Green State
I have it on good authority that the citizens of Red State Country (or, if you’re Jeff Gannon with a lousy printer — Green State Country) curse more than their Blue State counterparts. If you don’t believe me, please consult your “redneck” and “urbane sophisticate” stereotypes.
Or consider the lattee-drinking conservatives, who fly from New York to Washington Los Angeles, staring at the window at Flyover Country, marvelling at the Wal-Marts and the Nascars and the farming and the ranching and the religiosity and the simple values that need to be exalted off the rooftops.
I’m thinking of this in context with the supposed meaning behind the Election of 2004. The “Values Voter”s, an idea that you have to wonder hasn’t been squashed a bit as of late. If you notice — the Republican’s two Great Political Attempts post-election haven’t taken them anywhere. Social Security Privitization has stalled, and proven unpopular — there’s your Club for Growth Grover Norquist contingent stalling. (In the meantime, the one party state changes the Bankruptcy law to make it easier for corporations to get by and harder for regular citizens to, but we’ll ignore that sort of stuff for the moment.) And more directly, the Religious Right who have supposedly been declared the most mainstream Americans off of that last election has been proven a bit less than overwhelming by the whole Terri Schiavo fiasco.
There’s a point to which a Democratic Party ends up buying the hype a little too high, and loses sight of the situation. Excise sin, find Jesus, and obscure yet more differences between the parties, and you will find the road the redemption.
But the mythology of the most Republican part of the nation, the West, brings us to an opposing conclusion. Cowboys run around with their herds of horses. They then take their off days and booze and pick up a hooker and gamble away their money. Where is the religiosity there?
Consult the “Montana Example”, the modest bright light on a dark Election day for the letter “D”, particularly within the rural red states. Aside from electing a Democratic governor and a Democratic state legislature, the state legalized medicinal marijuana. A great day for Montana pot-heads? Who knows? The new governor, while running, didn’t touch the Initiative with a ten-foot pill (I imagine it to have been passed with a coalition of Libertarian-minded conservatives and counter-culture types), to avoid the charge of McGovernism, but the message is delivered.
The tranjectory of the Montana politics within the framework of our national politics: a rebuke of the Patriot Act. A request to bring Montana’s National Guard soldiers home from Iraq so, where they will be dealing with the summer’s forest fire season, traditionally the domain of… your National Guard. (Actually, come to think of it, that’s “Homeland Security” right there!)
Beyond that, there’s the idea that environmental issues as connected to hunting issues, and the prototype for your Red-state elected Democrat begins to emerge… (a bit of the “Get off My Land” aesthetic thrown in) at least in the West. I don’t have a clue what the letter “D” can do to churn itself around through the South.
Some conversations with my dad. He receives a batch of material from the State Employees Union. “They always support the Democrat, no matter what.” My response, “Interesting about their support for NAFTA-supporting Clinton.” “Weird how that works.”
Or, “The Democrats sure aren’t any good at explaining why you should vote for them these days.”
That’s sort of a swipe at Kerry’s obfuscation regarding the war. I came out and said that there was no difference between Bush and Kerry on where Iraq is going… and, to tell you the truth, I still believe that.
You burrow all that in with the “What’s the Matter With Kansas” thesis and a basic attack on the DLC, who took the Democratic Party out of the barren landscape the party found themselves in in 1984, and delivered them to the barren landscape the party finds themselves in in 2004. (Except there’s a peculiar sideswipe with which I’m going to explore in one of my next three posts.)
One last commentary, found circa after the election, a Montana voter saying: “I think we’d vote for a Democrat who forthrightly supports gay marriage, if they don’t pussy-foot around the issue.”
This is basically a case of Attitude.
As for gays and lesbians in the frontier… hell… Lynne Cheney wrote a book about it! Today? Maybe convert the issue in with the gun issue, and declare that you will not take away the right of every gay and lesbian their godgiven Constitution right to own firearms? I don’t know.
For the moment, just consult Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin…