I don’t leave the city much. I love my beautiful, walkable, eatable, drinkable neighborhood in the City of St. Louis and I find almost everything I want very close at hand. Democrats rule the roost in the city, but Red America is always lurking, out there, just beyond the city limits. After the horrors this weekend in Charlottesville, the majority of the people out there in the red glare scare me more than ever. How many on the right want to come for the rest of us with violence in their hearts?
Oh, you’re wondering about the picture of the purse? Don’t fool yourself. It’s a gun holster. Yeah, there’s a story behind that.
I had to leave the city this weekend. I had to immerse myself in what’s out there in the red countryside and I came away feeling more than a little bit stressed. The occasion for this was a surprise party in Oklahoma, arranged by my sister-in-law for my mother-in-law’s 90th birthday. ‘
Mrs. Left is nothing like the rest of her family and for many years we have hardly ever seen any of them. But for this occasion, Mrs. Left and I made the road trip, across ruby red rural Missouri, down the route of Historic U.S. 66, into Northeast Oklahoma, where Mrs. L’s maternal family has long lived among the hills and streams and woods and fields. They lived there decades ago when almost everybody was a Democrat and they are still there now that almost everybody is a Republican.
Mrs. L and I spent Saturday with the mother in law, along with Mrs. L’s sister and her husband, their daughter and hoards of nameless (to me) cousins, etc. We went to town (two, count them, two traffic lights) for a birthday lunch at the country style buffet. There we surprised the mother in law with a family reunion attended by her only nephew in law, one great-nephew and a slew of aging nieces, and great-niece. The average age of the guests was probably near 70.
In past times, I had met just a few of Mrs. L’s cousins, etc., but mostly, not. Saturday, there were over twenty relatives at the party and I have no idea how, or if, any of them voted last November. Other than privately, between myself and Mrs. L, I heard no one talk of politics all weekend. Nobody within my earshot talked about anything of much consequence at all, unless you count sister in laws’s stories of shooting varmints and killing poisonous snakes in the tall grass. A considerable amount of conversation pertained to lawn mowers, brush hogs and getting the church yard mowed before it rained again. Riveting stories, to be sure, but not exactly about impending threat’s of nuclear war, either.
Last November, some of the party guests may have voted for Hillary Clinton; the folks at the party were about 80% women. I think maybe my mother in law voted for HRC. But a lot of the others may have voted for Trump. The county went for Trump 73.5%, over Clinton 21.8%. Trump did even better in other vast, if largely unpopulated, swaths of the Sooner State. Of Oklahoma’s 77 counties, 8 of them gave Hillary Clinton less that 10% of the vote. Ouch!
During the trip from my blue, urban cocoon to the thinly populated GOP dominated reaches of NE Oklahoma, we crossed about 300 miles of White Christian, red as hell America, driving through an eye popping barrage of highway billboards for gun shows, gun sales and gun shops, while traversing a gauntlet of roadside fundamentalist Christian churches. Then we arrived in a strange, to me, place where what passed for conversation carefully steered around news and current events, or even pop culture, focusing instead on the personal minutia of daily life in rural Oklahoma. To be sure, I found no malice in my sister in law’s casually related tales of gunplay, snake bit dogs and combative, if doomed ground hogs. Still, the overall experience chilled my spine a little.
I’m worried about all the dangerous, to me, background noise, out there in small town, small city, rural expanses of America like the part of Oklahoma I visited. I can’t shake the impression that way too many people out there, who really like Donald Trump, also really like guns and church. The combination of cults and firearms, never seems to lead to positive outcomes. Which brings us back to the purse in the top photograph.
The very busy buffet restaurant in town served us delicious fried chicken and mashed potatoes, but getting into the place, or moving back and forth from the party room to the buffet, required a trip through the large gift shop, offering a variety of fashion accessories, country kitsch and knick-knacks adorned with positive or Biblical sentiments. There was also reading material in the waiting area, consisting entirely of two, well worn, Holy Bibles. One was elevated on a bookstand. Can I have an Amen! I have to admit that nothing gets my tummy ready for a fried chicken and pork chop buffet quicker than a few verses from Ezekiel or Second Thessalonians.
On our way out after the party, while browsing a display of leather goods in the gift shop, Mrs. L found the bag pictured at the top of this post. I think it’s pretty; she must have thought so, too, because she bought it. Only later did she find out the true nature of her new fashion accessory. She discovered that while wearing the bag over her shoulder, the side of bag pictured below would hang concealed near her waist, close to her body. In this position, it is easy, with little visible movement, to find the oversized zipper fob and quietly open the roomy pocket where, to provide a sense of scale, the small lemons are displayed below. If Mrs. L had a gun (which she does not, being totally unlike most of the rest of her family, in this and nearly all other respects), the firearm would fit easily in this holster, allowing her to surreptitiously grip her pistol and point it at whomever she thought she might need to shoot.
Unbeknownst, Mrs. L had inadvertently acquired a beaded, concealed-carry bag for a handgun, designed and manufactured by quality leather goods company, Montana West. Make sure you check out their line of Bible covers, too. Don’t forget that Mrs. L made this purchase in a small rural town, in a Trump landslide county, in the gift shop, of a restaurant on the US highway, offering patrons the use of open, well worn Holy Bibles and selling Bible covers as well as concealed-carry purses for a fashionable country lady to carry her pistol to church or to the hoedown or honky-tonk, depending on whether she is a hillbilly or a redneck.
The gun pocket of this concealed-carry bag is more than large enough to hold a lady’s hand, as well as her small handgun. The ideal gun would be something like a snub nose .38 caliber revolver. Guns like this have been continuously in production in America since 1950. Their numbers contribute to the burgeoning private arsenals amassed by Americans, largely in the White, Christian parts of America. There, people still cling to their religion and their guns and their concealed carry purses and their fried chicken and mashed potatoes and pork chops at the country buffet. That food was good, too.
In my city, there are gun owners, gun ranges and gun clubs. There are churches here, too, including fundamentalist Christian, but also many other Christian sects, along with synagogues, mosques,, temples, etc. My city has way too much intransigent poverty and violent crime, though, thankfully, not so much in my neighborhood. But the inclusive and diverse quality of life of my city, and its people, belies the possibility that any significant part of the populace here is preparing to strap on firearms and lock and load for Jesus.
During my rural cultural immersion weekend in Trump country, the fusion of religion and guns assaulted my senses from all directions. I wasn’t looking for this stuff. It was just there. In my face. Guns and Gospel seemed to permeate much of the fabric of day to day life, seemingly for nearly everyone.
Of course, not everyone in Oklahoma or any other state mindlessly supports Trump and there are well meaning right thinking people everywhere in America, including dear friends of mine in Oklahoma. But I tremble at the widespread convergence that I observed this weekend, in ruby red Oklahoma, of guns and religion, among voters who very recently, overwhelmingly wanted and expected Donald Trump to Make America Great Again, for them and those like them.
As shown this weekend in Charlottesville, America’s new Brownshirts are taking to the streets and lashing out with goons when Trump resistors peacefully counter-protest. When the violence in Virginia escalated to outright terrorism, the President’s bothsiderism, as well as local law enforcement officials’ lackadaisical protection of resistors, seem intended to produce a continuing acceleration of the frequency and destructiveness of these kinds of encounters.
My blue city floats in a great sea of White, Fox New watching, fundamentalist Christian, American Redness and Trump Love. Majorities of people out there, in the redness, fancy themselves to be on a Christian Crusade against The Other and are armed to the teeth, waiting for their tweeted orders to bypass the fake news and send them into battle.
I slept poorly last night. Little wonder.