Honor Among Murderers
Republicans are tolerant. Democrats are bigots.

Of course that's not true -- although it does reflect my experience. I don't remember the last right-leaning person I met who genuinely wished ill on those of a different ideology. On the left, it's an accepted norm. But there are tolerant and bigoted people in the world and they come in all parties, all ideologies, all manner of everything. The old saw that leftists are the tolerant ones, though, isn't true.

Consider, by way of example, "The Urban Archipelago," a recent gem from The Stranger.

I've known of gay-bashers less filled with hatred. And I mean real gay-bashers, the kind who, if the writers of this editorial are to be believed, make up the whole population of the "red states," the kind who pistol-whip a kid and leave him for dead. Some of those gay-bashers are scared and enraged and dumb -- bad people who did evil things, but not cool liberal elites who have the composure and intelligence to sit down and write, meaning every word, in a cold and premeditated and hateful way: "If a kid in a red state finds his daddy's handgun and blows his head off, we'll feel terrible (we're like that), but we'll try to look on the bright side: At least he won't grow up to vote like his dad."

Nice. That's real progressive. Some mother in Wyoming who lost her eight-year-old to gun violence is gonna really appreciate that vaunted tolerance and compassion you're putting on parade.

Legally speaking, our hypothetical gay-basher would be committing perhaps second-degree murder; the editorialists, first-degree.

The Stranger's a Seattle paper, and the fact that they'd try to bill local mass transit as anything like a success based on the hypothetical benefits is grand. Ask Dan Savage what the per-capita cost -- monetary and environmental -- of ferrying around one person on that silly monorail is going to be. Wanna show us the cost/benefit stats on those bike paths? And I don't just mean in someone's tax bill, I mean in resources that could be put to use helping poor people. How about unemployment occasioned by that beloved excise tax? Do we really have a liberal promoting "density in outlying areas," i.e., sprawl? You gonna wanna have some urban planners "fix" the sprawl in a decade when it doesn't accord with your image of an ideal society?

Maybe not. I wouldn't want to assume as much, classifying you as representatives of an ideology rather than as people. Bigotry and prejudice are bad things. They taught me that back in pre-school.

I'd like to take the whole thing as a satire, but I'm afraid it isn't. There are really people who think like this, who actually think there's something to this idea of holing up in cities and letting the backward hicks in the "red states," or red non-cities, or whatever, fend for themselves. Who actually think it's tolerant to say, "If you don't live in a city, fuck you."

There's part of your offer I'll take, guys. Wall off your cities, and keep your government health care and your gun control and your mass transit and all that stuff inside. If your idea of a civil society is one in which people routinely die of treatable diseases even more often than they do now, the weak have no opportunity to defend themselves, and we feel good about the way we get places at the expense of jobs and the environment and ultimately people's lives ... then maybe it's time I moved to Wyoming or Kansas. Those backwards, gay-bashing hicks seem to like me a lot more than the progressives. And at least some of them are willing to have a conversation about it ... not say, "Vote like I do or I hate you."

Many in the "heartland" you so disparage, believe it or not, know that dividing people into groups, and then hating some of the groups, is bad. That's why racism is bad, and classism. And red-state-ism. "You live in Colorado, or Kansas, or Wyoming. You suck. Terre Haute, okay! But Akron, fuck you."

C'mon.

"We oppose their sub-moronic, 'faith-based' approach to life.... SCIENCE! That's another thing we're for. And reason. And history. All those things that non-urbanists have replaced with their idiotic faith."

More tolerance. If people of faith treat secularism with the same amount of respect, we'll have a grand dialogue going, won't we? Do those promoting government control of education and medicine and art and all manner of other stuff really want to criticize others for not understanding history? For being insensitive to the produce of reason?

What set me off about this article is that it comes from a respectable publication, and says what so much of the left is thinking -- kudos for that, by the way! -- in a way that, say, the NYT is a little too dignified to do. It's what's spoken by many leftists around water coolers, in coffee houses, on the street -- this is the credo.

It's a credo of hatred.

No matter who is doing the hatred, hating is bad. Hatred is my enemy, and I've been fighting it for a while. The "sides" in this battle have nothing to do with party affiliation or ideology. It is about people who are willing to understand where other sincere and decent people are coming from. I'm part of that group, and I'm quite willing to say: you're either with us or against us. If you don't care if a kid in Wyoming blows his head off, I'm against you.

We people like that are an awfully lonely bunch.