I Was a Teenaged Hippie
[Frederica Mathewes-Green  02/22 03:11 PM]

I confess, it's true. Yes, I am old. But in the early 70's, when I was in college, I was a thoroughgoing mother-earth hippie and the first women's libber in my dorm.

But before that, strangely enough, I grew up in a big old house in the historic district of a grand old southern town. Since many of the adults I knew were status-conscious and comfortably racist, I developed an allergic reaction to privilege. When I became a Christian, Jesus' teachings on humility and love of enemies gave grounding to the more benign of my hippie values. It felt liberating to leave the fancypants world behind and live on a shoestring, and learn how to make things, and do for myself, and try to live with everyone in peace and harmonee.

So, Caleb, the idea of "never going anywhere without your driver and your butler"! Of "action and adventure" and a rather class-conscious black cape — and wielding a sword cane (which, as far as I can tell, is designed to poke a hole in somebody). Horrors! Not at all my definition of Crunch.

See, that's why the "Crunchy Con" identity is so elusive. It can just seem to mean "I'm not your usual Conservative."

I remember when Rod was first collecting responses to his column, and could get in the same batch of emails an evangelical pacifist mom in Alabama, and a pro-war Log Cabin Republican, and both would exclaim, "I'm Crunchy!"

So that's why a first question to examine is this one of identity. Or should we say image? I still suspect that a lot of this is about the rankling feeling that the culture labels us either Red or Blue, where the subtext of Blue is "hip, cool, sophisticated" and that of Red is "crude, hateful, dumb." So is an underlying meaning of Crunchy Con, "I'm not your usual dorky Conservative. I'm different. I'm cool"?