I cringed listening to the Gianforte tape for all the normal human and patriotic reasons. But also because it conforms to the Trumpian flyover rube stereotype that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the bookish, movie-mad, bleeding-heart tenor of my Montana college town years participating in what used to be called the “peace movement.” Which sounds so quaint and old-fashioned now that this country is so militaristic we will name a Navy ship after the former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

But back in my youth protesting the Iran-contra deal at the Federal Building, riding my bike 13 miles to hear Jesse Jackson speak during the ’88 primary, or handing out mimeographs denouncing the Reagan administration’s military spending in grocery store parking lots, my fellow ineffective progressives and I did not see ourselves as a bunch of beatnik outliers. We saw ourselves as carrying on the longstanding nonviolent tradition of Montana’s Jeannette Rankin, the only member of the United States House of Representatives who voted against entering both World War I and World War II and lived long enough to demonstrate against the conflict in Vietnam.

The polls were still open Thursday night when I went to Willson Auditorium to Bozeman High School’s choir concert to see my nephew perform. I came up in the same excellent public school music program, playing in the very same hall. All my discipline, my work ethic, much of what I know about perseverance, teamwork, camaraderie, world history and the G-sharp minor scale I learned playing in this district’s bands and orchestras. Everything I heard about Russians in my Cold War childhood was shaded with hatred and fear and yet playing Tchaikovsky was never not a joy. Every time I come across one of these white supremacists that seem to be coming out of the woodwork I think, here’s a person who never had to improvise a trumpet solo on a melody by Duke Ellington.

And, right around the time the special election polls were closing, the tenors’ choir hammed it up on a happy-go-lucky version of “Louie Louie” and I was pretty sure the Republic would endure.

Mr. Gianforte, by the way, lives in Bozeman, but chose to send his children to a Christian private school, which strikes me as criminal when the public schools are pretty good but, unlike the thing with the reporter, not technically illegal. I’m guessing he wanted his children to be taught according to his beliefs — apparently that evolution is a myth and humans coexisted with dinosaurs. Which means that a state that has been at the forefront of paleontology for decades thanks to the local hero Jack Horner, the first person to discover dinosaur eggs in the Western Hemisphere, will be represented in Congress by the guy who donated the T-Rex on display at a cheesy creationist museum in Glendive.

Still, I have questions. Would the early voters who cast absentee ballots for Gianforte well before his hissy fit have changed their minds? Will the readers of this East Coast newspaper ever stop picturing Montanans as unhinged, authoritarian hotheads and remember that some of us are Lynch-loving, Lebowski-quoting, lily-livered lefties who have a postelection tradition of walking over to the Jeannette Rankin statue in front of the post office and putting our “I Voted” stickers on the heel of her boot even though we can see how that could technically be construed as littering?

And finally, will Laura Palmer’s cousin Maddy from Missoula pop up somewhere on the space-time continuum of the new “Twin Peaks”? Because, like the vast majority of Montanans, she was nice.

This Op-Ed has been updated to reflect news developments.