Secure

Post-election pronouncements have been little short of apocalyptic on both sides, but the smug assurance of right-wingers is overwhelming given the 51/48% vote tally (it's a smugness reinforced, admittedly, by self-flagellation and extravagant mourning on the left). Democrats are being treated to all sorts of fine lectures about how to court suburban voters, how to court southern voters, how to get in touch with the real America.

As a guy who gets up and goes to work on the subway after a cup of coffee and a baked bread product every morning, I've begun to resent this dismissive condescension. I am not a trust-fund baby; I am not a froth-mouthed radical. I am not immune to security concerns. I live in New York City; I'm not sure security could occupy greater space in my modest brain. When the Republican convention was in town I couldn't walk down a sidewalk for lunch without visions of detonating car bombs. I took the bus instead of the subway, changed the route by which I conducted basic business like purchasing milk (yes, we do conduct basic business like purchasing milk here in Pointy-Headed Elitist Urban Voterland), and called my wife every couple of hours to make certain she was safe. It all felt pretty real to me. I tried to steer clear of the myriad monuments and historical locations that pepper our streets, those much-discussed symbols of the nation and its ideals which are, presumably, thus despised by enemies worldwide: the Empire State Building, the Public Library, Grand Central Station, Times Square. And it seemed as I did so that I was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other hardworking, equally anxious American souls — as real as they could be, each one of them.

Claims of "real America-ness" are also a way of exaggerating the Bush campaign's connection to suburban voters. My brother lives in the suburbs; my mother too. They were both staunch supporters of Kerry. So were their neighbors. This is just another fictitious form of Republican self-congratulation. And a way to normalize themselves, to suggest — to whom? to David Brooks? Spare your breath; he'll convince himself — they didn't get pushed over the top by an evangelical appeal.

Many Bush voters cited security as their issue; and indeed "success" in the so-called war on terror, plus presumably attendant security, were an important part of Bush's sales pitch. It's interesting to note that the people who actually live in places that either have been hit by terrorist attacks or are likely to suffer them in the future — coastal cities; commercial and political centers: Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Seattle, Chicago — voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. We who feel our lives are on the line every day, and who have good historical reason for feeling so, could not disagree more strongly about who we'd like watching our backs. We do not feel safe with Mr. Bush in office; we do not believe he has done or will do a competent job of protecting us, our places of business, our homes. (And why my home as a thirty-something resident of New York is suddenly less valuable, less "authentic," or less authentically "American," than the home of a thirty-something resident of Phoenix escapes me.) It is true that when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center towers they intended a strike at America in its entirety, the idea of America and the reality of America and its place in the world; but it was New Yorkers who died (and here I employ the regional definition, one that includes people from New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and so on). It will be New Yorkers, by and large, who pay for the rebuilding, spiritual and material. If we are hit again — America, I mean — it will once more, in all likelihood, be in New York or San Francisco, Chicago or Washington or Boston. It will once again be the residents of whatever urban coastal region who die. It will not be residents of an Iowa suburb, or rural Mississippi, or exurban Indiana. (I know we see news reports from such places depicting fears of immanent attack, but this is, realistically speaking, self-aggrandizing paranoia. And lest I be dismissed as a pointy-headed northeastern elitist for saying so, I'd offer the Al Qaeda record. It suggests a strategy of mass casualties. I'd offer, furthermore, that it's not exactly an enviable position in which to find oneself. Could there really be competition over being a target?)

It's well and good to suggest that we reach out to the midwestern voter, but I for one would first like to see the midwestern voter make rational decisions about allocation of national resources. I won't ask for corn subsidies for farmers in Long Island; they shouldn't ask — as they have, twice now, successfully — that folks in Wyoming receive higher per capita homeland security funding than folks in New York. At the moment, I simply do not trust Red America to make competent choices about my safety. And I'd say the assumption that midlanders understand the security concerns of an urban coastal city at this point in our history ranks higher on the arrogance meter than my own assumption that they don't. Frankly, this particular policy shakedown — the allocation of homeland security funds prioritizing local pork over national threat — bespeaks a severe lack of judgment about the security challenges faced by this nation. I don't care what your congressman has been telling you (he gets paid to do that); I don't care what Dick Cheney has been telling you (he gets — oh, never mind). If you think Wyoming is the homeland's front line, you don't understand this fight.

It's an assumption that ran through a great deal of the reporting on the campaign: that suburban and rural voters had safety as their first concern and thus voted (of course, the implication goes) for Bush, whereas urban voters placed different concerns in the foreground, leading to support for Kerry. I think many urban voters would tell you it was the reverse: that they voted for Kerry precisely because they feel their lives are at stake, and they do not trust Bush to protect them. They were just as obsessed with security as folks in the heartland. They simply reached radically different conclusions about who could and would provide it. And if you asked, I wager most would tell you it was a question of competence. Bush has displayed none; Kerry, though admittedly untested at the executive level, at least held promise. He seemed to approach the subject with thoughtful gravitas, rather than with bull-headed slogans and nasty soundbite quips. Last I checked, bull-headed slogans and quips were unsuccessful at turning Kalashnikovs into bread loaves in Iraq.

This struggle has come down to an argument over the definition of moral commitment — a disagreement over who has it and to what. The irony is that, much as Red America would like to paint us as wild-eyed pushers and pimps who want to drive stakes through the hearts of those who refuse corruption, Blue America's motivating philosophy is pluralism. We're happy to let Red America do as it pleases, so long as what it pleases to do is not legislate our personal moral codes. We don't want to convert and we don't want to be converted. The evidence suggests, we think, that at the end of that road you find Talibanland, and we would prefer to be spared that particular — and particularly lethal — ride.

Sidebar: Former-leftish-now-born-again cadabout Christopher Hitchens is fond of citing fears of Islamic fundamentalist cells working today, in our midst, when explaining his support for President Bush. You'll see this logic pop up even in such unlikely pieces as his discussion, in this week's NY Times Book Review, of Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times. It comes off mostly as a revisitation of McCarthyite ranting — a hysterical justification of Bush and Ashcroft's suspension of habeas corpus as well as god knows what new surveillance schemes. He'll gladly hand over his dirty underwear, if only they'll protect him, protect him. Good luck, Hitch. Maybe you should move to Wyoming. I hear they've got enough homeland security funding there to get every last terrorist out of your soup.

Look for Hitchens to be playing the Walter Winchell role in a remake of They Came From Planet Red, coming soon to a theater near you. Right about the same time one — just one — of the more than 2000 people Ashcroft's Justice Department has arrested and held without trial gets convicted of something other than jaywalking. If they're really doing such a bang up job, Hitch, shouldn't they have acquired some evidence over the last two years? Even the Nassau County Sheriff can manage that from time to time. And if the reason they haven't is because terrorists are really that much more clever, shouldn't we hire smarter guys? Maybe less time in prayer, more time following up leads ....

In any event, even Hitch can't explain how the bungled adventure in Iraq has improved security on the homefront.

But there I go with my pointy-headed arrogant northeastern elitism again — always asking for results, results, when any good American boy, especially nowadays, just has faith.