Following President Bush’s stunningly incoherent
press conference, his
media acolytes reintroduced one of their most
useful fictions: the
decadent, blue-state "Beltway elite" vs. salt
of-the-earth, red-state
"real Americans." Based upon TV electoral maps
that colored Al Gore
states in 2000 blue, Bush states red, it’s a
theme GOP imagineers have
exploited since Newt Gingrich pronounced Democrats
"enemies of normal
Americans." Even his admirers had to notice that
Bush had no answer for
the deeply embarrassing question of why he can’t
testify before the 9/11
Commission without Dick Cheney holding his hand.
In the Weekly Standard,
however, Fred Barnes invoked geography. The president’s
real audience,
see, "is outside the Beltway-the mass—and he
does surprisingly well in
appealing to it. How does he do it? By being
plain spoken and amiable
and down to earth. By sounding more like Midland,
Texas, than like
Georgetown or Chevy Chase."
Ah, the heartland. After the Supreme Court made
Bush president, see,
conservatives had to deal with the uncomfortable
fact that he’d lost the
popular vote. So they seized upon his popularity
in counties containing
more livestock than people. No more lampooning
what H. L. Mencken
called the idiotic hallucinations of the cow
states. GOP thinkers contrasted
the humble faith and patriotism of the American
yeoman to the snobbery
and intellectualism of the liberal "elite."
New York Times columnist David Brooks helped with
an article in the
December 2001 Atlantic titled "Are We Really
One Country? A Report from
the Red and Blue America." Brooks, who effects
a thoughtful, academic
demeanor as a PBS commentator, traveled to a
rural county in Pennsylvania
(actually a blue state) like a 19th century British
explorer visiting the Hottentots.
"We in the coastal metro Blue areas," he confessed,
"read more books and
attend more plays than the people in the Red
heartland. We’re more
sophisticated and cosmopolitan.... But don’t
ask us, please, what life in Red
America is like. We don’t know. We don’t know
who Tim LaHaye and
Jerry B. Jenkins are... . We don’t know what
James Dobson says on his
radio program, which is listened to by millions.
We don’t know about
Reba and Travis.... Very few of us know what
goes on in Branson, Missouri,
even though it has seven million visitors a year,
or could name even five
NASCAR drivers.... We don’t know how to shoot
or clean a rifle....
We don’t know what soybeans look like growing
in a field."
As Kansas author Thomas Frank has pointed out,
the top three
soybean-producing states—llinois, Iowa and Minnesota—all
voted for Gore.
It’s a strange map of America that leaves Iowa
out of the "heartland."
Me, I’ve hauled several generations of stubborn
beagles out of Arkansas
soybean fields on rabbit-hunting trips. Would
that be Travis Tritt or Randy
Travis that Brooks is talking about? Completely
different breeds of cat.
Last I heard, Reba McEntire was starring on Broadway,
which blows
almost as big a hole in the "two Americas" theme
as the soybean nonsense.
But no, I don’t care for Branson or any "sport"
involving gasoline engines.
As for LaHaye and Jenkins, I recognize them as
the authors of the "Left
Behind" series of best-selling "Christian" novels
based upon apocalyptic
themes from the Book of Revelation not very different
from the doomsday
"prophecies" of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians:
The end is near,
and events in the daily newspaper specifically
the Middle East prefigure
Armageddon. It’s a mish-mash of crackpot theology
and action/adventure
melodrama concocted to keep turnstiles clicking
at cineplexes everywhere.
How seriously people take this stuff is questionable.
I expect most still invest
in life insurance even as they giddily imagine
the end of the world. How it
makes them more grounded in reality than Democrats,
I cannot imagine.
(Shoot, many are Democrats.) I doubt Brooks knows,
either; he’s just
patronizing the rubes for political advantage.
At the Ann Coulter-Michael Savage end of the right-wing
spectrum,
moreover, the cartoonish "two countries" theme
gets ugly. Democrats are
essentially accused of the crimes of the Jews
as Hitler saw them: atheism,
moral relativism, communism, sexual license,
physical cowardice and lack
of patriotism. Anybody who thinks I exaggerate
should visit freerepublic.com
or read my e-mail.
Especially next week, because I’ve got an impertinent
question. During
his recent "60 Minutes" appearance, reporter
Bob Woodward was asked if
Bush consulted his father about Iraq. "I asked
the president about this,"
Woodward said. "And President Bush said, ‘Well,
no,’ and then he got
defensive about it.... Then he said something
that really struck me.
He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father
to appeal to for advice.
The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms
of strength.’ And then
he said, ‘ There’s a higher father that I appeal
to. ’" My question: Is
Bush pandering to the "heartland," or is he really
that far gone?
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.