Republican-Americans

“Okay,” I said.

He held his hands about six inches apart.

“Then you wrap it around a piece of lead pipe, about this big.”

I knew where this was going.

“Then,” he went on, “if anyone gives you any trouble . . . Whack!”

I spent four years here, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and never took the man’s advice–never needed to, in fact. But I thought of him last week, as I read and heard about the nasty way in which some New Yorkers greeted the visiting Republican delegates. In some stories, protesters waited outside Midtown hotels, harassing the delegates on their way to dinner. In others, Republicans were booed and jeered as they walked the streets. Sometimes they were pushed around.

Usually dressed in hinterland casual, the delegates were easy to identify. According to the Times, one was punched in the face. Others were spat on. On Wednesday, as two colleagues left Madison Square Garden, they were joined for several blocks by an angry man in T-shirt and shorts who shouted, “Republicans, go home!”

It was always thus. New Yorkers like to think of their city as a tolerant one, but it is no such thing. Each new immigrant group makes its way through the maze of streets and smells and languages unloved and alone. The Republicans last week were no different.

For elaboration, turn to Harpo Marx, who once wrote a book about the city, a reedy volume titled Harpo Speaks . . . about New York, in which he described the immigrant’s dilemma. “The worst thing you could do was run from Other Streeters,” Marx wrote. “I learned never to leave my block without some kind of a boodle in my pocket–a dead tennis ball, an empty thread spool, a penny, anything.” Harpo came to accept his situation. “It was all part of the endless fight for recognition of foreigners in the process of becoming Americans.”

Republicans are already Americans. But in New York, they are Other Streeters.

They left too soon to assimilate successfully, I think, which is a shame. There are Republicans who live here, of course, but one likes to imagine what would happen if they all migrated to the same few blocks in SoHo or the East Village, and then, joined by their red state brothers and sisters, formed a vibrant immigrant community. (Staten Island doesn’t count.)

Travel guides would point business professionals to the corner of Goldwater and Hamilton streets, where you could eat tasty barbeque and shop for books on the gold standard. There would be the occasional scuffle, to be sure, perhaps over the construction of a giant statue of Ronald Reagan overlooking the East River, and yet for the most part the Republican-Americans would slide into the easy anonymity of New York, and invite other New Yorkers to spend lazy summer evenings beneath a tree in Rudolph W. Giuliani Park. Zell Miller would feel right at home.

Yet the Republicans have left, and with them the hecklers, and with them, in turn, the bitterness that plagued the streets. And Republicans who live here will melt into the background din of the city, their elephant pins set aside for another day, the toothy smiles they flashed at members of the Missouri delegation replaced with the city pedestrian’s glassy, half-vacant gaze, which sees everything but acknowledges nothing.

Every now and then, when I grew bored with work, I liked to walk from my building at 116th Street and Broadway to Sixth Avenue and Carmine Street in the West Village. It is a walk of about seven miles. I feel sorry for the Republican delegates, who, sequestered in their Midtown hotels this week, probably didn’t take such walks. If they had done so unmolested, they would have taken in the great spires in awe, smelled the “gassy air” that Saul Bellow writes of in Seize the Day, walked over the “sawdust footprints,” and, like so many other immigrant New Yorkers, joined the

Matthew Continetti