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Superior, Nebraska: Somewhere “Out There”
As mentioned previously, I am a son of Superior, Nebraska. In fact, I am a grandson. 
Here is a picture of where my grandparents lived for nearly 50 years. It was conveniently situated a block from my house–very handy for running off to when you’ve gotten yourself in trouble. A soft hug and a piece of candy from Gram’s green apple candy dish could soothe any wound.
It is one of the Victorian homes on the Lady Vestey Tour of homes–part of the Lady Vestey Festival. Or, as I call it, The Lady Vestey Festy. Gram’s house was a dandy but it doesn’t hold a candle to what her neighbor Willie Miller has done to restore the beautiful Kendall house (pictured below.) For the Victorian tour, it is positively iconic. 
The festival is one of the ways Superior sought to breathe life back into the town after the closure of its biggest employers: the cement plant and the cheese plant. Mozzarella, in case you’re wondering.
I worked several summers at the cheese plant to earn money for college. It was a great job, except for the time I nearly chopped my hand off in the cheese box packaging machine.
Tendon severed. Lesson learned: don’t put your hand in the area of the machine that says “Keep Hands Free.”
I have many fond remembrances of my boyhood in Superior. It was, in many ways, Mayberry and American Graffiti rolled into one.
Denis Boyles has a lot of good memories as well. He folds his recollections neatly into Superior, Nebraska, a book that Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard describes as “hilarious and beautifully written.”
Ferguson nails it when he says that the book manages to be “several things at once: memoir, travelogue, narrative history, and love letter. It’s also a brief for a subtler and simpler way of seeing the world than you’ll find on either side of the culture war.”
During his youth, Boyles lived in Kansas City, and later in California, but spent his summers visiting his grandparents and extended family in the rolling hills of northern Kansas–just across the river from here:
If you divided the great red sea of American voters that stretches from one blue coast to the other and stood on the dry ground in the middle, you’d be on the north bank of the Republican River looking down Central Avenue, the wide, dusty main street of Superior, Nebraska, population 2,055.
So begins Boyles’ Superior, Nebraska. Like most of Red State America, Superior is somewhere “out there” to Blue Staters.
The seeds for Boyles’ book were moistened by the comments dripping from the lips of Blue Staters after George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004. Like the majority of Americans, Boyles had voted for Bush–but with some reluctance. Boyles writes in Chapter One: “Out Where?”:
I figured a president leading a nation into a very complicated war should be capable of a few Saint Crispin’s Day moments without needing a fire truck and a bullhorn as props. The trouble was, John Kerry was all props and no play. He thought the country should swallow his “reporting for duty” jive and fall in line behind him and his weird zillionaire wife while they pretended to relive the anti-war movement’s glory days and also, you know, save the poor and some seals . . . . It was stretching it, to me, to call Bush the best of a bad choice. But it seemed a snap to call Kerry the worst.
To most of rural America, however, Bush was just fine. This stunned most people in the big cities (where they know better) and on the coasts (where everything’s better):
. . . [T]o a lot of easterners, the election defied comprehension. After all, for weeks, months, years, hadn’t the truth been obvious? Had all those thousands of big media reporters, editors, and columnists, the best writers in America, the best minds, just been wasting their time? Had they not worked tirelessly—almost selflessly, really—creating a simple narrative that was as easy to understand as the label on a bottle of Perrier? Left = tolerant. Right = cruel. Howard Dean?
Dick Cheney?
By now everybody should have been on the same page! In fact, the whole effort had been brought to the level of art during the campaign. Even the Boss campaigned for Kerry.
So why hadn’t all those farmers gotten the message in 2004? Or, as one British newspaper’s headline whimsically pondered, “How can 59 million people be so dumb?”
So at four in the afternoon I started typing this, what I hoped would be an explanation of why Kansans and Nebraskans voted as they do. My explanation wasn’t going to be the only one, that’s for sure: Over the next days and weeks, the 2004 election would be “analyzed”—to put it gently—by journalists, pundits, and ordinary left-wing types.
Their incredulity blended with hysteria and spread until it was everywhere: cartoon maps of America with big inland seas of dumbness; Internet rants; sociological studies. I was on the phone again, this time talking to a New Yorker toiling in the sweatshops of the global lit biz. I mentioned the 59-million-dumb-people headline.
“Yes,” she enthusiastically agreed, “that’s what I’d like to know. Really, the only reason I can think of that all those people out there vote like they do is that they’re dumb. Can there be another reason? Isn’t what it comes down to is that they’re just stupid?” By “out there,” she meant that big pile of red states filled with illiterates, Jesusland, the heart of political darkness.
As it happens, “out there” is a fairly precise measurement describing the distance from where you stand to where all knowledge disappears and all sense evaporates.
Superior–and most of the rest of America–is “out there” to those in metropolitan (or should we say “cosmopolitan”?) America. Through first-rate reporting on the impact of WalMart to historical reporting on the orpan trains, Denis Boyles does a great job of bringing this faraway place “closer” to his readers.
More to come . . . .