Red vs. Blue

Having just driven 3,300 miles from Boston to LA, and passing through some of the most breathtakingly beautiful and amazingly desolate country I have ever seen (the Texas panhandle, northern New Mexico and Arizona, southeast California), I have a newfound appreciation of the red state mentality. To the people who were born, raised, lived, and will die there, what expectations are there in life? What is there to look forward to? Quite literally, there is nothing to do BUT go to church and bash liberals.

You have to give the right wing neonconservative mouthpieces credit: they understand this demographic and take full advantage of it. You can get two kinds of radio stations in the heartland of the USA: country western and conservative talk radio. Passing through a large metropolitan area such as OKC I could not even pick up an NPR news station during the 5:00 PM evening commute. I may have missed it searching through the FM spectrum, of course, but I picked up NPR in every other major metro area I went though. Even though my sampling is very small, it's clear that the neocons have done a superb job of silencing any dissenting opinion.

If liberally-minded folk want to change the political climate of the nation, they are in for a serious uphill battle. This is something I sort of understood in the abstract before, but this road trip really drove the point home in a big way. For the Americans living in the heartland, "liberal" values are simply alien. Women's rights? Gay rights? Reproductive rights? Environmental protection? I doubt that any reasonably minded person, given enough serious thought, would be opposed to that which is representative of basic human rights. The problem is that there is no frame of reference, no relevant life experience, no discourse, and no discussion. There is one way of life, and one voice of opinion.