Well. Part of setting up my Substack was posting a link to it in Twitter and Facebook. Now I suppose I should write something. An introduction is as good as anything. So who am I?
Let me start by explaining how I got here. I’m a Gen Xer who grew up in Wyoming, one of the most gun-culture-steeped states. Our household could hold its own with just about any of the most fervent pro-gun households in America’s flyover country, at least any that fall short of the “sovereign citizen” or “militia” or white separatist subcultures within American gun culture. I had my first BB gun at around six, a semi-automatic .22 Long Rifle carbine at ten, and much of my out-of-school time growing up was spent at a little cigarette-smoke-filled back alley gun shop in Cheyenne. My mom became besties with the proprietor.
My Mom was seldom without a gun (unloaded) on her hip or in her hand (this handling-without-shooting is “administrative gun handling” and should, I learned later, be minimized to the utmost to prevent negligent discharges). Growing up I asked for, and received, guns for birthdays and Christmases, and had no inkling that other Americans would blanche in terror at this practice. At the gun shop I marinated in black helicopter and U.N. conspiracy theories (even as a kid I often remember thinking: Huh. I wonder if that’s really true?). We cursed those God Damned Oily Clintons and their schemes to take our guns & freedom away. I crowed in the face of my liberal college roomate as we watched mid-term election returns in 1994. Finally that gun-grabbing Slick Willie & his libtard crew were getting what was coming to them. When Fox News first aired in 1996, our family let out a tribal whoop as we realized during the broadcast that finally there was a news network that told the truth. Well, our brand of it, anyway.
And somehow, inexplicably, I became a liberal.
Not really inexplicably. In college I started out in a perfectly rational major, computer science, because I wanted to get a good job after college. That, after all, was what college was for, to get ahead. Problem was, while I’m not terrible at logic I’ve never been great at math, and one of the hurdles we had to clear in computer science was talking to a computer using only ones and zeroes. I had a hard enough time when I had a full compliment of ten digits to work with.
Then I got really excited about geology, of which there is a great deal visibile in the landscape of Wyoming. The stories of eons written into the living rock. Professor James McClurg of the University of Wyoming was an excellent teacher. Here was my major!
“You’re going to need Calculus to graduate with this major.”
Well hell.
One of my first loves had always been history. I blame long winters in front of the only functioning heater in a poorly insulated house on the Wyoming prairie outside of Cheyenne, a bookshelf filled with Time Life’s Old West series within reach. No TV or internet. I was an excellent reader, and there’s a lot of that in history.
Guess that major will have to do.
Along the way I learned some critical thinking and to question accepted dogmas, and darned if I didn’t start questioning the conservative orthodoxy I’d grown up with (especially when I started to dig deep into the Civil Rights movement).
Problem was, as far as the “getting a good job” purpose of even going to college in the first place, a history degree rated barely higher than a high school diploma, unless you were going to become a high school teacher. Even then, the job market was (and is) absolutely awash in high school social studies teachers. Still, the odds of getting a job teaching high school are still better than getting a professorship, and the pay & bennies better than Walmart. Even so, my dad was a teacher, and I heard endless complaints about the low-for-level-of-qualifications pay, the long hours, the politics, the administrators, the parents, the student behavior problems. No bleepin’ way was I going to go there.
Then I met my wife, a teacher who came back to college to get her Master’s, and who wanted to start a family, for which we would need a decent income. She suggested I get my teaching certification, at least to earn some money substitute teaching. Seemed OK as a temporary gig.
It’s been my temporary gig for fifteen years now.
So now I self-identify as a liberal (I say “self-identify” because many liberals would say I fail one of the acid tests of liberalism: see below).
And a teacher.
And (mumbling almost inaudibly) I still like guns.
As the Superbad meme says, “F—- me, right?”