“Well, gawwww-ley Ned!!!”
Actor Jim Nabors once entertained America portraying a good ol’
boy from Mayberry named Gomer Pyle. A minor character on The
Andy Griffith Show, Nabor in his performance as a not-so-smart
country boy so captured audiences that in typical TV-style he was
given his own show which immediately shot to the top of the
ratings. The premise of Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. was that Gomer decided
to enlist in the Marines. Nabor’s trademark expression of surprise
and innocent wonder, always delivered in a slow rolling, deeply
Southern twang, laced itself into the American vocabulary of the
day. To say it — and it was said at water coolers and school
playgrounds everywhere — was recognition that something new if not
shocking had just been discovered. Something that was endlessly new
and shocking only to Gomer, as he was usually learning something
that his peers or exasperated Sergeant Carter had understood
forever. To say that someone was a real “Gomer” was to say that the
individual was dim-witted, or in today’s language someone who
doesn’t get it.
As it happens, the word “Gomer” has come to have another
meaning. “Gomer” is a popular acronym in the medical world uttered
by a doctor when being told he must treat a patient with, say, a
painful hangnail, while he has another patient hemorrhaging from a
gunshot wound to the chest. In this version the word “G-O-M-E-R”
stands for “Get Out of My Emergency Room,” a snappy term used by
sarcastic and irritated doctors to mean that the hangnail patient
is an unwanted hospital patient taking up valuable time when there
is a real emergency at hand.
Whether one leans to the Gomer Pyle version or the medical
definition, it is abundantly clear that America — and the world —
is rapidly being divided into Gomers and non-Gomers. The non-Gomers
are those who understand the terrorist threat, who “get it” in a
visceral fashion that America is at war with Islamic fascists for
whom this is a death struggle. The Gomers, of course, are those
politically naive and dim-witted enough to crowd into the emergency
room of national security complaining about a lack of funding for
some recycling program, all the while wondering what all the fuss
is about as doctors with names like Bush or Blair or Cheney or
Lieberman are trying to perform operations to stop, say, 24
British-born Muslims from blowing airliners out of the sky.
How richly ironic it is that Connecticut’s new Democratic Senate
nominee is actually named “Ned,” the very name Gomer Pyle used and
that so vividly captured his bewildered naivete. Had these latest
attacks gone off as planned, one wonders how many Gomers would have
become numbered as the latest terrorist victims because they had
decided to do nothing more ordinary than get on a plane? How many
Gomers, having protested everything from the Bush administration’s
surveillance methods to interrogation procedures and detention
programs, are looking at the discovery of the latest plot to mass
murder Americans and actually saying “well, gawwwwwwwwlly
Ned!”?
Not the Gomers at the New York Times editorial board.
No, the Gomers there “want to understand as much as possible about
what the terrorists were planning.” Helloooo?? Hellooo?? Is anybody
home? These terrorists were planning, according to the Deputy
Police Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, to “commit
mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” Gawwwwwwwwwlly Ned! The
Times wants to “talk about airport security and how to
make it better.” Well, gawwwwwwwwwlly Ned! Might we break out some
excellent sherry, close the boardroom doors and discuss airport
security? Then publish the details on the front page! Well
gawwwwwwwwwlly Ned!
The Times and its fellow Gomers remind of nothing so
much as all those British members of Parliament who spent the 1930s
insisting Hitler was not a problem, and on a fine May day in 1941
came to work to find the House of Commons itself had been destroyed
by German bombs. If one of these airliners had made its way to New
York and plowed into the Times itself while the gang was
smart-setting its way through martinis one suspects they still
wouldn’t get this.
Yet it would be a serious mistake for the rest of us to believe
that Gomers are limited to the Dons and Divas of the smart set at
the Times or residents of Connecticut. Not long ago I gave
a speech in Pennsylvania about another topic. Afterwards a member
of the audience took me aside and made it clear that he thought the
idea America was involved in a “war on terror” was ridiculous, and
so was the President. This from someone who identified himself as a
Republican! Presumably he is looking at the latest news from London
and saying gawwwwwwwwwlly Ned! But don’t count on it.
If there is one central fact in America’s current situation it
is that we are dealing at all times — just as our parents and
grandparents and others well before that did — with human nature.
Not only will there always be a new set of tyrants or evildoers in
the world, there will always be a certain amount of credulous
people — Gomers — who simply are unable to grasp the facts of
life. As in the 1930s this will play itself out politically.
Gomers will appear in many guises. There are smart Gomers and
sophisticated Gomers. Nice Gomers and arrogant Gomers. There are
genuinely befuddled Gomers and plain old vanilla
frothing-at-the-mouth-Bush-hating Gomers. But they are Gomers one
and all.
Most dangerous of all are Gomers who actually get nominated for
a United States Senate seat or are holding one now. Ditto for the
House. They are dangerous because they actually have their hands on
the levers of power — funding power, voting power, the power of
free publicity. This danger is multiplied a million times over if a
Gomer is given the ultimate power — the seat behind the big desk
in the Oval Office. Working with non-elected Gomers like the ACLU
or MoveOn.org they will use every ounce of their power to withdraw
or underfund troops, disrupt, leak or publicize surveillance
programs, misrepresent interrogation procedures or supply oxygen to
the most blatant of anti-Semites, whether they be Hezbollah or Al
Sharpton. They are, one and all, a danger to both themselves and
the rest of us.
The goal of the 2006 election — and in 2008 and for as far into
the future as it is possible to see — is to make absolutely
certain that non-Gomers well outnumber the Gomers. So it is no
small thing to understand that the rush of the Democratic
establishment to embrace big-time Gomer Ned Lamont makes it now
vividly apparent that the Democratic Party has officially decided
to become the Gomer Party.
Well, gawwwww-lly Ned!
