I am a conservative metrosexual.
As most people know, a metrosexual is a heterosexual man who has
good taste in art and music, and likes to pamper himself with nice
clothes and expensive grooming. There’s only one drawback: I can’t
stand much of the so-called common-man culture celebrated by the
Right.
I fully realized I’m a conservative metrosexual — let’s call me
a metrocon for short — a few weeks ago. The Gretchen Wilson song
“Redneck Woman” came on the radio. This tune, a hard-charging
boogie-woogie number, is a celebration of crude behavior, a kind of
red-state aria of defiance against the staid, snobby, and
civilized. The woman in the song boasts about shopping at Wal-Mart,
keeping the Christmas lights on the house all night long, and
standing in the front yard barefoot “with a baby on my hip.”
I had an immediate, visceral hatred of the song. It represented
the one thing I truly cannot stand about modern conservatism: its
defense of anything dumb, tacky, and second-rate, as long as it
comes from “the people.” The common man is deified by the right.
NASCAR, an absolutely idiotic “sport” which consists, as the joke
goes, of “a bunch of rednecks makin’ left turns,” is hailed as red
state America’s favorite pastime — and ipso facto comparable to
the Olympics of ancient Greece. Actually, scratch that: NASCAR is
not treated as something grand and noble, which makes it all the
worse. To populist conservatives, the simple fact that Bush country
embraces the sport makes its aesthetic quality quite beside the
point. This is the sport of people, we are told ad nauseam by folks
like Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity, who “work
hard, go to church, and play by the rules.” They are the ones who
watch the WWF — a “sport” even apes laugh at — and who read the
Left Behind series of books, which should probably be called
Theology for Dummies.
This attitude would be less irritating if it were an
acknowledgment of reality rather than a celebration of the
mediocre. When Bill O’Reilly goes into his
just-an-average-Joe-from-Levittown riff, he doesn’t come across as
a man who aspires to lose some of the provincialism of his
upbringing, much less expand into different areas of knowledge and
artistic appreciation. He’s proud of being a blockhead. Yet — of
course — the liberals are worse. Baby boomers still dress in jeans
and T-shirts (like their NASCAR counterparts), listen to music
that’s 40 years old (the Stones anyone?), and try to sound like
teenagers to impress their kids. Whereas JFK — one of the great
American metrosexuals of all time — looked great even on vacation,
with his Ray-Bans and khakis, Al Gore just looked silly when he
tried to reach the common man by wearing “earth tones.” It’s the
difference between Brooks Brothers and the Gap.
WHAT MAKES THIS SO SAD is that I firmly believe in the common
sense, decency, and wisdom of the American people. I just wish that
the attempts at self-improvement common among the masses up until
the 1960s hadn’t gone out of style. People once read Reader’s
Digest to keep up with the best books and thinkers. They felt
guilty about not understanding classical music. They shamed those
who dressed like pigs. In his masterpiece Transformation in
Christ, the great theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand claimed
that there are two phases of growth for the human person. The first
is physical, and the second spiritual. After the physical growth
stops, the human person starts to grow towards God. This, in
Hildebrand’s view, entails a growth in appreciation of, among other
things, aesthetic beauty and the arts. It means going from pop
music tunes to symphonies, from blue jeans to slacks, from Old
Spice to Polo. It means trying to improve yourself.
This is really how I became a right-wing metrocon. As a young
socialist my uniform was studied rock and roll grubbiness — mullet
(hey, it was the '80s), ripped jeans, rock band T-shirt. Yet when I
sobered up and became a conservative — which also meant a return
to Christianity — I began to experience the second growth that von
Hildebrand speaks of. I went from Levis and punk rock to Saks and
swing dancing. I poured out the Old Spice and went to Nordstrom’s
for a bottle of Truefitt and Hill of London (founded, the bottle
reminds us, in 1805, when Lord Nelson won the great battle at
Trafalgar). I stopped wearing sneakers and white socks. Like George
Will — a Hall of Fame metrocon — I began to prefer baseball to
football. And I never stopped liking Woody Allen films — yes, I
call them films. I didn’t stop growing — in fact, this was when I
started growing. Soon, “Red Neck Woman” seemed like an embarrassing
Bible Belt banshee wail.
Yet very few of my new right-wing brethren made their trip with
me. There’s William F. Buckley, the pluperfect conservative
metrosexual. Buckley, whose National Review turned 50 last
year, is the picture of style, erudition, dignity, and grooming.
He’s more Polo than Gillette, goes to the symphony, and would look
lost at a rodeo. Buckley is representative of the older
conservative order, people like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz
and Irving Kristol who can speak about Beethoven and Brahms more
than Alan Jackson and Jeff Foxworthy. They read the New
Criterion — a kind of Bible of the metrocon — and buy
Christmas presents at Brooks Brothers instead of Wal-Mart. There
hasn’t really come up a younger generation of metrocons to take
over.
Sadly, in America being a metrocon is just too close to being a
snob. Here snobbery is considered about one notch above child
molester. Endless sitcoms are plotted around the idea that someone
who is well-dressed, fussy, or otherwise “uptight” needs a
shellacking from the mouth of some working-class hero like the
“King of Queens.” The star of that show is a man parading around
wearing a football jersey like the one his 14-year-old son owns,
delights in gas and other vulgarity, and couldn’t identify a single
piece of classical music. The smash one-man show Defending the
Caveman is a celebration of the common man, a creature who
grunts, chows on Doritos, and ceases all brain activity when pro
wrestling is on. Yet this dumbing down doesn’t respect sex: In her
new film With the Family, Sarah Jessica Parker plays a
coifed, polite, and urbane woman who marries into an earthy red
state family. The entire film is a kind of dressing-down of Parker,
a thawing of her pretensions. How dare she strive for beauty,
dignity, art, and knowledge.
As it stands now, things don’t look good for the metrocons.
George Bush is the antipode to our kind — unlike Ronald Reagan, an
actor used to cleaning up well and who looked as comfortable in a
suit as he did on a horse. But he’s a good man who’s perfect for
the job at hand — the War on Terror — so he gets a pass. Here’s
hoping that in 2008 we conservatives put forth someone who is for
low taxes, the War on Terror, and no white shoes after Labor
Day.
