in front of the place), spit, and complain of Obama.
As it is now the Holiday season, they have erected a display of mechanized puppetry about four feet high and brightly lit that depicts Rudolf helping Santa to clamber up and down a chimney. I believe this display was intended to be erected on a roof, but they do not appear to own a ladder or to be sober often enough to scale one, so Santa and Rudolf perform their little dance on the lawn next to the front porch. The vagaries of the wind and the uneven topography of the yard cause this display to collapse on its side several times a day, where Santa, now horizontal, continues to emerge from the plastic chimney and Rudolf continues to render assistance. Whenever this happens, passing children are exposed to the spectacle of what appears to be Santa and Rudolf engaged in something most unseemly. The occupants do not seem to notice this.
Displayed across the porch banister is a banner that proclaims “Proud Teabaggers”! This is, of course, a reference to the Tea Party, a deeply conservative political movement known for raising hell at public meetings of various kinds with loud and abusive rhetoric and threats. My part of Pennsylvania is so full of these cheerful folks that we have been featured in national media for the vocifery of our homegrown neocon radicals. Now the best part of all this is the proud adoption of the term “Teabaggers” and the teabag itself as a symbol of their movement. Sometime last summer, left-wingers started derisively labeling the members of the Tea Party movement “teabaggers”, which is, of course, a euphemism for a sex act, and can also refer to a technical angling term that describes what happens when a male fisherman wades just a bit too deep in the stream. In either case, the term is not a complement. The irony was wasted on the Tea Party folks who adopted the badge, and wear it proudly.
Good for them!
My point is; this is a pretty conservative part of the world. Remember James Carville’s characterization of Pennsylvania as “Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Alabama in the middle”? I am a hippy, what Garrison Keillor has called “a museum-grade liberal”. Several months ago, at a gathering of several hundred people taking in a Hoots and Hellmouth show in support of sustainable agriculture, it dawned on me that I knew or recognized almost everyone at the event. That’s because there are so few pinkos here, that it is possible to actually know every hippy in the county. So you might wonder what in God’s name I’m doing here? Why don’t I live in Missoula, or Boulder, or Santa Fe, or Eugene, or Berkley, or any of the other People’s Republics? Two reasons…
First, I’m good for these people and they’re good for me. I have a half dozen dear old friends who are regular listeners to Glenn Beck, Rush, and other creeps, and would vote for a rattlesnake if it won the GOP nomination. I mostly don’t talk politics with them. In fact, I made a pact with one of these guys years ago that we wouldn’t talk politics anymore. After a decade of bickering we discovered that taking either of our admittedly extreme political philosophies out to a logical end point brought us to a place of convergence. Unfortunately that place was a grim and pitiless internment camp; he was in mine and I was in his. Bring your own waterboard!
Point in fact, it’s good for the country and for all of us that we’re friends. While I find conservative politics mean, exclusionary and dumb, I don’t find my conservative friends that way at all. They’re generally kind, witty, and eminently decent people. They just think differently than I do. I assume they see me in the same light. I’ll think, speak and vote as I choose, but these folks aren’t my enemies and I’m not theirs. In my view we share the same planet, country, state, county and so on, and we have to find a way to co-exist. Gettysburg is not far from my house. There you can wander the long white rows of grave stones and consider well the consequences of irreconcilable politics.
The other reason I live here debarked in the port of Philadelphia sometime in the mid 18th century. My Dad’s people, Ulster Irish Presbyterians and Welsh, arrived here straight from the hostile confines of Northern Ireland and Wales, and made for the hills. They were as tough as hell, and had names like Baker, Williams, and McClure and they were accomplished miners, loggers, and farmers. They built “Kierks” like the First Presbyterian in Carlisle, and there thanked God for his providence. They made whiskey and played fiddles. They fought with the Indians and with each other. They labored at iron furnaces and farms, hewed log cabins, and followed the long green ridges deep into the Appalachian hinterlands. You see their names hereabouts on mailboxes, campaign posters, storefronts. I have roots here that extend to bedrock, and when I climb up on White Rocks or Center Point Knob or the Pole Steeple, or drink from the Whiskey Spring, or fish in Yellow Breeches Creek I am connected to something that by now is part of my DNA. Like the stream bank sycamores and the timber rattlers and the limestone bank barns, I belong here. I will not give up on this place because I am in the political minority, and I have enough ancestral hillbilly flintiness in me to refuse to be driven away.
There is an expanse of farmland just south of the village I live in. Those fields, now in corn stubble and dormant wheat and alfalfa, afford an expansive view west and south. This place has the most magnificent Winter sunsets imaginable, the light often breaking into shafts of orange and deep red tearing great holes in the clouds. It’s best if there’s some snow. I walk the dog there often this time of year and savor those sunsets like good wine. In such a place, and in the presence of such great beauty, I don’t ever doubt that I am right where I ought to be.
Happy Solstice!
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