Conservatives crow of their steely strength in the face of adversity — ‘America strong’ — while at the same time fret endlessly about all the threats to their way of life. Their leader, Donald Trump, is an exemplar of their knee-knocking courage. One moment he announces a willingness to stare down a lunatic firing an AR-15, the next he is whining the media is so unfair to him. His tough guy persona is belied by his simpering regard for true tough guys.
It is as if conservatives need a powerful father figure to assure them everything will be all right. So many on the right, Trump more than any, get damp at the contemplation of Russia’s bantam Vlad. No teenage girl has ever swooned so hard for a bad boy.
Conservatives show this same dichotomy over liberals. They cannot decide if the left wing is a timorous mob of safe-space snowflakes or an implacable fifth-column panting to strip them of their guns and religious freedoms.
The right-wing see terrorists under every bed, although the odds of an American dying in an ISIS attack are smaller than an American getting shot by a toddler and far less than a trip and fall in his bathroom.
But try telling that to a red, white and blue scaredy cat.
And don’t get these real Americans started on immigrants. To these ‘Home of the Brave’ Chicken Littles, there is no group more terrifying than foreigners who are trying to carve out a better life. Except for maybe refugees. Those cunning moles cleverly get themselves born into a country riven by civil war, then travel hundreds of miles across desert lands and heaving waters to launch attacks against Western nations.
And what is the evidence for these claims? On refugees, nothing yet. And on immigrants, stories. Tales of marauding MS-13 gangsters in Long Island and a many-times-removed illegal aliens shooting young women in California. I don’t deny that there are gang members from Central America. Or that Kathryn Steinle was killed when a gun found by an ‘illegal alien’ went off accidentally. Or that another ‘illegal alien’ killed Edwin Jackson and his Uber driver in a drunk driving accident.
However, there are few better examples of cognitive dissonance than an obese smoker, sitting on his couch, stuffing down Ding Dongs with a beer chaser freaking that he will die at the hands of a Mexican rapist.
All those fears though take a back seat to the fear a good patriot has of his government. He lives in a constant froth of terror that America is minutes away from a power grab by the deep state in DC. And the prelude to his emasculation is the seizure of his weapons.
What's missing from the arc of dread is the government's plan. The only concrete step the feds seem to have taken is the establishment of FEMA death camps - somewhere. Ammosexuals do not explain how the authorities will execute the gun grab. Any more than they describe precisely how arming teachers would work. (Is the gun kept loose in the classroom - or locked up in the central offices. How do teachers not hit kids when firing at the gunman. How do they not get shot by cops looking to take down a gunman? Etc.)
And talking about school shootings, America would be a better place if the armies of Alex Jones and the paranoid MAGA crowd would take a lesson in calmness and maturity from the Parkland School students. Contrast their implacable demand that something be done to stop kids being shot with the lunatic fringe’s belief that Obama is raising a UN Army to change our land use laws.
Thank God the students are the future.