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April 28, 2006
George Allen's Six-Gun Soul
Ryan Lizza has written an absolutely unnerving portrait for TNR of presidential wannabe George Allen, the conservative’s great-white hope to unsaddle John McCain. Lizza’s Allen is a boot-wearin’, tobacci-chewin,’ Country-music thumpin’ cowboy-senator who has always cultivated a version of red-state cultural identity—even while attending high school on the rugged badlands of Palos Verde, California (an L.A. suburb much like Beverly Hills, only snobby). But Allen apparently has a checkered past. As a teen he drove around Southern California brandishing the Confederate flag (and wore one on his lapel for a school portrait); he was suspended for scribbling racist graffiti on a school wall; and as a young politician he was quite willing to advance his career by cozying up to constituents steeped in confederate nostalgia.
But oddly, the picture of Allen that comes through is not that of a closet racist, but something even worse. Left to tend his younger siblings while his famous coach-dad traveled the country, Allen dispensed a form of discipline that looked more like recreational violence. He was a bully. (Much of this—a broken collarbone, a broken nose, pulled hair, etc.—is detailed in a memoir penned by his sister.) Those who knew him when remember a troublemaker, one who seemed to delight in images of cruelty. He was, as he now boasts, a “rebel.” If Lizza’s picture is remotely accurate, it seems clear that what attracted Allen to confederate culture was not its racist core, but its iconography of violent rebellion to authority. Senator Allen has some issues.
Political psychology is, to be sure, a highly suspect art. And even if it were not, we’d still have to concede that some degree of adolescent “acting out” is more evidence of mental health than is a stainless record of do-gooder behavior. But most kids grow up, learn lessons, and confront (or disavow) their youthful antics. Allen, however, has seemed to buff them into a political personality. Senator Macho decorates his office with a hangman’s noose and his home with a confederate flag. He revels in the politics of shit-kicking. So we must at least wonder whether the childhood angst that drove him to identify with Southern rebels is the same impulse that would inform a hip-shootin’ presidency.
Posted by stevemack at April 28, 2006 01:10 PM
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