GOP Vixen

Confessions of a Republican Journalist: College, Part I

There’s a time in life for getting serious, for thinking hard about where you’re headed in life, to stop wrapping people’s trees in toilet paper and eating Taco Bell at 3 a.m. after shaking your boogaloo in a club until closing time in platform heels.

Contrary to popular myth advanced by school counselors and parents everywhere, that time is not age 18. At least not if you go to college.

I was accepted to the handful of colleges to which I‘d applied, but chose a California State University campus where I would not be subjected to the dorms -- which, in 1993 and probably today as well, each had their distinct aromatherapy of vomit, urine, or Keystone Light.

The first challenge for an entering freshman is picking a semester’s worth of classes. There are many things you don’t understand the first term of college -- give yourself ample time to sleep in (for obvious reasons), don’t pick a class a mile across campus and give yourself only ten minutes to dash there, and never be part of the 8 a.m. rush to buy Scantrons (those fill-in-the bubble test sheets) before class in the campus bookstore.

And go ahead and pick stupid courses, but beware picking courses for stupid reasons.

Like how every semester’s Introductory Greek class was packed with fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, most of whom dropped the course after realizing learning Greek was about more than reciting the alphabet as a match burned down to your fingers (a popular hazing ritual -- I can still do it). Or how I, a city girl to the core, thought I could take Agricultural Economics for the general ed math requirement out of a hope the class would be full of hot aggies (aggies who thought the city girl was a twit). And how I picked another general ed class for the natural science requirement, a course that focused on Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, etc. -- actually, maybe Cal State was the stupid one for offering the class as an option to fulfill graduation requirements. I mean, come on.

After ensuring that you will learn next to nothing in college, the next step is to pick one’s extracurriculars. In high school, these are greeted with joy by parents wanting you to beef up a college application with wholesome, community-service activities. In college, parents remember what “extracurricular” meant to them at that age, and shudder mightily in fear.

But how bad could it be? Better put, how bad could I be?

I, along with high school chums Susan and Jackie, promptly signed up with the campus Republicans, a club with a storied history of raising ire from department to department. They were an eclectic mix. Their logo was a caricature of a donkey with a target on its butt, and above that the words “KICK ASS.” The group’s official movie was Quentin Tarantino’s classic gangsta-fest “Reservoir Dogs,” and this was enjoyed with liberal amounts of Sam Adams. Couple that with “Point of No Return,” and the group probably would have nominated Harvey Keitel for president -- or at least spiritual leader.

But the GOP club had a deeper purpose beyond reaping free food from local candidates who wanted to bribe us to do their dirty precinct-walking work. School politics was a nasty beast, and the campus Republican group doubled as the conservative party in the student government. The right side took the name of the Reality party, and the left side took the name SCARED, or Students Concerned About Real Education Disaster.

The lefties broke a cardinal rule of political warfare -- never give yourself an acronym that your enemies can assign new words to for mocking purposes. SCARED quickly became Socialist Communist Atheist Radicals Endangering Democracy. And so the stage was set.

Since the left side held a slim majority of senatorial seats on the student council and the leadership positions -- two politically independent senatorial posts were Greeks from fraternity/sorority row -- the ASI office was basically the left’s territory. So like gang initiates going out on their first drive-by, Susan, Jackie and I began taking our lunches into the office, just to sit and happily eat -- to the chagrin of the SCARED folks. They’d peer from the doorways of the few offices rimming the central area where we’d camped out, not sure if we’d come to wreak havoc or spread our right-wing fairy dust. We were too concentrated on our Carl's Jr. and the latest gossip.

With the Greeks pitching in, we had enough votes to attain appointments on some of the ASI committees. Here is where I learned how useless committees are, a feeling that has grown powerful throughout my journalism career. I was on the Legislative and Legal Committee; our task was “interpreting bylaws.” I’m not bloody Rehnquist; I know bylines, not bylaws. But we tried our best to sound important and argue with the other side just to keep things interesting.

Not like SCARED didn’t have some seriously dumb ideas worth a knock-down, drag-out argument. In fact, the entire semester basically focused on three things.

* Using a sizeable chunk of student body fees, which were paid with yearly registration, to fund a campus child-care center that served only a handful of students. When we suggested ways to raise private funding, we were greeted with the “you’re insensitive bastards” argument -- we didn’t care about moms and kids, the lefties hollered. When our protestations over funding fell on deaf ears, we mocked their undertaking with an article in our underground newspaper: “ASI to implement Campus Dog Care Center: Senators wish to lessen the burden on single student pet owners.”

* Trying to pass a symbolic resolution expressing solidarity with the United Farm Workers’ table-grape boycott. (Cesar Chavez, left, was a Cal State icon.) This culminated in a fiery meeting crowded with aggies vs. Latino activists. Among the many speakers, one student stated that his uncle was a farm worker who had died of cancer; when one aggie suggested that the disease may run in his family, the student shouted, “You’d say that about all us dirty Mexicans, wouldn’t you?!?” Filling in for a senator that day, I expressed my view that the whole thing was an utter waste of time: first, it had nothing to do with implementing student policy or spending school funds (i.e. the reason we were there), and “Considering that our agriculture department is developing new and safer pesticides, why would we dream of passing something that simply dogs on that department?”

* Arguing about how many days there were in a week. Yes, it’s true: A slight but scary student who served as the ASI legislative vice president my first semester kept posting agendas late. They were supposed to be posted seven days in advance, but she was convinced that Thursday to Thursday was not a week, but eight days if you counted them off on your fingers. Thus, she wouldn’t post the agenda for Thursday’s meeting until late the previous Friday (which hampered our strategizing), claiming she fell within the window of allotted time. She reportedly accused the righties of interpreting the rules as “Earth days.”

The underground newspaper was a 12-page-long monthly tabloid-style publication, staple-bound on crisp white paper. GOPs would get up early in the morning to distribute it across campus before students arrived: desks, benches, bathrooms, even on lecterns to “inspire the lecture,” we hoped in vain. In addition to smart-ass editorials often given smart-ass pen names, the editions included the Movie Review (“Reservoir Dogs”), the Brew Review and the Gun Review (“Remington 870 Ideal for Stocking Stuffer”). Who could resist?

Confessions of a Republican Journalist: Wee GOP, Part II

See, even at age 3 I wore red, white and blue. But this segment picks up at the end of junior high, after I campaigned against Dukakis and had befuddled everyone around me with my intense political infatuation.

Pickets and phone banks aside, it’s easy to single out the two most influential moments in my evolution as a GOP -- and as a human being.

When Chinese gathered en masse in 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests, they were no longer worshipping Mao but the Goddess of Democracy, a statue they’d crafted resembling the Statue of Liberty. It was inevitable that the government wouldn’t put up with this kind of demonstration, and military forces rolled into the square to wipe it clean. But one guy stood in front of a line of advancing tanks, keeping them at bay for half an hour. I was transfixed in front of the television -- this was the bravest man I’d ever seen.

The sight got me thinking about what would drive him to take such drastic measures; I studied further and learned that he lived under a system infinitely more oppressive than your average teen grounding. Talk about having things put in perspective.

Years later, I would see the still of the unidentified “tank man” periodically when going into Republican Party offices, and I wondered how many others might have been inspired by the guy, too.

The other event of note in Bridget development also wasn’t in California, but a world away in Germany. I remember well watching pieces of the Berlin Wall come down, ecstatic Germans ripping away chunks with their hands and hacking at the graffiti-scarred behemoth with pickaxes. I remember wondering what would incite such emotion, and when I began to delve into the Communist system that repressed these newly freed people it solidified my Republican beliefs. Karl Marx, I learned, was a complete boob whose philosophies created misery for millions.

But Karl had nothing to do with California high school miseries. And when I graduated from poufed bangs to Guess jeans, it wasn’t just a battle to adjust to high school life -- it was a war. The Gulf War, to be exact, which broke out during my sophomore year, was announced over the campus loudspeakers while I was in an after-school audition.

“Students, this is the principal speaking. We just wanted to let you know that we’ve just gone to war. If you need to talk about it, you can talk to your teachers. Have a good day.”

From there, I went back to being tragic, reading from “Steel Magnolias.” But a few of the students took the announcement as a call to arms across campus.

It all started when a handful of students who’d paid ample attention to lessons involving the late 1960s decided to stage a lunchtime war protest in the quad. Most students chuckled at them as they walked past, but I was inspired to counterdemonstration. So were many others. And boy, did we have fun with it.

First came the yellow ribbons on the backpacks, tied neatly to zipper pulls. Then came the buttons -- tons appearing from every corner of campus, fresh from home button-makers. And the anti-war protesters were overwhelmingly outnumbered, as students scrawled “Saddam Sucks“ on their binders and book covers. One rather militant student started the “Kill Saddam” line of backpack buttons.

My friend Andrea (on the right in our Sears best-friend photo package, left) and I produced the “Free Kuwait” buttons and ones bearing pictures of Bush cut out from magazines. She and I used to walk home from school together, and adopted the practice of stopping and saying the Pledge of Allegiance -- loudly -- in front of every home that had a flag displayed. If the war had continued much longer, she and I could have single-handedly been responsible for a drop in public support, fueled by ire raised among scores of homeowners in once-quiet neighborhoods.

One afternoon we were goofing off on the sand volleyball court in Andrea’s apartment complex. As I’d just accidentally hit a cat with an errant ball, we decided to put the weapon down and began drawing in the sand with sticks.

“Hey, look, it’s Iraq!” I said, pointing to my makeshift map, also known as a big nondescript blob.

Andrea nodded in agreement. She grabbed a nearby rock, and plopped it in the middle of the blob. “It’s the U.S.!” she cried mid-throw.

I laughed. “The I-rock just bombed I-raq!”

Things like this are really funny when you’re 15, so we clutched our sides and howled at the joke. Everything is also a souvenir when you’re 15 -- everything that can fit in a scrapbook or puffy-painted box -- so the I-rock left with us that day. I have no idea what happened to it, other than it’s probably retired from combat and resting comfortably in somebody’s suburban decorative rock garden. Andrea and I didn’t become military strategists that day, it has to be said.

Another GOP friend was Susan, the pinnacle of involvement -- if there was a party, she’d be in there planning the decorations, placecards, theme, etc. So it was no surprise that she became involved in a teen program of the city council that treated a body of teenagers like they were any other city advisory panel -- namely, getting to have an opinion but absolutely zero sway.

The teen advisory body soon was sponsoring a forum on police and teens. Cool, I thought, cooperative strategies toward crime prevention! It totally fit with my then-FBI aspirations. Susan and I were appointed on panels for the seminar, and the night before the forum we went to a preparation meeting at an inner-city community center. There we saw what it was all about -- the panel, it seems, was to be a less-than-constructive standoff between cops and kids.

“We want the cops to stop fuckin’ with us, man!” yelled one teen with tattoos across his knuckles -- not usually a good sign of a lawful citizen. His words were greeted with cheers.

I groaned. “They why don’t you just obey the law? And stop picking fights with them. You say you want respect, but all you show is disrespect.”

Gasps!

Two seconds later, Susan and I were off the next day’s panel; I was replaced by a gangbanger named Pooh, as I recall. And our brush with junior civic responsibility showed us that a) bureaucrats had a pretty distorted idea of the average teen, and b) the right thing to say may be common sense, but isn’t always the politically correct thing.

Looking back on my senior year of high school, I think one of my extracurriculars was preening (Winter Formal dance photo, left, in which I felt compelled to crop out part of the early-'90s hideously high bangs). I also took the legendary Advanced Placement European History class at my public school. The minute you stepped in the class, the teacher made you memorize his definition of nationalism, and repeat it often, on demand, under penalty of punishment and humiliation: "Nationalism: Extreme pride in one's own country and a disregard for international opinion."

Or was it "for" one's own country? Dammit.

The teacher was a genius in historical smut, rattling off with ease which royal had which lover and who did it with which breed of animal. In my senior year, the year of AP Euro, Bill Clinton became the new president, and my teacher was no fan. (He didn’t know Bush’s loss was probably my fault, because though I volunteered I didn’t replicate the sidewalk yard-sign rally of four years before.)

This teacher also put on the chalkboard quotes of the day, and I remembered two in particular: "It is better to be feared than to be loved," by Machiavelli, which could be every teacher's mantra -- and journalist's -- and Archimedes' "Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth."

And, boy, did I want to. It just took a thing called college to really start shaking it up.

Confessions of a Republican Journalist: Wee GOP, Part I

I’ve never voted for a Democrat. I’ve never identified myself as anything other than a Republican. I like hugging stuffed elephants. I bawled when Reagan died. In fact, I’d earlier named my cat Ronnie. And red really is my preferred color over blue.

I still can't pinpoint when I decided my politics, but it was early. And it wasn't at the behest or pressure of any relatives. I once asked my mother: How did I bud into a party stalwart?

The phone line was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she responded. “You were into some pretty weird stuff as a kid.”

Surely that was a compliment. When I was 12, I was into three things: hip-hop, Guns 'n’ Roses and the Iran-Contra hearings. I even did a seventh-grade book report on “Taking the Stand,” the transcripts of the hearings and the 9-11 Commission report of its day. Oddly enough, I wasn’t a social pariah considering the nerdy nature of this undertaking.

Yet a presidential campaign was coming up, and there was no candidate more fit to drive impressionable 13-year-olds into the arms of the Republican Party than Michael Dukakis. I was inspired to volunteer for George Bush, and convinced my parents -- who were convinced this was the latest fad, along with my acid-wash jeans and poufy bangs -- to drive me down to the local GOP headquarters.

I felt like I was in a toy store -- there were stacks of colorful bumper stickers, a straw basket filled with buttons, tables offering more leaflets of literature than a Jehovah’s Witness picnic. And a grumpy old lady hovering to make sure I only took one of each.

As the table monitor watched, my fist closed around the crisp, white wooden stake of a yard sign. It was beautiful -- two big placards stapled back-to-back on the post, a pointed tip carved at the end. I had to have it. But the Yard Sign Gestapo was eyeing me suspiciously.

“We only have a few of those,” she barked.

My grasp tightened. Out of my cold, dead hands, grandma.

Arms folded, she continued. “Do you promise to put the sign out on your lawn?”

Fully aware that my parents had previously refused to allow anything that would make holes in the grass -- scruffy lawns being so irreplaceable and all -- I fudged. “Oh, sure.”

And before she could unfold her arms and change her mind, I was out the door with my precious booty. But what would I do with it, my parents asked? They wouldn’t let me stick it in the front lawn. And how could that beautiful unfinished wood, sticking my palm with tiny splinters, get soiled anyway? Was it destined to perpetually lean against the wall in my room? That wouldn’t be cool.

Hence the one-woman campaign crew swung into action.

First I persuaded my friend Heather to get her grandmother to take her down to the headquarters and procure her own sign. Once Heather made it past the sign storm trooper and back to the neighborhood, we walked down my street to the end of the block and the busiest nearby thoroughfare.

Ready ... set ... rally!

We hoisted our yard signs in the air, two eighth-graders hoping to rock the vote (or hair-band the vote, back in those days). One passing car honked, the driver raising a fist through the window in approval.

“Woooo!!” we cheered, pitching the signs up and down.

The next appendage thrust at us through a car window was a middle finger. Dukakisite.

But if we cheered, that would irritate them, right? “WOOOO!!”

In half an hour, we counted six cars solidly behind Bush, two for Dukakis and scores of undecideds, also known as those simply ignoring us and/or paying attention to the road. It was nearly as accurate as an exit poll.

My next contribution to George Herbert Walker Bush’s campaign was back at the local headquarters, where I didn’t confess my inappropriate sign usage but got roped into phone banking. Yep, those dinnertime calls now successfully deflected by the miracle of caller ID.

It went something like this:

Me: “Hi, I’m calling from the local Republican headquarters, reminding you to cast your vote for George Bush on Election Day.”

Them: “Umm... OK...”

A caller down the line finally uttered what they were really thinking. “How old are you?”

Old enough to know better. But I was learning politics, every tedious bit of grunt work. Thus I was ready when my history teacher tried talking about the election with a classroom full of completely disinterested students. The teacher was trying to explain what an Achilles’ heel was for a candidate, and most were quickly disappointed to learn it had nothing to do with sports injuries. Thus note-folding and passing took higher priority. It usually did for me, too, except the election-speak made me perk right up. This was my new thing.

The teacher continued the lesson that had few listeners. “Now, what is Michael Dukakis’ Achilles’ heel?”

My hand shot up. “He’s a card-carrying member of the ACLU!”

Note-passing stopped. Weird looks were cast in my direction. The teacher looked confused.

Ah, you are wise, young GOP. And Bush was surely thankful for my part to rally the valuable junior-high bloc, also known as swing-set voters. I even sent him a letter during the campaign outlining which rumored platform changes I could not support, and received a personal letter back on White House stationery, addressing my concerns point by point. Could he really have won without the tween backers and policy advisers? I think not.

There were other great things that marked my thirteenth year. I snuck into my first R-rated movie, for example: “Pretty Woman.” I got cool, rebellious friends to make public school more enjoyable than my previous years in Catholic school. I danced with a boy for the first time, heralding the start of many years of misery for my folks. But hey, I also helped the president get elected. Sweet.

Confessions of a Republican Journalist

When colleagues find out I'm a Republican, the response is often like Paris':

When fellow Republicans find out I'm a journalist, the response is often like Robert Blake's:

"How can you stand being around all those liberals? How do you survive? Why do you like it?" are some of the questions I hear -- often.

So I'm starting the Confessions of a Republican Journalist feature on GOP Vixen to periodically tell tales from the inside, funny experiences, who may have tried to strangle me, survival mechanisms, how I got to this point. I created a category in the left-hand column in which to store these tales. Enjoy!

* * *

What do I love about newsroom environments? I've worked in six of them, and I've never found a place where you can be more yourself, where you can mock that which should not be mocked. I’ve had some of the most fun ever making fun of news stories with colleagues, which may also mean we don’t get out much. But when you’re trapped in a windowless newsroom for hours on end, good friends and good humor are essential, and I’ve been lucky to find both in journalism.

But with every comfort comes some discomfort.

I am a Republican. And it's never been a secret. There are closeted GOPs in every newsroom, and a few like me who never went in the closet in the first place. We stick out like Ollie North at an anti-war rally.

Many journalists have a tiresome tendency to find "Republican" synonymous with "Nazi." Half of America is deemed to be full of GOPs who burn crosses, flog gays, want women to die in back alleys, want to resurrect Jim Crow, not only step over homeless people but stomp on them, want to bomb third-world daycares, dump motor oil in the ocean on a monthly basis, etc. Republicans are, in other words, bigger enemies to humanity than Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro combined.

Other than that, it's a pleasant working environment for a political conservative! :))

It wasn't always like that in my newsroom experience. At smaller papers, employees are more like family and differences are fought out, worked out or at least acknowledged with a minimal amount of food thrown. Something began to change, began to get more hostile, though, after the 2000 presidential election. Somewhere around that time I began to be regarded as Satan. It was all right having a Republican in the newsroom, as long as a Democrat was in the White House. Oh, yeah, and Bush “stole” the presidency; blame the closest GOP!

When the Iraq War began, it got even worse. It became less and less acceptable to say, "Hey, you have your viewpoint and I respect that. I have my own viewpoint that I ask you to respect as well." (Translation: “Get a grip and zip it.”) It was more acceptable to blame war supporters for civilian casualties, beheadings and Abu Ghraib, and became even easier after newsroom liberals canonized St. Michael Moore. One reporter and friend insisted on engaging me in an argument over the war, and I saw how deep the divide was when I garnered no sympathy for the thousands in Saddam's mass graves and torture chambers. "Why should we be the world's police force?" he snapped while scarfing Hershey‘s Kisses, swiftly emerging from the bleeding heart routine evoking dead soldiers and other unintended casualties.

I've always liked decorating my desks to adequately reflect me. A few photos from my autograph collection -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Mongolian President Natsagiin Bagabandi (because he is a completely badass Genghis Khan incarnation). Throw in American and Irish flags, a talking Rumsfeld doll, and a couple of stuffed elephants. I once erected a shrine to our buddies the French, with a "Let's Make Fun of the French" page-a-day calendar (with gems like “Joan of Arc was the last French virgin to put up a fight”) and a stuffed Pepe Le Pew. Still, it has often taken colleagues months to figure out I'm a Republican, thus spreading out the mouth-dropping and gasps.

Most often, I laugh off twerpy comments from liberal colleagues to prevent confrontations from escalating into news-desk cage matches. It's like a big, happy dysfunctional family.

Two days before the election, on All Hallow's Eve, a colleague evidently possessed by the spirit of the Left came into work railing about Kerry the Great, as I discussed the latest episode of "South Park" with another colleague -- a classic pre-election episode where P.Diddy/Puff Daddy (a.k.a. Mr. "Vote or Die") threatened to kill one of the kids, Stan, for not voting between a giant douche and a turd sandwich for the school mascot. The leftie colleague jumped in to describe a program she'd just seen on a televangelism channel, railing against "South Park" and basically every other element of modern culture.

I shrugged. "I love South Park."

"Well, your people said you shouldn't. They called Jon Stewart a communist. They called the two who make 'South Park' communists," she fired back.

"They're Libertarian," I said of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. No comment on Stewart. And why were we having this conversation? I’d been talking about a cartoon. A cartoon douche.

"Still, those are your people saying it," she continued about the TV fundamentalists. "The fundamentalists represent your people," she barked and snarled. "The Republicans!"

About now was a good time to continue discussing the finer points of the "South Park" episode with my saner colleague. But a minute later, I couldn’t resist engagement, and turned back to the colleague who was on fire over the televangelist-Republican conspiracy.

"So," I asked nonchalantly, perhaps mischievously, "why are Republicans treated like freaks in newsrooms?"

She huffed. "Oh, please. Newsrooms are not liberal. That's such a myth!"