I work in a rural community and am the only male in the building who does not hunt. I have never fired a weapon in any capacity. I've never even used an electric knife to carve a holiday turkey. I grew up in Chicago and have never had an occasion to hunt, fish or shoot at varmints.
Recently I was expressing my usual disbelief that Bush was our commander in chief and met with the usual defense from the great white hunters at work. Lately, Bush has been harder to defend for these chaps so now their latest line is the old "lesser of two evils" gambit. Kerry was a liar and an obfuscator, but Bush is a real guy.
One fella, I'll call him Fudd, brought up a story that I had never heard before, and as an avid political junkie I am surprised I missed this last election season. Kerry was quoted in the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as saying that he enjoyed hunting and, he said
"I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach. I track and move and decoy and play games and try to outsmart them. You know, you kind of play the wind. That's hunting."
Since I am not a hunter, I found nothing wrong with this statement, but apparently my ignorance is staggering to the average rural white male because I have learned that 1) 12-gauge shotguns aren't used on deer, 2) one does not "crawl" when hunting deer and 3) tracking deer is not done by using "smarts". I guess this comment has been circulated widely among NRA types and it is a big reason Kerry lost the rural white male vote. In fact, the last two elections were decided because by white males who were the only demographic group lost by either Gore or Kerry. The only one. Fudd admitted that this was the sole reason his vote was cast for Bush. Yikes!
Maybe I'm overreacting, but this scares the living crap out of me. I have spent the last five years trying to figure out how a numbnut like Dubya could fool enough people to actually get himself elected leader of the free world and this is it: one comment made off-hand to a mediocre journalist has been parlayed into a national disaster. As a nation, we are f**ked.
As I think about this phenomenon, I realize that no Democrat can ever win a national election. Hunters by and large vote with their trigger fingers and only one issue is germane-- guns. For the most part these guys couldn't tell you the difference between Darfur and deer fur, between Iraq and a raccoon. Fudd and his ilk wander around in their testosterone-induced stupor counting the days until deer season opens. They go out to their tree blinds a month in advance and stock it with freeze-dried noodles and thermoses of Gatorade in preparation for opening day. After dragging their knuckles around for three and a half years after each election, they wait until some other troglodyte tells them how to vote in the next election.
How can we fight this ideological idiocy? All the great diaries on dkos, all the enlightened dialogue, weighing priorities, defining imperatives, etc. And for what? Every demographic group in America votes for the best interests of the nation... except one--the hunters. Is it a lost cause?