Garrett Keizer on "Progressives" and Guns

Thanks to Underbelly's PDX bureau for favoring me with one of the best bits of bathroom reading I've seen in a long time--The Best American Essays (2007), including this gem:

Notice the telling grammatical shift by which the adjective "progressive" becomes a titular noun--comparable to a godly person who begins to speak of himself as a god. As the living embodiment of progress itself, a progressive is beyond rage, beyond "the politics of yesterday," and certainly beyond anything as retro as a gun. More than I fear fundamentalists who wish to teach religious myths in place of evolution, I fear progressives who wish to teach evolution in place of political science. Or, rather, who forget a central principle of evolutionary thought: that no species completely outgrows its origins.

--Garret Keizer, "Loaded" in id. 137-43, 139 (2007)
(Originally published in Harper's Magazine)

And continuing:

Like democracy, for example. What is that creature if not the offspring of literacy and ballistics? Once a peasant can shoot down a knight, the writing is on the wall, including the writing that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

--Id. 139-40

This is dazzling stuff, but in fact he speaking for a long intellectual tradition, not so? The idea of an armed citizenry was a staple of 17th-Century small-r republicanism, not so ((link))? Still it is fun to see it so elegantly and provocatively expressed.

Statement of Interest: This post written by someone who hasn't owned a gun since a house fire destroyed his .22 rifle when he was 10, and who hasn't touched one since he left the army in 1963. Loud noises frighten me, but the truth has its claims.