It’s official. We have had the first “flinty New Englander”
sighting of the post-primary campaign season, courtesy of Jim
Hoagland in the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook Section
on August 1. Under the title, “Convention Wisdom,” Hoagland wrote, “The
Democrats were ruthlessly uplifting as they sent up a flinty
Massachusetts liberal war hero and a smooth Southern populist to
run against brash George W. Bush and dour Dick Cheney on Nov.
2.”
Hoagland really oughtn’t to be missed most of the time. He has
superb connections in the intelligence community and nearly always
has something to say. But that lead? No. You can say, for example,
that Eastern Kansas is flat as a pancake, and it would be a
cliché, but true. But combine “flinty” with “liberal” and
something has gone seriously wrong, let alone “war hero,” which is
plain ridiculous.
The modern media love the “flinty New Englander” label. We last
spotted it multiplying like Lyme ticks after Vermont Senator Jim
Jeffords resigned from the Republican Party in the spring of 2001,
and, as an Independent, began caucusing with the Democrats.
Remember all that? Jeffords’ defection threw Senate control back to
the Democrats for the next two years. It was in all the papers.
Time selected Jeffords as a runner-up Person of the Year.
Time columnist Tony Karon
wrote “How Jim Jeffords Changed the World,” this on May 29,
2001. Which date may give us some clue why Jim Jeffords hasn’t been
heard from much since, nor has been seen to have changed the
world.
The only thing flinty about Jeffords before, during, and after
his 15 minutes of fame was his relentless self-promotion. In this,
of course, he greatly resembles John Kerry.
But there is something to this famed flintiness of New
Englanders. It could be described more accurately, and has been, in
Style vs. Substance: Boston, Kevin White, and the Politics of
Illusion, by George V. Higgins (Simon & Schuster, 1984;
out of print). Of Boston’s neighborhood voters, Higgins wrote:
“They do not trust anyone they do not know, and those they do
know they think they have unmasked for the scoundrels they
are…You cannot deal with people like that.”
Vain, touchy, tribal, self-righteous, combative — those traits
go back to colonial days. Higgins wrote about modern political
Boston, an Irish culture, and much has been written of the
transformation from Yankee to Irish domination. In truth, the Irish
fit right in.
In the Battle of Bunker Hill, the colonials deliberately picked
a fight. They built their fort not on Bunker Hill, the higher and
more distant from the harbor of Charlestown’s two hills, but on
Breed’s Hill, within cannon shot of British warships and
fortifications across the water. (The historical misnomer
persists.) In Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill
(Owl Books, 1999; original edition out of print), author Richard M.
Ketchum devotes a chapter to the now-mostly-unknowable overnight
argument about which hill to occupy that took place between
colonial commanders. The hotheads, apparently led by Israel Putnam
of Connecticut, prevailed.
Flinty? I stopped George Putnam III on Post Office Square years
ago, after I had read the book, and asked him if Israel Putnam was
a relation of his.
“He was kind of a black sheep,” Mr. Putnam said. “He drank.”
Barely a block from our house, in the early 1990s, on the very
fringe of the Bunker Hill monument, a 19-year-old boy, bald from
chemotherapy, was beaten nearly to death by other boys his own age
— his own confreres, natives of the neighborhood, as he was. They
did not recognize him in his illness, apparently thinking him an
AIDS sufferer.
A Townie jailbird shrugged and explained to me how it happened.
“Well, if he was a stranger or somethin’…”
Flinty? The Salem witch trials, abolitionism, the Know-Nothings,
prohibitionism, “gay” marriage — they’re all of a piece.
Periodically, New Englanders go off on crazed moral bats, and
sometimes change history, and sometimes do terrible damage before
they are turned back. They are born agitators, and born
nanny-staters, emotional tailgaters every one. (And they drive that
way, too.) Sometimes New Englanders get it right, and we owe them a
lot, for the American Revolution and for the elimination of
slavery. But without the moderating influence of Southerners in the
Revolution and the genius of Lincoln in the Civil War, I do think
New Englanders would have found a way to transform both causes into
Cromwellian tyrannies.
Because, above all, they think they’re right. And they think
that being right gives them the right — nay, the obligation — to
do what they think must be done.
In the modern press, liberal journalists love “flinty” when they
can use the tough-sounding word to describe one of their own. It
makes them feel all goosey inside, like masturbating in the
shower.
When you read it, as you undoubtedly will over and over again in
the months to come, watch out.
