A small town liberal

“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” _{– G. K. Chesterton}

Someone once described my politics by saying, “Howell, you’re not really liberal or conservative, you’re just contrarian.” I think that’s true, because a lot of my friends over the years have been big city conservatives and small town liberals. In other words, contrarians.

When I think of a small town liberal, the person that comes to mind is someone who knows that he’s something of an outcast, but also feels lucky to live where he does and wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else. He has visited, and may have once lived in, New York or Chicago. His old friends there stay in touch, but he has no desire to ever move back to a big city. He may be an atheist, but he would never lecture his small town neighbors, 90% of whom go to church regularly.

The Fairhope I remember had quite a few people like this – genuine “live and let live” types. They loved the town, and the town welcomed and valued its eccentrics.

My mother, Dorothy Howell Gibbens, was a small town liberal and a contrarian…

One of my earliest memories was of her riveted to the television during the Watergate hearings. She called me once when I was out of the country, just to vent about George W. Bush and the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. My mother voted for the last time in 2016, just before she passed away. It was a loudly and proudly cast absentee ballot for Hillary.

On our living room wall is a signed and numbered print that my mother had of Johnny Matassa’s Bar in the French Quarter…

That bar is famous for being the starting point of Southern Decadence, the biggest drag queen parade in New Orleans. Dottie Gibbens counted among her oldest friends several marchers in that parade. I once carried back to Louisiana a small bottle of glitter, with instructions to sprinkle it on the grave, in Opelousas, of one of her dearest friends lost to AIDS.

And yet, I am certain that she would have rolled her eyes and ruthlessly mocked the “Color Fairhope With Pride” event. She would have found it sanctimonious, grating, and worst of all, tedious. Sanctimonious because it carried the air of a self-righteous lecture, as if the town needed moral instruction. Grating because it would upset her older, more religious neighbors, whom she genuinely cared about. And tedious because it was a watered-down knockoff of Southern Decadence.

Dottie (or Dootsie to her family and childhood friends) moved to Fairhope in 1978 because she liked it. It didn’t need improving. She knew where she was going and she knew what she was leaving behind. She could have stayed in New Orleans, or moved to Atlanta, but she wanted to live here, as a small town liberal. Fairhope had no need for drag queens, Johnny Matassa’s was just three short hours away.

I miss her and wish we had more like her.

That Chesterton quote at the top of this post is one of my favorites, and bears quoting in full…

“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

I’m fairly certain that if Dottie and everyone in the Colony Cemetery were given the vote next month, I’d win in a landslide.