Years ago Paul Harvey had a radio spot called The Rest of the Story where he presented a commonly known event or personality and then after retelling it, he paused for…… the rest of the story, which would turn out to be an interesting or revelatory twist. Harvey gave a homely spin and represented heartland America.
Heartland America is what a large swath of Americans like to think of as the real America or, as Sarah Palin put it, where Real Americans live. Thinking about who uses the stereotypes of that largely imaginary region, what we would now call tropes, it turns out to tilt Right. Pondering more on that, I realized it was founded in conservative thought, back to Burke. Here’s what I mean:
When Burke told us about the horrors of the French Revolution (and I have to read Burke to make sure I’m right about this – I’ve been surprised before, my own ‘rest of the story’), he left out the rest of the story, the horrors of the Ancien Regime.
Similarly with the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik. The Chinese Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, and so on, all except the American one which is fully laid out with all its rationalizations. But wait! There is more…. the rest of the story.
A majority of Americans liked being British. They did not want to revolt. They got pushed aside. Many of them were of the upper class. Recall Thomas Jefferson in his Declaration castigating King George for promoting slavery; the slave holders were not down with that.
That was the rest of the story…….. also that many of the signers and framers were smugglers, defying British tariffs. But that also is the rest of the story. We could transpose all that to our times and the calls for law and order only when it applies to Blacks. A BLM protest is a ‘riot’ but a White Supremacy actual riot is ‘legitimate political protest’. The distinguishing mark is the skin color.