Ray "Moose" Dutey in front of the Ironton, Ohio, courthouse, where he's worked for 39 years.   (Photo: Shelby Lee Adams)

Told this, Sheri blushed. “Pastor Roy said that? That’s very flattering. Well, he might be right.”

But outside of working on beating out the hated Hillary, what did Sheri plan to do when she came to New York? We were talking about it over steak-and-portobello fajitas at Chili’s in Ormond with Sheri’s mom, Reatha, who will accompany her daughter to the convention. A friendly, charming woman in her forties who bakes a heck of a banana bread, Reatha hasn’t been to New York either. “The closest we got was driving by. We were going 60 miles an hour but still locked the doors and windows.” This time, Sheri and Reatha agreed, would probably be more fun.

This opinion was shared by several of Sheri’s friends who joined us for dinner after Bible class. Proud that Sheri would represent them at the convention, several noted how instructive it was to hear Pastor Tommy talk about Christian persecution in light of the massive protests likely to greet President Bush in New York. “He’ll be the underdog, that’s for sure,” one said. Beyond that, there were a lot of suggestions about what Sheri and Reatha should do in the Big Apple. While the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty were pretty cool, everyone agreed the city’s number No. 1 attraction was ground zero.

“Right,” Sheri said. “That place belongs to all Americans.”

This was the commentary that tried the resolve of even the most committed New York City missionaries. Because I didn’t feel like ground zero belonged to “all Americans,” certainly not the sort of “all-Americans” who took it as a moral imperative to keep George Bush in the White House. Ground zero belonged to New York, to the people who died there and their families, to those who rode the F train every morning and never once looked at the skyline without noting the absence of those not particularly beloved buildings looming over the Brooklyn Bridge.

It was a question everyone asked out here: Where were you that day? I had a compelling answer, or at least one people usually find compelling. Because I was there. Not when the planes hit, or when the buildings fell, but a couple hours later, when, in the horror and confusion, no one kept me from walking through the twisted rubble, right to the pile of dust that would come to be called ground zero. “Where are the buildings? Where are the people?” I asked a weary firefighter. “Under your shoe,” was the answer.

I told my WTC story to the delegates because—more than what restaurant to eat in or what play to see—this seemed to be what they really wanted to know about New York. Reliving that day is always emotional for me, and hearing about it was emotional for the delegates. If there was any real bond between us, it started there, as legitimate as it was that day.

Yet I begrudged them their emotion, their sense of outrage that 9/11 had been an attack on them, too, a thousand miles from the half-empty firehouse of Squad One. Perhaps it was provincial—should only Hawaiians have been pissed about Pearl Harbor?—but it bothered me that 9/11 had redefined the city in the minds of those who hitherto would have agreed with John Rocker’s assessment of the 7 train.

It has been declared sacred ground, a place of pilgrimage, separate from the real city. For many, Republican delegates certainly included, ground zero has acquired the patina of a Revelations-style Valley of Decision, with the steel girder “cross” found in the wreckage taken as proof of where God’s allegiance lies in the War on Terror. Don’t they know that cross is a fireman’s cross, a cop’s cross, an ironworker’s cross—a Democratic cross, if it’s any kind of cross at all?

Thinking about it was enough to make you shake your head, yet again, at the audacity of Bush’s bringing his convention here, so close to the anniversary of that day. Like he imagined he was really invited.

On the other hand, wasn’t it sheer bad manners to do anything but say “thanks” when someone like Wes Rice asserted, “I think everyone in the country became a New Yorker that day”?

Then again, Wes Rice, a delegate from Zephyr Cove, Nevada, on the shore of Lake Tahoe, and his wife, Eileen, also a delegate, are another kind of Republican.

“I’m a Republican because my father would roll over in his grave if I wasn’t,” says Eileen, who works as a nurse in the local emergency room and has never had a problem making herself heard even if she is only five feet tall. It was her orphaned dad, a man who pressed his pants underneath flophouse mattresses so he could keep looking for work even while hoboing around the country (later becoming an electrical engineer), who taught her the value of self-sufficiency, Eileen said. This was what the Republican Party was really about, Eileen declared.

True political conviction came not from handed-down ideology, or some loudmouth rant on the radio, but from life experience, Eileen said. Back when she was working at the Arcadia Methodist Hospital east of L.A., “they brought in two victims of Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. These were elderly ladies, dismembered. One had a pentagram carved into her leg. I didn’t know how I felt about the death penalty, but then I knew: Richard Ramirez had to die. Even now, thinking of him living a fat life in prison with new teeth paid for by tax dollars sets me off.”

Politics was about “trying to stay in the real world,” agreed Wes Rice, a large, wry-humored man of 61, who spent 28 years in the Pasadena, California, Police Department, many as chief of detectives, and who now pilots a patrol boat on the lake for the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department. To this end, Wes’s most difficult task as chairman of the Douglas County (population: 44,000) Republican Party is “beating back the single-issuers . . . mostly the anti-abortion people.”