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Superior, Nebraska: A Defense of, and Love Letter to, a Red State
The divide between Red and Blue America is, in fact, a great one.
In Superior, Nebraska, author Denis Boyles uses personal reflections, current reporting, and deft touches of humor to drive home the point that the Red States are not populated with cardboard cut-outs who voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush.
They are populated with thoughtful, three-dimensional people . . . who voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush. And some who didn’t.
Part of the reason blue staters can only imagine what red staters are like is because they mostly just fly over this part of America. The same cannot be said for red staters.
We only have to turn the t.v. on to become better acquainted with blue state thought and practice. Most of us have also physically visited and spent time in blue cities and states. Boyles points out that most Midwesterners have:
. . . at least a functional knowledge of New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, and other blue enclaves–not only because they are the America of TV and movies but also because most these people have been to the East more than once.
My grandfather used to tell his tales of Times Square, 1918, the way only a famer-turned-soldier from Burr Oak, Kansas, could tell them. My grandmother lived through many losses in her life, but few as memorable as the one that took her prized hat off her head and sucked it out the window of the train she was riding east to New York City at about the same time. Eighty years later, that hat was still on her mind.
Almost every day, marching bands or drama clubs or debate teams or high school graduating classes board buses in Kansas or Nebraska or Oklahoma and end up in Washington, D.C. or Boston or Pasadena. What does Nebraska get in return? Provincialism, ignorance, and condescension from the New York Times. Since the invention of buses, none has ever carried a bunch of inquisitive New York City students to Alma, Nebraska–and it’s too bad for them.
True. Poignant. And now funny when he turns to the imaginary men of Brokeback Mountain:
The front yards of Kansas roll on mile after mile, crossing an invisible border to become Nebraska or Colorado or Oklahoma. It’s a very big-picture landscape unfamiliar to many Americans, for whom the heartland of their own nation can be strange and even terrifying. For them, Middle America is unknown territory, not just mapwise but mindwise, with only the most basic of stereotypes to use for navigation.
For those for whom the nation between St. Louis and Vail is a blank space, it must seem there’s a moral primitivism loose in the land wholly at odds with their experience of the world, a place made civilized only by populating it with the imaginary men of Brokeback Mountain, handsome lads who dress for cows but look at sheep, or by a bit of electoral unpredictability, as in 2006.
Funny. And right on.
This has also struck me as something you would never see on the avenues of New York City. The state highways of Kansas and Nebraska are dotted with tributes to life and free speech:
U.S. 36 is an almost-straight line across the northern tier of Kansas counties–Brown, Nemaha, Marshall, Washington. Between every town, scores of hand-painted signs–”Choose Life: Your Mother Did,” “Abortion Is Not a Choice,” “It’s a Child Not Tissue”–say in big, bold letters things people wouldn’t say aloud in most places in Manhattan unless they were being, like, ironic.
Unless, of course, you were in Manhattan, Kansas.