The scourge of inflationary paranoia. The NRA's official Enemies List is roughly 150 percent larger than Dick Nixon's, although no one could ever outpace our 37th president in malignant fears and diseased dreads. Clinical distrust of his fellow man became so bad, in the end he wasn't even really paranoid. He was just right.
At any rate the NRA's list contains some names that rather surprise--Sylvester Stallone, for instance--and some that do not; the exotically intelligent Meryl Streep, the infinitely beguiling Sigourney Weaver (it's OK, my wife was quite aware of my boyish fixation), and, notes Addicting Info, Barbra Streisand, "the only person to be on both Nixon and the NRA’s lists."
The NRA's blacklist contains organizations, too, and the two that naturally caught my eye were my hometown teams of the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals. This took me back--not to hot, boozy summer nights at the ballpark, but to a particularly hot, boozy night on Kansas City's West Side, where, when I was a teenager, my best friend lived--and died.
He had always had a fascination with handguns; they were part of his cultural fabric and an unmistakable neighborhood symbol of a manhood arrived, and one not to be messed with. One evening, in a West Side bar, he took offense at the bartender's words, about his sister. He left the bar, retrieved a pistol from his car in the parking lot, and reentered the bar, where the bartender was waiting--handgun in hand. I never saw my friend again.
Even drunk, he was one of the sweetest guys I had ever known. But when drunk with a gun in his hand he became, in his mind, invincible as well.
I suppose you could say he was on the NRA's Enemies List, too.
I was scanning the NRA's list and noted that all the Olympic medal winners were called "Former Olympians" for no particular reason. Nobody else is called former anything.
Is this meaningful, or is it just noise in the signal?
Posted by: Jim Milstein | February 02, 2013 at 12:43 PM