A Personal Farewell to Arms

Just before I turned 19, my country put a rifle in my hands and taught me how to use it. As an inexperienced city boy, I eventually learned how to unbolt it, release the barrel from the stock and remove the metal innards. Putting it back together was torture but, after a while, my hands took over even as my mind went blank.

Toward the end of basic training, as recruits sat on khaki blankets in a large hall, a sergeant ordered us to take apart our rifles and reassemble them in one minute--with our eyes closed.

As he counted down, I managed to pull out and put together a few pieces, but time was almost gone and I could hear disapproving footsteps and I knew the non-commissioned officers were shaking their heads. Sitting up, the wooden rifle stock between my legs, I fumbled to fit the barrel to it and slam home the bolt.

Just at the count of sixty, it all came together and I felt an overwhelming whoosh inside my thighs. At the age of 19, I was having my first conscious orgasm in carnal knowledge of a Garand M-1 rifle.

Three years later, after carrying my new friend through France, Germany and Austria without shooting anyone face to face, I turned it in but brought home a souvenir pistol taken from a German officer.

It remained on a closet shelf, wrapped and unloaded, for years until my children were old enough to start showing curiosity about it.

Forty years ago, I used my Army training to disassemble the weapon and then take a long walk through Manhattan streets, dropping parts of it into a dozen garbage bins more than a mile apart.

Somehow I've managed to keep my family safe without firearms ever since.

Small-Town, Small-Time Politics

By now, Barack Obama has learned to avoid sociological commentary during a presidential campaign, after unleashing the Clinton-McCain attack dogs with his observations at a San Francisco fund-raiser.

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest," he said, "the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

McCain's spokesman pounced: "It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking. It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."

Hillary Clinton was shocked, shocked and evoked her own Lincolnesque, Annie Oakley childhood, recalling how her father taught her how to shoot when she was a young girl and her faith as "the faith of my parents and my grandparents,” presumably unlike that of you-know-who's Muslim forebears.

The Clinton and McCain little houses on the prairie in Chappaqua and upscale Arizona are a rebuke to the Obamas' elitist life style in Chicago and should serve as a reminder to the candidate to stay in touch with the realities that voters face every day.

No matter how bad things get in Bush America, it's not a good idea to knock guns or God, especially with Charlton Heston still warm in his grave.