Hurray for Dollywood
<p>Hot damn! I wonder if <a href='http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2004/11/blue_state_blue.html'>this<br />
here post by Iowahawk</a> means I&#8217;m gonna git me someplace near here<br />
in Pensylvay-ni-ay that can serve up a decent mess of <a href='http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?m=200207#79'>Texas<br />
barbeque</a>?</p>
<p>Put me down as a proud purple-stater.  I like guns, but I hate<br />
country music.  I love burnt-ends sandwiches, but I despise chewing<br />
tobacco. I agree that Waffle House makes the breakfast food of the<br />
gods, but I loathe fundamentalists.  I not uncommonly use &#8220;y&#8217;all&#8221;<br />
rather than &#8220;you&#8221; for the second person plural because it&#8217;s clearer,<br />
but I assume people who use &#8220;y&#8217;all&#8221; for the second person<br />
<em>singular</em> really <em>are</em> dumb hicks.</p>
<p>Demography is not destiny.  I was born in the Yankee heart of<br />
Boston, I went to an Ivy League university, I&#8217;m a fluent writer and<br />
speaker, every house I&#8217;ve lived in in the U.S. has been within a<br />
hundred miles of the Atlantic, and I&#8217;ve never had a manual-labor job<br />
in my life.  By all that&#8217;s stereotyped I ought to be a member in good<br />
standing of the chattering classes and the tribe of fuzzy-sweater<br />
liberals, sucking up NPR and voting for Kerry like all decent<br />
blue-staters were supposed to.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not quite sure how I escaped this fate.  It wasn&#8217;t by becoming<br />
a conservative, oh dear no.  I&#8217;m a radical Wiccan anarchist with a<br />
sexual style that your average red-stater wouldn&#8217;t even know the right<br />
words to describe (yes, I&#8217;ve checked).  Right-wingers appall me<br />
&mdash; most are so narrow-minded that they don&#8217;t even have a prayer<br />
of understanding how narrow-minded they are.  They live inside cages<br />
and never see the bars.</p>
<p>So instead of repudiating my blue-state pedigree by turning into<br />
some sort of repellant young-conservative lizardoid, I grew into<br />
someone half-blue, half-red.  My wife Cathy thinks my father&#8217;s<br />
influence had a lot to do with that, and she&#8217;s probably got a point.<br />
He grew up hardscrabble poor in the red counties of rural central<br />
Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, clawed his way out to a<br />
profession in coastal blue-land with drive and brains, and married an<br />
upper-class girl with the looks of a movie star.  Men like that don&#8217;t<br />
fall for easy, comfortable answers in politics or anywhere else.<br />
Among the traits I inherited from him are a contrarian streak, a<br />
studied and stubborn refusal to fit into anyone&#8217;s tidy categories, and<br />
some bedrock respect for red-state virtues.</p>
<p>Iowahawk ends his brilliant satire with the line &#8220;After the toilet<br />
backed up, I think he got my point&#8221;.  Whether intentionally or not, he<br />
perfectly illustrates the single most important advantage of red-state<br />
culture and politics.  It&#8217;s an advantage my father understood, and he<br />
passed that understanding on to me.</p>
<p>Here it is: your average red-state prole&#8217;s world-view may be<br />
strangely cramped, and is too often shot through with bizarre and ugly<br />
superstitions like creationism &mdash; but within his limits he<br />
<em>is</em> in contact with reality.  On the other hand, your average<br />
elite blue-stater &mdash; insulated by wealth and a complacent<br />
mainstream media and thick layers of theoretical artifice &mdash;<br />
understands everything <em>except</em> reality.  Which is great if<br />
what you need is irony or wit or skilled navigation through a maze of<br />
social constructions, but not so useful when you need a toilet<br />
fixed.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s nothing new about this dance.  Aristocrats and yeomen have<br />
been doing it since the days when Sumer was the new kid on the block.<br />
The anti-red-state squawking now being emitted by blue-state pundits<br />
in the wake of Kerry&#8217;s defeat can be summed up as a fearful cry of<br />
&#8220;The peasants are revolting!&#8221;  It isn&#8217;t really about political<br />
geography but about class and class snobbery.</p>
<p>And you know what?  Class snobbery pisses me off, especially when<br />
the people peddling it are vapid ninnies whose smugness about their own<br />
sophistication doesn&#8217;t conceal their complete failure to get a grip<br />
on reality.  Apparently it pisses off Iowahawk too &mdash; his satire<br />
doesn&#8217;t conceal a dark delight in the thought of all those blue-state<br />
aristo parents wringing their hands.</p>
<p>So, even though I&#8217;ll never be one of them, my response to<br />
Iowahawk&#8217;s satire is to root for the Neckies.  Being one of them by<br />
birth myself, I have long since taken the measure of the blue-state<br />
elite.  They&#8217;re more interesting to hang with, they tell better jokes,<br />
they understand all the finer things in life &mdash; and it&#8217;s past<br />
time for this country&#8217;s Y&#8217;alls to be rubbing their noses in the fact<br />
that they&#8217;re mostly full of shit.</p>
