The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

Glock under the left arm. Two flags and on the porch inside, a Confederate windsock. What was I doing on his lawn? I explained my mission. I asked for his name. “Just a guy,” he said. An Average Guy. One with another gun in his right pocket, a tiny .380 that almost fit in his palm. One you could see, one you couldn’t. He was a city man, Milwaukeean, native-born. Nothing to do with Confederate anything, he said of the red flag, which belonged to his stepson. heritage not hate, it read, though in the dank heat only the latter word could be seen. He recited the right-wing rosary—borders, crime, stolen elections, stealing our guns, “our” guns—and added his own variation to my growing toxic bouquet of reproductive disinformation: man traps. The dark marriage plot. Abortion as “birth control,” he thought, allowed women too much leverage. He pitched his voice high: “ ‘I got pregnant because I wanted this guy to marry me’ ”—so many men I met discussed abortion by imitating voices they considered feminine—“ ‘and now he’s found out I’m pregnant and he doesn’t want to marry me. So I’m going to have an abortion done. Until the next guy comes along that I can maybe chicken into marrying me because I’ll get pregnant with his baby.’ ”