The photo in the Richmond Times-Dispatch taken at the ReOpen Virginia rally in the state capital on Wednesday looks damning. It appears to show a rabid, anti-lockdown, President Trump-supporting redneck, half-mad with inchoate rage, about to poke an innocent counterprotestor wearing a doctor’s coat in the eye with the pointy end of an American flag. In short, the classic confrontation between ignorance and science.
The photo of the redneck in question is, to say the least, unflattering. Caught in the act of leaping in the air, grimy baseball cap askew, flag on a downward trajectory, pants sagging, his too-small sweater (which once fit him “13 million, 98 thousand and 967 Budweisers ago” as one Reddit commentator opined) riding up his ample, middle-aged belly. You know the type. The gun-toting, Bible-thumping, overweight, Confederate flag-waving, Trump-voting, beer-swilling imbecile, poorly educated and probably intelligence-impaired from inbreeding and clearly consumed by hatred and prejudice.
This is where I confess that the individual described above is myself. Of course, except for the beer-swilling part, none of this description rings true — though not Budweiser, please! Rather, I drink the same locally brewed, overpriced, overproof, and undeniably tasty microbrews favored by many self-respecting beer-savoring liberals.
I don’t go on the internet much these days; it’s too full of hateful invective and weird porn. But friends who do have told me that the picture from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, posted on Reddit, has generated quite a few, shall we say, disparaging comments. I have been threatened with dismemberment and cursed by several to die painfully of COVID-19. My name should be “taken down, and remembered,” remarked one commentator, along with the names of all the other anti-lockdown protesters — perhaps to be put on a list for incarceration later in reeducation camps sponsored by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam.
But before my internment orders arrive in the mail, let me tell you a little bit about myself and why I was photographed down there in Richmond on what was a sparkling, beautiful spring day.
I am a published novelist of slender means (is there any other kind?) who had a brief run at success in the early 1990s, back when people read novels or at least mine. I’m a graduate of the University of Virginia, “Mr. Jefferson’s University” as we call it here, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, still clinging to its reputation as one of the best writing MFAs available in the country. Alas, these days, I’m forced to support myself as a minion of the service economy — or did.
I worked in the box office of a local theater that has been closed for the duration of the lockdown. To make ends meet, I’ve been doing errands (shopping, shipping, etc.) for neighbors too afraid to leave their homes. I have also volunteered with the Virginia Reserve Medical Corps and await their call, should things get worse.
But in the most important way, I’m no different from the roughly 2,000 other protesters at the rally, which consisted of roughly 600 cars each containing several people, honking and circling the state Capitol grounds, and a hundred or so on foot, waving flags at the closed gates, beyond which the state Legislature met outside, cowering under a large tent. In other words, I need to eat and pay my rent, and to do these things, I need to work.
So, what did all the crazy right-wing protesters down there really want? They want to be let out of their homes and, within reasonable limits, allowed to work again and resume their lives. Yes, there were a few pro-Trump banners waving from the circling vehicles, but the vast majority of signage played on a simple theme: “LET US WORK!”
Though the news media generally described the rally as, according to the NBC 4 nightly news in Washington, “a small demonstration consisting of protesters and anti-protesters,” it was not small, and of the anti-protesters, there were only two: the doctor and his wife, who I’m apparently in the process of sticking with my American flag in the photograph (at no time was anyone in danger of bodily injury, except maybe myself). Again, that’s two versus 2,000. Yet the media focused with great avidity on these two protesters, granting them equal time with the thousands circling and honking and the hundred or so in the street demanding the return of their livelihoods. The anti-lockdown protesters, mostly hardworking middle-class folks, were the real story of the rally. Many had driven hours to get there. Yet the two anti-protesters in the lab coats were frequently surrounded by nonsocially distancing news crews, eager to hear their story to the exclusion of all others.
Yes, there were a few of the usual gun-toting “gun nuts” present in the crowd on the street — this is Virginia, after all, where open carry is the law. But most were unarmed and anxious only to exercise their constitutional rights to free assembly and free speech. I did my best to engage as many of the participants as possible, entering into conversations with a Christian obstetrical nurse, a farmer there with his wife and four lovely children, several service employees and small business owners, and a political type running for Congress in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, concerned over the suffering of his possible future constituents under the lockdown.
None of these people can be described as rabid right-wingers in any way.
Then, soon after the Richmond Times-Dispatch photographer snapped the photo of me, things heated up a bit: The counterprotesting doctor, irritated by my counter-counterprotest slapped my arm, knocking the American flag I was waving to the ground. (I had been waving it in front of his sign, hoping to shield his reductivist message from press photographers all too eager to cover the supposed “counterprotest” led by genuine medical experts.) Heated words flew back-and-forth, and suddenly, the police intervened. They did not, however, chastise the lab-coated counterprotester for what might be described as a possible assault, but rather yours truly for my mouthiness.
More heated words were exchanged, now between me and the Richmond police, and things seemed to be sliding rapidly in the wrong direction. I was urged to calm down immediately. I countered that enthusiasm in the defense of freedom should not be subject to police intervention (or words to that effect). The cop’s jaw tightened, and I thought I saw his hand twitch toward his handcuffs. At that moment, I felt a calming presence at my shoulder: One of the “gun nuts,” a tall, steel-jawed fellow wearing a stars and stripes shirt and a 9 mm Beretta strapped to his belt stepped in and mercifully pulled me out of there. He resembles, in my memory, that actor who played Marshall Matt Dillon in the old TV show Gunsmoke.
“You’ve made your point, my friend,” he said quietly when he’d gotten me off to a safe distance. “That situation was not going to end well for you.”
“OK, thanks,” I said, blinking up at him, relieved and slightly stunned.
“And thank you for lending your passion to our cause,” he nodded, before walking off into the sunset, spurs jangling (metaphorically speaking).
What was that cause, exactly? A few moments later, a foreign journalist asked for an interview and helped me clarify that question. He was with AFP, he said.
“Agence France-Presse?” I said in my best French. I grew up in Paris in the 1970s, when my father worked at the American Embassy on the Place de la Concorde. I can still speak the language, at least in short bursts, with what they call l’accent du Seizieme — the patois of the posh arrondissement where I went to school.
The AFP correspondent gaped at me for a moment, astonished. Could it be possible that one of these “cou rouges” could actually speak French? The interview proceeded in fits and starts in his language, which I now paraphrase:
Why were we protesting, he asked. Because the people circling here with their “Let Us Work!” signs were suffering, I answered; because soon they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills or buy food; because a quarantine in which the bottom three-quarters of the population, economically speaking, (including almost all the brown and black people and poor whites and myself and my daughter who packs delivery orders at Whole Foods) were risking their lives so the upper quarter might quarantine in snug safety.
Because, in other words, the quarantine was a fake quarantine. Because the numbers of the sick were declining, and the hospitals had not been overwhelmed as predicted by the fearmongering “experts.” And because the “cure” might very well prove more harmful to the country than the virus itself.
There was also, I added, an existential reason. I saw his French ears perk up at this: Ah oui? C’est quoi?
To quote the Southern writer and philosopher Walker Percy, “I refer to the general situation in which sovereignty is surrendered to a class of privileged knowers” — experts such as the doctor and his wife in the lab coats, the latter holding up a condescending sign that read, “Sign up here to die for the economy.” I signed up to die the day I was born, I told the Frenchman. There are those among the terrified, work-from-home elite who genuinely believe they’re going to live forever.
The protesters I spoke to on that beautiful, sunny day in Richmond were not irresponsible merchants of death, set on returning to their outside lives at any cost. Indeed, most advocated reasonable restrictions: temporary cancellations of mass gatherings such as baseball games and rock concerts, appropriate personal protective equipment worn in public, and other measures. The protesters in Richmond were just desperate folks, in search of an end to a lockdown that is actually killing them.
Robert Girardi is a novelist and nonfiction writer from Springfield, Virginia. He can be reached at [email protected].
