Dan
A home appraiser, loves shooting the breeze about his America.
“So you like American football…,” he with pride.
Because the last time we talked I praised it. As I did baseball the other day, I like baseball too.
“Football, Dan, incredible. These games formed within a singular country by a singular folk, they become the extension of the national psyche. Football and baseball, very American, one hundred percent.”
“The extension of the national psyche…,” Dan with an inviting ellipsis.
We had already gabbed about those “extensions,” and I know Dan wouldn’t want me to think his memory goes south, but he’ll jaw about his America at any length and time. So he’s laying out this ellipsis like a gangplank for me.
Why, I can take the bait.
“American football, Dan, it’s like someone said, two packs of guys wrap themselves up in whatever they can find and run into each other.”
Dan’s laughing his heart out. That wrapping and running thing, I hadn’t used before.
“Very American, one hundred ten percent,” I carry on. “Because you have a harsh brawl, and you have thick skin to go along with it. This way your psyche chimes in with the majority of other psyches of the land, and you have a joy of life in America.”
I hired out for a one-off gig on his property and we’re into the second year now. Today, after a day of gardening, we have now crashed on the steps in the back of his house and chug Molson from bottles.
Dan takes a swig now, looks up over the tips of the backyard pine trees at the head of the mount.
He smiles. He feels good. He even seems to forget I'm here. He explains as if to himself:
"Yeah, America's changing. Changing. But it's like a pendulum. Like a pendulum. It swings one way, then it comes back and swings the other way. This way, that way. Like a pendulum."
About the pendulum thing, we had covered it too. Dan sees the problem in America gone too far left, swamped by liberalism. "Liberalism," the word with a semantic past, a tramp making out with any political creed interested in it. In the present-day America it denotes social liberalism, or demoliberalism, or – to use a more natural lexis – anti-traditionalism. And this here home appraiser in a western Montana town holds that this has been the reason for the present day America's slide.
He's not alone in the diagnosis. Many Euroamerican men I've encountered think along these lines. Some women, like the hair shop owner who cut my hair the other day. They tune in to the conservative radio motormouths who about the time I was leaving New York — in 1992, we’re in 1996 now — began popping up across the American airwaves. And those conservative radio gabbers explain to the flyover Americans that America has become what she has become because of the pendulum thing. The pendulum thingy has moved too far left, to liberalism. Liberalism all evil all the time. Liberalism yesterday, liberalism today, liberalism tomorrow. The enemy number one, two, one hundred. Bad, badder, ugly as night.
And the flyover Americans munch on this gab-garnished intellectual potato, and believe that at long last they have been relieved of the wrenching uncertainty. At long last, they know. After so many woeful years of unease, intimidation, abuse coming at them from the mainstream media, the political establishment, the cultural establishment, the economic establishment, the academia establishment, those amazing radio gabsters have handily figured it out for them.
And when they listen in growing numbers to those conservative radio windbags windbagging to them about the woeful liberalism, and they listen to the frequent commercials interwoven into broadcasts, the windbags along with the radio stations owners make fortunes. This is why there’re more and more of them on the airwaves. This is a new eldorado of America. The sweet to the ears "conservative" radio rant.