Two Incompatible Americas
Brit conducts research among the aboriginals, tries to understand their strange ways. Open-minded UK Guardian sophisticate Linda Grant to gap-toothed Yank hillbilly Republicans: What makes you so small-minded, bigoted and stupid?
Small-town Americans have values and a lot of those values are good ones: neighbourliness, family life, a knowledge of the land and what grows in it. The other America they see on TV seems without ethics - crime, violence, drug addiction, pornography and prostitution - and they don’t want any part of it.
So clear is the divide between big-city and small-town America that one American friend said to me: “These whitebread Republicans are like children - someone has to tell them what to do and what to think, they’re incapable of independent ideas.”
The conviction by the left that the right is stupid is one of the defining and least attractive characteristics of contemporary politics. Assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is too dim to get your point is not itself a particularly brainy way to win others over to the essential correctness of your views. But it is true that to small-town Republicans the world is not a complicated place, because they have seen so little of it.
I asked a sophisticated and well-travelled Republican why he voted the way he did. He described growing up “dirt poor” in a small town in Northern California where joining the military was your sole ticket out; where the people in his family who depended on welfare stayed where they were and the ones who worked their fingers to the bone managed to make a better life for themselves. For him, joining the army led directly to an education. In fact, it led all the way to Princeton. But how, I asked him, baffled, could someone as intelligent as he is believe that George W Bush was anything but a cretin?
Because, he explained, people in small towns don’t like or trust intellectuals, particularly ones who appear to be sneering at them for their supposed stupidity. They admire a plain-speaking man; it’s what they know and what they are used to.
They always assumed Bush was a regular guy who could keep his thoughts concise.
So America is stuck. Two countries, mutually irreconcilable, who never meet each other and don’t want to, either. Who distrust each other at best, despise each other at worst. And who have absolutely no understanding of the other.
I’m sorry, my mistake. Not particularly brainy columnist didn’t actually do any fieldwork among these primitives to confirm the essential correctness of her views. She read a novel and spoke to two pals. Whole pile of bigoted, ill-informed garbage here.* The fact that this woman essentially made all this up to reflect her own biases should not detract from its fundamental truth, however. Sort of like this:
Guardian scribbler via the inestimable Andrew Bolt, whose Palin roundup informs us that even reporters claim they are embarrassed by the Palin hatchet jobs they’ve been dispatched on … I dunno, I think that’s just what they tell McCain staffers so they’ll keep talking to them.
In other Palin-bashing develoments, via Malkin, MTV piles on …
* Full disclosure: As a rightwing gun nut raised in a big city who has traveled the world extensively and possesses a mouthful of modern dentistry significantly exceeding UK standards, who happens to live among the intellectual Chardonnay sippers and even likes and trusts some of them, I found this Brit’s idiotically simplistic “two Americas” view hurtful but I’m trying to get over it. Awaiting informed opinion from across the pond on the one-third or better of the residents of my sophisticated, quiche-eating state of Massachusetts who routinely vote for knuckle-dragging Republicans.
That said, here are some heartfelt expressions of patriotism that encompass much of my trogolodytic worldview and explain why I want to glass over large parts of the world or at least subject them to Coca Cola and McDonalds:
These and more compliments of American Power and Control.
I want to treat Linda Whatshername’s thesis on conservative American thought with all the seriousness it deserves. For more on my own political thinking on this important subject: Bikini Girls with Machine Guns.
Topics: BS, Britain, bigotry, moronocy, pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:45 am on Monday, September 8, 2008
5 Responses to “Two Incompatible Americas”
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September 8th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Snobbish, snide, bigoted drivel. And since we’re all expressing opinions here, that picture of Linda Grant makes her look like somebody beat her with an ugly stick. Maybe that’s the reason for all the bile.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Ladies and gentlemen of The Guardian, I’m just a Republican. I fell on some ice and was later thawed by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes when I fly to Europe first class, I wonder, am I inside some sort of giant bird? Am I gonna be digested? I don’t know, because I’m a Republican, and that’s the way I think! When I’m courtside at a Knicks game, I wonder if the ball is some sort of food they’re fighting over. When I see my image on the security camera at the country club, I wonder, are they stealing my soul? I get so upset, I hop out of my Hummer, and run across the fairway to to the clubhouse, where I get Carlos to make me one of those martinis he’s so famous for, to soothe my primitive Republican brain. But whatever world you’re from, I do know one thing - we must do everything in our power to lower the capitol gains tax. Thank you!
(With apologies to the late great Phil Hartman and SNL.)
September 8th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 09/08/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
September 8th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Truly amazing the vituperative emotion that is conjured up by a little belief in free markets, small government, human life, and a robust national defense from those who don’t believe in any of that reich wing hooey.
Oh, and because RebeccaH brought it up first, that is one butt ugly lefty scribbler.
September 29th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Jules,
Honored to be of service. ;-)