By Jeremy Lott on 11.2.04 @ 12:06AM
Dealing behind enemy lines not many miles from home.
My hometown of Lynden, Washington, is on the road less traveled
-- literally. Unless they catch the few oblique mentions on freeway
signs as they trace I-5 to Vancouver, motorists aren't even likely
to know the place exists. In order to get here, they must exit the
freeway at Bellingham and take one of two roads that head
more-or-less due north, or cut over from a freeway exit several
miles west of town.
This geographic quirk may help to explain the politics of the
place, though I'm sure the farming and the few dozen well-attended
churches contribute. This is Bush country: a red state harbor in a
sea of blue. Bush-Cheney signs are almost as ubiquitous as the
American flags that sprouted up here following September 11. Also
present are placards for Republican Senate and gubernatorial
candidates George Nethercutt and Dino Rossi, some professionally
done up, others homemade.
Bellingham is a different story. Divided by I-5, the city has
nearly 70,000 residents to Lynden's 10,000. It has five movie
theater complexes to Lynden's couple of video stores; five decent
used bookstores; a mall; Western Washington University; Bellingham Bay; one boring, reliably liberal daily
newspaper; a couple of alt weeklies; and a downtown that caters to
bohemian tastes. Protesters regularly picked city hall over
outrages and injustices.
Normally, the political rift between the two locales isn't so
glaringly obvious, but this is election season, and politics often
brings out the worst in us. The other day I gathered review copies
of a number of mostly pro-Republican and anti-Democrat books, piled
them onto the passenger seat of the '91 Sunbird, and coaxed my
wonderful old car down the back road to Bellingham.
The political signs by the side of the road kept up the pro-Bush
bias for a few miles outside of Lynden but the Democrats showed up
with greater frequency and gradually overtook them. The ratio
tilted more and more to Kerry-Edwards as I traveled from Bellingham
city limits to the downtown core. Deep into Democrat territory, I
did see one oversized Bush-Cheney sign but it been vandalized. Some
progressive punk had spray-painted bold black swastikas on both
sides and the owner of the house must have left it up as a
commentary on the opposition.
None of this bothered me overmuch but, when I parked in front of
the used bookstore/ book buyer of choice, I was made to wonder if
this was a serious mistake. The storefront featured not one but
three Kerry-Edwards posters. I knew that the owners were lefties
but that had not been a problem in the past. The more outspoken of
the two -- a middle-aged man with glasses and a full head of gray
hair -- once asked about the Reason tee shirt I was
sporting and I described the magazine as "The Nation
without the socialism." He seemed to get a kick out of that.
And yet, there I sat with a stack of books that included
Unfit for Command and The Many Faces of John
Kerry (accumulated as research for a story on the politics of book publishing, if you must
know), wearing a white-with-red-lettering American
Spectator T-shirt, wondering if I should go in. I'd sold this
particular store thousands of dollars worth of books over the past
several years and discretion is often the better part of making a
buck.
After a few moments, I damned my cowardice, fed the parking
meter, marched through the doors, and plopped my books down on the
sellers' table. As I hightailed it to the rear of the store to
browse while the owners picked through the books, the lady owner
quipped, "He crossed enemy lines."
Indeed. Fifteen or 20 minutes later I made my way to the front
of the store to see if they wanted to offer filthy lucre for my
filthy right-wing bestsellers and was pleasantly surprised to find
that the store would take most of the books in the stack --
including everything that was even remotely controversial. As
usual, the amount offered was more than adequate.
The conversation after went, roughly, like this:
Me: Deal.
(Assistant hands me the notebook to fill out my particulars:
name, address, price paid, etc.)
Lady owner: I guess we're real liberals. We'll buy books from
the other side.
Me: Market liberals.
Gray with glasses (heavy with sarcasm): Yeah, liberal. We don't
worry about truth or ethics as long as we can make a buck on
it.
Me: Uh, OK.
I filled out the information and got out of there before they
could change their minds.
The truth is, the owners have been more than decent to me over
the years. I prefer to deal with them because they pay better than
the rest of the book peddlers in town, and because they seem to
share my infatuation with the printed word. The massive selection
of books that they have accumulated is something to behold. To
browse the overflowing shelves of literature, history books, and
religious literature is to show modern politics for the small,
petty, fleeting thing that it's become.
Jeremy Lott is the foreign press critic for GetReligion.org.
topics:
Religion, Books, NATO, Socialism
