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