A mean mound of a man

The greatest threat to the Republican tide washing over Arkansas is its woefully simple-minded and irresponsibly mean-spirited element.

You know, Nate Bell.

Actually, the element extends beyond one mean mound of a man from Mena.

State Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway wanted to put a probing device into pregnant women’s unmentionable parts. State Rep. Bob Ballinger of Hindsville wanted to defy new federal gun law.

Over the weekend, the Benton County Republican Committee newsletter carried a ranting, raving essay from its secretary’s husband. The diatribe invoked the idea of shooting legislative Republicans who had gone to Little Rock and betrayed supposedly genuine conservatism with, ahem, socialized medicine.

Almost at the end of this legislative session, you see, the Arkansas Republican mainstream prevailed in defining itself honorably.

Defying its lunatic fringe, it joined the solid Democratic caucus on a major issue. It passed an innovative and Republican-conceived plan to use federal Medicaid money to extend private health insurance to an estimated quarter-million people of low incomes.

But a legislative session is not over until Nate Bell sings.

The health-care expansion was completed Wednesday night. On Friday morning, as the session ground toward adjournment, there came a huff and puff from the aforementioned Bell, a Republican state representative.

He made the woeful misjudgment of getting on Twitter, the worldwide social-media platform. There he typed something revealing his vast smallness of character.

Bell’s words proved so outrageously remarkable, particularly coming from an elected official, that they went viral.

They drew a national audience spectacularly transcending the 65 percent of his back-home constituents who tragically elected him.

Here’s what he tweeted: “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”

As perhaps you are aware, terrorists had detonated two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Then, four evenings later, suspects had been identified and confronted by police. That led to a shootout, after which one of the suspected terrorists remained at-large for a time, conceivably possessed of a suicide bomb.

The entire metropolitan area of Boston was put on a police-advised lockdown.

In other words, it was a perfect occasion for mindless chortling by Nate Bell.

In his limited sensitivity-so limited as to be without evident existence-Bell saw wussy Northeastern liberals hiding in their houses without any semiautomatic weapons for self-protection.

In Mena, by golly, the good ol’ boys would surely take care of the terrorists themselves.

Thus Bell was able to ridicule a public-policy position with which he disagreed, that of gun restriction, while at the same time degrading and stereotyping people with whom he held that disagreement. For good measure, he assailed and trivialized not only geographic and cultural difference, but a national crisis and human tragedy.

He almost seemed to view Bostonians not as fellow Americans needing solidarity, but as aliens of a distant land. He seemed to value their dire predicament mostly for exploitative value to promote his own provincial, insular and gun-crazed culture.

One thing about locking down the greater Boston area: Well-educated people will have nothing to do other than get on the Internet and read and respond to the grunts of a neanderthal from the backwoods.

Some tweeters replied that this was the kind of thing you should expect from a legislator in Arkansas.

Thus all of us were besmirched by the returned fire of stereotype.

And that included these very legislative Republicans who had managed to overcome their own fringe element and govern competently on health insurance expansion.

House Speaker Davy Carter put out a public statement apologizing on behalf of the House, indeed on behalf of the state, for Bell.

And Bell? He said he’d hadn’t thought about people in Boston reading his tweet and that he was sorry … for the timing and if he upset anyone, but not for the content.

A liberal-bashing and gun-loving simpleton dares not retract too much lest he look positively Bostonian to the armed militia back home.

It took me back a couple of years to that time Bell posted on Facebook a short essay that seemed to imply that Democrats were like Nazis-or, specifically, that it was too easy to liken them to Nazis.

He was aghast at sane efforts to restrict cell-phone use by operators of motor vehicles in school zones during school hours.

I wrote at the time that Bell was a primitive life force.

I’d worried since that what I’d written was too harsh.

Now I realize that it instead was in the vanguard, a couple of years ahead of a national revelation.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 15 on 04/23/2013

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