I don’t mind the hunting rifle

An excellent piece by John Derbyshire. It doesn’t explain why I dislike conservatives in general, but does the trick for one variety: “the red-state conservative with his Bible, his hunting rifle and his sodomy laws”.

When a conservative commentator says, “I am at ease in a roomful of New York liberals in a way that, to be truthful about it, I am not in a gathering of red-state evangelicals,” one has to admit that cultural and political distinctions and bonds are hardly the same. How can I, a citizen of the Third Rome, take serously anything — especially concerning my country of birth and residence — pronounced by a pundit from Moscow, Iowa?

But then — could it be that Derbyshire is a NRO, and not TNR, columnist because and inasmuch as he is a bit of a parochial conservative at heart, all of his sophistication notwithstanding?

Oh, by the way, as a counterweight: Iowa was home to my beloved Grant Wood; and there is something deeply provincial about the Third Rome notion, conceived by a Russian cleric two and a half centuries before Peter the Great.

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