You'd know the name. This person is a white conservative Arkansas male. But I repeat myself.
He sent a pointed missive the other day in the context of the preposterous presidency of Donald Trump.
Preposterous was my word, not his.
He wrote: "I hope you had a chance to read David Brooks' column for it seemed especially focused on the thrust of columns such as yours. He used several phrases to categorize such offerings as 'narcissistic displays,' 'predictable howls,' 'silly,' 'high school' and 'outrage du jour' with the admonition for 'universal humility,' 'emotional pause' and 'a little listening.' He urged you to get over your sentiment of 'moral superiority' and that 'the country isn't good enough for us' and to accept the idea that perhaps the country wants a 'philosophical change of course.' ''
My correspondent suggested that Brooks had "arrived at conclusions worthy of [my] consideration."
My experience has been that encouragement to cooperate with a politician with whom one disagrees probably comes from people agreeing with that politician and unwilling themselves--usually without self-awareness--to offer cooperation toward the side with which they disagree. I refer to my correspondent, not Brooks, who, admirably, is naturally Republican-ish but wrote throughout the campaign the transcendent truth that Trump's candidacy presented a hideous affront to decency and reason.
A new poll from CNN says a higher percentage of Democrats urged reaching out to Republicans in 2008 after President Barack Obama's election--for all the good it did them--than the percentage of Republicans who want to reach out now to Democrats.
That's despite the fact that, unlike Trump, Obama actually got more votes.
People who never gave Obama a chance now command that detractors give Trump a chance.
Nonetheless, introspection of the kind my correspondent urges is always good and I do not shrink from it.
First, I do not for a moment believe the country is not good enough for me. That's laughable. Quite to the contrary, I am gratified that 2 million more of my countrymen cast a presidential vote like mine than for the preposterous president-elect.
The country is far greater than a horrible president. I trust it will survive and conceivably thrive even as this one befouls it with megalomaniacal irrationality and by mixing his vast business interests with our government in a way that--unless corrected by the time he becomes president--ought to invite impeachment.
Second, I agree both with my correspondent and Brooks on two points.
One is that we should listen to, rather than insult, the disregarded and disaffected working-class voters who delivered Trump's split-decision victory. The other is that we owe it to the country to accept this preposterous presidency--as if we had any choice--and work with it where possible toward a better country.
Alas, I fear my correspondent does not read all my essays. He apparently missed two published after the election.
One told of my singular status at a pre-election social gathering of liberals as I argued that the modern Democratic Party had abandoned working-class people for whom it had historically been the champion, leaving those voters vulnerable to the con job of a ball-capped buffoon.
I hardly could look down on the proud working people from whom I come.
My late dad toiled in a warehouse at night and ran a rural garbage route by morning. But when he got cut loose from the warehouse job with a tiny Workers' Compensation settlement after he fell while changing light bulbs in the ceiling and crushed his ankle, he did not blame a changing economy. Nor did he embrace a demagogic politician.
Instead he got a ladder and paint brushes and scrapers and dragged that old ankle from one house to another, and up and down that shaky ladder, doing ace painting jobs and other maintenance tasks.
His winning bids came in light years lower than anybody else's. What he saw as a lot of money wasn't.
For that matter, I myself am a white working-class male lacking a college degree. I dropped out of college because I preferred the education and apprenticeship of a newsroom. I simply am a stranger in my own demographic.
The second recent column my correspondent apparently missed was one in which I was pleased that congressional Democrats might join Trump in his Keynesian economic initiative to pour billions in government spending into infrastructure rebuilding.
It's about the policy, not the party or the preposterous person.
My position is the logical inverse of that expressed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2010. He said his job was to make Obama a one-term president.
But here we encounter again the nuance typically missed on both sides amid today's raging hyper-partisanship and hate.
McConnell said that his first preference, before trying to make Obama a one-term president, was that Obama not fail, but change.
Ditto for this preposterous president-elect.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/29/2016