From Entertainment Weekly’s interview with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert:

STEWART: I keep hearing that she’s ”like us.” There’s this idea that people who hunt and have ”good” values are somehow this mythological American; I don’t know who ”this” person is, I’ve never met them. She is no more typical ”us” than I am, than Obama is, than McCain is, than Mr. T is. If there is something quintessentially or authentically American about her, I sort of feel like, you know what? You ”good values people” have had the country for eight years, and done an unbelievably s—ty job. Let’s find some bad values people and give them a shot, maybe they’ll have a better take on it.

The equation that says that to appear authentically American a politician has to kill defenseless animals is something I’ve always wondered about. I live in the wrong part of the country to run into Natty Bumppo on a regular basis, but does anymore? Picking a state at random, Wal-Mart has 12 stores in Montana, which gives them roughly one store per two residents of the state. They have 11 in North Dakota. These people are not surviving on beaver meat. Sure, there are recreational hunters, but there are recreational bowlers too, not to mention recreational bird watchers and other non-lethal nature lovers. (Quintessential American-with-a-gun Theodore Roosevelt swore off blasting at potential specimens when the box camera came along. Of course, by then he had already killed at least one of everything that walked, crawled, or flew, so maybe it wasn’t that big a sacrifice.) Heck, there are recreational pornographers, too. What makes a hunter more prototypically American than those people, or all those folks buying frozen dinners at their local super-store? This is a myth to which we give far too much credence. One suspects that if we stopped catering to it, it would simply vanish.

Besides: the bowlers… they need some attention too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 8:47 pm and is filed under The Political Mindscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.