Posted on Sun, Jul. 13, 2008
Sorting ourselves out by politics
This excerpt is from The Big Sort, Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart (Houghton Mifflin) by Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing
By Bill Bishop
I kept a file of the more outrageous examples of political anger in 2004. They ranged from the psychotic to the merely sad. There was the Sarasota, Fla., man who swerved his Cadillac toward Rep. Katherine Harris as she campaigned on a street corner. (Harris had been the Republican secretary of state in Florida during the presidential vote recount in 2000.) ”I was exercising my political expression,“ Barry Seltzer told police. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported just a week before the election that ”when an 18-year-old couldn't convince his girlfriend that George W. Bush was the right choice for president, he became enraged, put a screwdriver to her throat and threatened to kill her.“ The man told her that if she didn't change her vote, she wouldn't ”live to see the next election.“ Two old friends arguing about the war in Iraq at an Eastern Kentucky flea market both pulled their guns when they got tired of talking. Douglas Moore, age 65, killed Harold Wayne Smith because, a witness said, ”Doug was just quicker.“
The destruction of campaign yard signs and the vandalism of campaign headquarters was epidemic in 2004. The Lafayette, La., Democratic Party headquarters was struck twice; in the second assault, miscreants wrote ”4 + GWB“ on the building's front windows in a mixture of motor oil and ashes collected from burned John Kerry signs. The most pathetic display of partisan havoc started at the Owens Crossroads United Methodist Church near Huntsville, Ala. The youth minister at the church sent children on a ”scavenger hunt“ shortly before the election. On the list of items to be retrieved were John Kerry campaign signs. Once the kids toted the placards back to the church, the minister piled them in the parking lot and set the signs on fire. The scavengers did the best they could, but in Republican Huntsville they found only eight signs, barely enough for kindling. Had the same hunt taken place in, say, Seattle, the kids could have rounded up enough fuel to signal the space shuttle.
Living as a political minority is often uncomfortable and at times frightening. In 2000, more than eight out of 10 voters in the Texas Hill Country's Gillespie County cast ballots for Bush. Two years later, Democrats prepared a float for the Fourth of July parade in the county seat of Fredericksburg. ”We got it all decorated,“ county party chairman George Keller recalled, ”but nobody wanted to ride.“ Nobody wanted to risk the stigma of being identified as a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican area. ”Thank goodness we got rained out,“ Keller said of the orphaned float.
Gerald Daugherty used to live in the hip and shady section of Austin known as Clarksville. When he became active in a campaign against a proposal to build a light rail system in town, Daugherty put NO LIGHT RAIL bumper stickers on his car and on his wife's Mercedes. That apparently didn't go over too well in Democratic and pro-rail Clarksville. Somebody ”keyed“ the Mercedes at the local grocery and for good measure punched out the car's turn signal lights. Was Daugherty sure the damage had been politically motivated? Not really. But then one morning he found his car coated with eggs. ”There must have been two dozen eggs all over my car,“ he remembered. ”Splattered. And then deliberately rubbed on the "No Rail' bumper stickers. You knew where that was coming from.“
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http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/459759.html