{"id":166,"date":"2004-11-15T02:16:30","date_gmt":"2004-11-15T07:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=166"},"modified":"2004-11-15T02:16:30","modified_gmt":"2004-11-15T07:16:30","slug":"hurray-for-dollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=166","title":{"rendered":"Hurray for Dollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hot damn! I wonder if <a href='http:\/\/iowahawk.typepad.com\/iowahawk\/2004\/11\/blue_state_blue.html'>this<br \/>\nhere post by Iowahawk<\/a> means I&#8217;m gonna git me someplace near here<br \/>\nin 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 \/>\nbarbeque<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>Put me down as a proud purple-stater.  I like guns, but I hate<br \/>\ncountry music.  I love burnt-ends sandwiches, but I despise chewing<br \/>\ntobacco. I agree that Waffle House makes the breakfast food of the<br \/>\ngods, but I loathe fundamentalists.  I not uncommonly use &#8220;y&#8217;all&#8221;<br \/>\nrather than &#8220;you&#8221; for the second person plural because it&#8217;s clearer,<br \/>\nbut I assume people who use &#8220;y&#8217;all&#8221; for the second person<br \/>\n<em>singular<\/em> really <em>are<\/em> dumb hicks.<\/p>\n<p>Demography is not destiny.  I was born in the Yankee heart of<br \/>\nBoston, I went to an Ivy League university, I&#8217;m a fluent writer and<br \/>\nspeaker, every house I&#8217;ve lived in in the U.S. has been within a<br \/>\nhundred miles of the Atlantic, and I&#8217;ve never had a manual-labor job<br \/>\nin my life.  By all that&#8217;s stereotyped I ought to be a member in good<br \/>\nstanding of the chattering classes and the tribe of fuzzy-sweater<br \/>\nliberals, sucking up NPR and voting for Kerry like all decent<br \/>\nblue-staters were supposed to.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not quite sure how I escaped this fate.  It wasn&#8217;t by becoming<br \/>\na conservative, oh dear no.  I&#8217;m a radical Wiccan anarchist with a<br \/>\nsexual style that your average red-stater wouldn&#8217;t even know the right<br \/>\nwords to describe (yes, I&#8217;ve checked).  Right-wingers appall me<br \/>\n&mdash; most are so narrow-minded that they don&#8217;t even have a prayer<br \/>\nof understanding how narrow-minded they are.  They live inside cages<br \/>\nand never see the bars.<\/p>\n<p>So instead of repudiating my blue-state pedigree by turning into<br \/>\nsome sort of repellant young-conservative lizardoid, I grew into<br \/>\nsomeone half-blue, half-red.  My wife Cathy thinks my father&#8217;s<br \/>\ninfluence had a lot to do with that, and she&#8217;s probably got a point.<br \/>\nHe grew up hardscrabble poor in the red counties of rural central<br \/>\nPennsylvania during the Great Depression, clawed his way out to a<br \/>\nprofession in coastal blue-land with drive and brains, and married an<br \/>\nupper-class girl with the looks of a movie star.  Men like that don&#8217;t<br \/>\nfall for easy, comfortable answers in politics or anywhere else.<br \/>\nAmong the traits I inherited from him are a contrarian streak, a<br \/>\nstudied and stubborn refusal to fit into anyone&#8217;s tidy categories, and<br \/>\nsome bedrock respect for red-state virtues.<\/p>\n<p>Iowahawk ends his brilliant satire with the line &#8220;After the toilet<br \/>\nbacked up, I think he got my point&#8221;.  Whether intentionally or not, he<br \/>\nperfectly illustrates the single most important advantage of red-state<br \/>\nculture and politics.  It&#8217;s an advantage my father understood, and he<br \/>\npassed that understanding on to me.<\/p>\n<p>Here it is: your average red-state prole&#8217;s world-view may be<br \/>\nstrangely cramped, and is too often shot through with bizarre and ugly<br \/>\nsuperstitions like creationism &mdash; but within his limits he<br \/>\n<em>is<\/em> in contact with reality.  On the other hand, your average<br \/>\nelite blue-stater &mdash; insulated by wealth and a complacent<br \/>\nmainstream media and thick layers of theoretical artifice &mdash;<br \/>\nunderstands everything <em>except<\/em> reality.  Which is great if<br \/>\nwhat you need is irony or wit or skilled navigation through a maze of<br \/>\nsocial constructions, but not so useful when you need a toilet<br \/>\nfixed.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s nothing new about this dance.  Aristocrats and yeomen have<br \/>\nbeen doing it since the days when Sumer was the new kid on the block.<br \/>\nThe anti-red-state squawking now being emitted by blue-state pundits<br \/>\nin the wake of Kerry&#8217;s defeat can be summed up as a fearful cry of<br \/>\n&#8220;The peasants are revolting!&#8221;  It isn&#8217;t really about political<br \/>\ngeography but about class and class snobbery.<\/p>\n<p>And you know what?  Class snobbery pisses me off, especially when<br \/>\nthe people peddling it are vapid ninnies whose smugness about their own<br \/>\nsophistication doesn&#8217;t conceal their complete failure to get a grip<br \/>\non reality.  Apparently it pisses off Iowahawk too &mdash; his satire<br \/>\ndoesn&#8217;t conceal a dark delight in the thought of all those blue-state<br \/>\naristo parents wringing their hands.<\/p>\n<p>So, even though I&#8217;ll never be one of them, my response to<br \/>\nIowahawk&#8217;s satire is to root for the Neckies.  Being one of them by<br \/>\nbirth myself, I have long since taken the measure of the blue-state<br \/>\nelite.  They&#8217;re more interesting to hang with, they tell better jokes,<br \/>\nthey understand all the finer things in life &mdash; and it&#8217;s past<br \/>\ntime for this country&#8217;s Y&#8217;alls to be rubbing their noses in the fact<br \/>\nthat they&#8217;re mostly full of shit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hot damn! I wonder if this here post by Iowahawk means I&#8217;m gonna git me someplace near here in Pensylvay-ni-ay that can serve up a decent mess of Texas barbeque? Put me down as a proud purple-stater. I like guns, but I hate country music. I love burnt-ends sandwiches, but I despise chewing tobacco. I&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=166\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Hurray for Dollywood<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}