Day: October 25, 2015

It’s not like downtown Washington is a ghost town on Sunday afternoons and evenings, but it’s not far from that. Not that I minded. I began my hike at 3 pm, partly, I’ll admit, to escape the 2.95 Mbps download speed in the Airbnb pad. (I have 85 to 90 Mpbs in my WeHo home.) I stopped for 90 minutes at Le Pain Quotidien near Dupont Circle for a little writing/editing, and then off to the races. To appreciate the Paris-like street scheme you need to have roamed Paris, of course. Not the usual rectangular grids but big, broad boulevards connecting roundabouts and wide-open plazas with huge, stunning, illuminated-after-dark buildings. D.C. was designed in the early 1790s by Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Paris didn’t become this kind of city until Napoleon III and city engineer Georges-Eugène Haussmann began their 17-year makeover, beginning in 1854.

Since last July the White House has been on some kind of double-security lockdown — extra fences, barriers, uniformed security guys. Keep your distance, citizens! All due to the Secret Service Improvements Act of 2015. It’s like they’re expecting some kind of armed assault. In the early Clinton days you could walk right up to the iron fence surrounding the property and put your hands on the bars — no longer.

The exterior of the house where Abraham Lincoln died (a.k.a., the Petersen house, built in 1849) looks like brick but is actually some kind of fake plaster.

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During yesterday’s post-screening discussion about The Armor of Light I asked director Abigail Disney why the word “regulate” or the phrase “treat guns like cars” hadn’t even been mentioned in her doc. I was feeling quite irritated by this. Disney’s response was that gun-right advocates would walk out of her film if they so much as heard those words, and I shook my head and seethed. The vibes were rather testy. There are two things you can do about gun wackos, I was thinking. One, convey the utmost contempt at every opportunity, and two, wait for them to die.

Virginia resident Phil Winfield and his two nephews, Jacob and Austin Winfield Jr. — Saturday, 10.24, 1:05 pm.

And then the vibe changed when a Virginia resident, Phil Winfield, spoke up. He asked the audience how many had received any kind of weapons training (about ten of us raised our hands, myself included) and then asked how many of us had been trained to give first aid and CPR. Maybe two hands went up. Winfield more or less said that knowing how to help people in some kind of medical distress was a better, more nourishing thing than knowing how to fire AK-47s or .45 automatics, and that maybe we should contemplate what kind of society we are given the focus on weapons and not activities of a more kindly and charitable nature. It was sort of a left-field remark but people applauded when he finished.

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Abigail Disney‘s The Armor of Light, which I saw yesterday afternoon at the Middleburg Film Festival, is an attempt to modify the knee-jerk attitudes of pro-gun conservatives by appealing to them on spiritual grounds. It’s not aimed at existential, Michael Moore-supporting, loose-shoe lefties like myself  but at rural obstinates.  She presents her case by profiling (i.e., following around) pro-life Evangelical minister Rev. Rob Schenck, a nice guy who regards himself as a spiritual leader of gun-toting Tea Party types, and showing how he gradually comes to believe that being pro-gun and pro-life are antithetical. But that’s as far as Schenck or the doc are willing to go.

Disney, the granddaughter of the rightwing Roy (brother of Walt) Disney and therefore possessed of a certain insight into conservative thinking, doesn’t want the word “regulate” or the words “treat guns like cars” to escape anyone’s lips. She just wants to put the teachings of the Bible and particularly the sanctity of life on the table. Here’s her statement.

(l.) Armor of Light director Abigail Disney, (r.) Lucy McBath, mother of shooting victim Jordan Davis, during post-screening q & a at Middleburg Film Festival.

Disney believes that if you say “regulate” or “control” the gunnies will freak out. HE to Disney: They’re going to arch their backs no matter what. The God-fearing, cut-and-dried, John Wayne culture that they grew up with is more or less over and they know it, and they feel threatened. That’s what their guns are about — making them feel a little more potent, a little less scared, a little closer to God.

Every rightie heard in Disney’s doc believes that the left wants to confiscate the right’s firearms. No debate or discussion — that’s what’ll happen if we don’t stop any and all gun-control proposals, they all say.

Schenck never addresses the term “slippery slope,” which every NRA gun nut uses to justify opposition to common-sense regulation of firearms. Allow one regulation to be adopted and that’ll be the thin end of the wedge, they say. Before you know it another regulation will come along and then another, and one day semi-automatic and automatic rifles and shotguns will be banned (like Australia famously did in 1996) and then they’ll come for the handguns, etc.

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