So this past weekend the boy announced he was ready to learn how to shoot.
Guns, that is.
So, good mother that I am, I dutifully traipsed off to the sporting goods store to pick up some ammo, lectured the boy on gun safety, and otherwise prepped him for his first date with Messrs. Smith and Wesson. Monday evening we piled into the car and headed out to a dirt road west of town that is a popular place for people to target shoot and sight in their guns. Nothing like some good mother-son bonding.
You see, I live in an extremely rural state, where guns are an accepted part of the culture. Here, guns are a tool for obtaining food, recreation, and (when necessary) self-defense. I know good Democrats who unabashedly belong to the NRA. I learned to shoot from one such person.
This diary really isn't about guns per se. It's about rural living. I'm sure many of you were shocked and horrified when I wrote above the fold about how a good mother would facilitate her son's desire to learn to shoot. But around here, that's perfectly normal.
In Deer Hunting With Jesus, the late Joe Bageant devotes a chapter to guns. His point is that if you want to understand rural people, you need to understand the gun thing, among other things. In this book, guns become a metaphor for everything urbanites find distasteful about rural people, and everything rural people distrust about urbanites and suburbanites. He writes:
Somewhere in between are the rest of us natives, in whom such change revives long-buried anger at those faraway people who seem to govern the world: city people, educated city people who win and control while the rest of us work and lose. ...These are the sentiments the fearful rich and the Republicans capitalize on in order to kick liberal asses in elections. ...
To the working people I grew up with, sophistication of any and all types, and especially urbanity, is suspect. Hell, those city people have never even fired a gun. ... Guns are everyday tools, like Skil saws and barbecue grills.
So when the left began to demonize gun owners in the 1960s, they not only were arrogant and insulting because they associated all gun owners with criminals but also were politically stupid.
While there are surely many additional reasons why rural America has turned largely red - environmental issues vs. jobs, racial issues, religious fundamentalism - the demonization of guns and gun owners hasn't helped our cause one whit. I submit that the larger problem is the urban-rural divide, the clash of cultures.
In many respects, I'm actually more redneck than my son's Fox News Channel-watching, Tea Party-voting, right-wing-Christianist dad (my ex). I'm the one who loves NASCAR, drinks beer, and likes to shoot things. He's the one who drives a hybrid, drinks white wine, and likes to go to museums. But I'm the one with the lifestyle many of you would find laughably retrograde, even though I'm the one who votes the way you do. I'm a progressive redneck, and damn proud of it.
It's easy to write off huge swaths of this country on the ground that "they're a bunch if morons who won't change." But we write off rural America at our peril. If we want to have any hope of regaining ground in rural America, we have to understand the rural lifestyle. We have to understand why rural people distrust "city slickers." We have to figure out how to tap into prairie populism and bring it back to our point of view. After all, prairie populism was originally a progressive force.
I'm going to pass this redneck lifestyle on to my son. Along with my progressive values. Here's to the progressive redneck life.