Ben Stein, who has been a denizen of the Deep Blue Seacoast for 24 years, writes,
. . . a man on a forklift came by and winked at me. “Keep giving ’em hell,” he said softly. “There are more of us here than you think. Bush rules.”
This is the way it is here. We meet in smoky places. We give the high sign, we nod knowingly. We are like members of the Maquis in Occupied France. Or early Christians emerging from the catacombs in Caligula’s Rome. We are the GOP in Hollywood, and on the West Side of L.A. The culture here is so dominantly left-wing, PC, vegan, hate-America that many of us feel we have to behave as if we were underground.
At a self-help meeting where men and women confess to drug use, betrayals, thefts, homicides with cars, at a break, a woman stealthily came up to me last Saturday and motioned me into a corner outside the room in Malibu. “I want to tell you there are some of us who agree with you. We have to keep it quiet because we want to get our kids into the right schools, but we’re there. We’re there. And there are more of us every day.” Then she scuttled off into the night. Slamming crack can be spoken of with a smile, but not voting GOP. That could be dangerous.
Along the same lines is an anecdote that I heard last weekend. The chairman of a California science fiction convention wore a suit to one of the con events with an American flag pin in his lapel. Afterwards the Guest of Honor, a well-known author, took him aside and whispered, “May I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“Are you a . . . Republican?”
Whispering back, “Yes.”
Dropping to the faintest sotto voce, “So am I.”
Streaks of purple herald the dawn.
BTW, I have at last figured out the real significance of the not instantly intuitive use of red for conservative states and blue for liberal ones. The Cold War is over, thus rendering obsolete the identification of red with the Left. Instead, the media have raised from their collective subconscious memories of old maps, on which the British Empire, front line of civilization, spread across the globe in red, and French possessions were colored – what else? – blue.
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