The Rhetoric of Steve King

Everybody says rural America is collapsing. But I keep going to places with more moral coherence and social commitment than we have in booming urban areas. These visits prompt the same question: How can we spread the civic mind-set they have in abundance?

Those of us who live out here in fly-over country can't help but be cheered by that kind of opening paragraph. David Brooks, who is always worth reading, started a New York Times column last week ("What Rural America Has to Teach Us") with that sweet opener, then went on to flesh out his claims with what he saw and heard on a visit to Nebraska's flood-ravaged small towns.

One of the town's bankers, he says, has a weekly calendar packed with volunteer stuff, while his sister-in-law, a mother of seven,  

writes for the newspaper, coaches swimming, is a substitute teacher and bus driver, competes in ironman triathlons, works at the Y, helps run a concert series, helped organize the building of the dog park, helps out with the high school discipline program and seems to sit on every spontaneous civic organization that pops up.

What he found and what he suggested suburban and urban America import from the hinterlands where I live is a commitment to community seen rarely outside of these small towns.  

Which is not to say there are no problems in River City (he pitched his tent at McCook and Grand Island). Managing cross-cultural change requires some grace here as anywhere, and the communities tend to lose a lot of children who get college degrees and never return. 

For better or worse, Brooks claims that "community" is huge in rural America, that out here people share and trust and contribute devotedly to the public weal. "Constantly they are thinking: Does this help my town or hurt it?" he says in conclusion. "And when you tell them that this pervasive civic mind-set is an unusual way to be, they look at you blankly because they can’t fathom any other."

It's a puff piece by a New York City columnist with a national readership, a thoughtful moralist writing about places where he was almost certainly the only Jewish person in the coffee shops he visited. 

Our own Fourth District Rep, Mr. Steven King, who loves headlines, did the same thing last week: he lauded rural Americans who pitch in when the guy down the road has health problems, or the neighbor's got water in his basement. . .again. He was talking about his constituents, and he wasn't wrong. Neighborliness thrives here. Every fall, every small-town rag does at least one story about local farmers who, some bright morning, gang up their corn pickers and harvest a crop for a farm wife recently widowed or some guy nursing cancer. It happens. Every year. 

The truth is, David Brooks and Steve King said the same thing last week, but Steve King determined, as he always does, to be mean and racist. "Here's what FEMA tells me," Mr. King told a town hall somewhere near here. "We go to a place like New Orleans, and everybody's looking around saying, 'Who's going to help me? Who's going to help me?'"

Make no mistake. He's talking about African-Americans. He might deny that, but he's equivocating, and even his fellow Republicans know it. That's why he's been stripped of his committee assignments.

Someone ought to tell Steve King to read David Brooks. Someone ought to send him this url. Someone ought to point out that it's not just what he says that gets him hated, it's the shape and edge of his arrogance, the hateful, racist rhetoric of his words. 

What I'm saying is that last week the two of them, David Brooks and Steve King, essentially said the same thing. But Steve King's racial pride is hateful. He can't speak without opening wounds because he seems to want to see blood spill out on the ground. 

Even when what he says is true, he can't stanch his hateful arrogance. What comes out has no grace.