Tuesday, October 24, 2006 7:59:02 PM
Red State Babylon
If the blue states are sinkholes of moral decay, as right-wing pundits insist, how come red states lead the nation in violent crime, divorce, illegitimacy, and incarceration, among other evils? To a bus-riding innocent on Manhattan's stroller-filled Upper West Side, it looks like a case of hypocrisy meets stupidity.
by James Wolcott
November 2006
In contemporary lore, the good people of the red states walk in Jesus's sandals while the rest of us are following Satan into the licking flames. Twenty-plus years of conservative propaganda have convinced millions of Republicans and their pet Beltway pundits that they inherited the legacy of frontier values and dwell in baptismal light, unlike modern Democrats, who crawled out from under rocks and prefer the ambiguous dark, where there's no right or wrong, only "personal choices." Newt Gingrich once spouted that Susan Smith's murder of her two children in 1994 was a sign of the evil that liberal Democrats had wrought: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things.... The only way you get change is to vote Republican." According to the gospel of Saint Newt, William J. Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and similar blowholes, the dying raptures of Sodom and Gomorrah can be found in the cultural duchies of the blue states. Here sin and moral sloth have set up shop, and venereal outbreaks of trendy ideas go unchecked. Conservative pundits and politicians regularly jeer that these Jurassic Parks of geriatric do-gooders and brainwashed college students don't represent the "real" America—the God-fearing, flag-waving, decent-living, high-octane, steeped-in-common-sense, everyday-low-prices heartland. Yet even as blue states hug the coasts and red states spread like a bloodstain across America's outstretched body, the influence of these elitist enclaves remains pervasive, corrosive, rotting away the pillars of moral order and foisting abortion, divorce, pornography, gay marriage, snail-darter environmentalism, secular humanism, dovish appeasement, moral relativism, and Rosie O'Donnell's TV comeback upon a once virile nation. The very names of the enclaves breeding such bacteria make the nostril hairs quiver. Hollywood. Berkeley. San Francisco. Madison, Wisconsin. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Martha's Vineyard. Georgetown. And, worst of all, New York City, especially Manhattan, most especially its Upper West Side, disparaged by its critics as the outpatient clinic for last-gasp liberalism.
It's so unjust.
As a resident of the Upper West Side and a regular bus rider, I must protest that the truth has been perverted and inverted. Yes, the Upper West Side is liberal, socially conscious, multi-culti, gay-friendly (Rosie's brother Daniel—also gay—is our state assemblyman), and occasionally itchy with political correctness. And, yes, it's true that we care, perhaps care too much, rattling our Zabar's bags as we nag the nation's conscience to no avail. Really, though, such little harm we do, what unracy lives we lead. It's like Jewish-Hispanic-Amish country up here! The broad sidewalks present a wholesome cavalcade of baby strollers, Columbia University students, diabetics on canes, and tourists posing in front of Tom's Restaurant, the diner made famous on Seinfeld. It isn't the cultural bastions of the blue states such as the Upper West Side that are greasing America's slide into the disco inferno. It's the Republican red states that are lowering the country's moral standards and dragging us through muck and malaise, the red states that are pustulating with horny hypocrites, rampant crime, polygamy, crystal-meth labs, federal handouts (The Economist recently christened Alaska "America's welfare state"), illegitimate births, blimping waistlines, and future generations of dumb bunnies. JonBenet Ramsey, dolled up and immortalized in her beauty-pageant footage, is the pre-pubescent red-hot-mama mascot of red-state Babylon.
"Red States cling to double standards like a drunk holds on to the last beer he can afford," writes Justin Cord Hayes in the semi-humorous survival guide Blue State/Red State. Hypocrisy is the hallmark of the red-state bull-roarer. Gingrich, who makes Hayes's dishonor roll of "conservative scalawags," has been married three times and has been known to have problems keeping it zipped [F6 note -- see http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=13863833 ]. Limbaugh has three marriages in the loss column. He is also a prancing Tartuffe on the drug issue, condemning addicts and users on his radio show for their weak wills and moral failings (and wanting to chuck them behind bars), only to be revealed as a painkiller anteater himself. Bennett expended volumes of wind preaching virtue and decrying seamy decadence, only to be exposed as a high-stakes slot-machine love monkey. But these are minor-league hypocrisies, as much a by-product of male prerogative as of Republican humbug. It is at the extremes that the red-state double standards are most sharply defined.
For the purposes of lurid illustration, no one is a better, more bitter distillation of red-state double standards than Dennis Rader, the monster who achieved lethal renown in Wichita, Kansas, and across the nation as the "BTK" killer (BTK: Bind, Torture, Kill). Convicted and sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms after a reign of terror that lasted decades, Rader was a methodical sadist, murdering his victims as if staging his own theater of cruelty, a Black Mass of the sacred and profane. The Los Angeles Times reported, "After killing neighbor Marine Hedge in 1985, Rader took her body to his church and photographed it on the altar. Then he hid her body, changed into his Scouting uniform and went off to chaperon a camping trip." It was the Scout-leader uniform and the other trappings of patriarchal authority that enabled him to blend into the community, elude suspicion. He played the role of respectability to the hilt. Rader was not only a Scout leader but also an officer at Wichita's Christ Lutheran Church and a registered Republican—a psychopathic parody of the Upstanding Citizen. Because he fit so well the stereotype of how a pillar of the community should conduct himself in daylight, his church congregation didn't have a collective clue. ("Nobody, nobody saw this coming," said the Reverend Michael G. Clark, the church's pastor, regarding Rader's arrest.) On the outside he couldn't have been more conformist; inside, he was an icebox of finely chiseled rage. Rader is the nightmare embodiment of the red-state personality at its most self-conflicted: piously Christian (he quoted the Bible at his sentencing hearing), yet torturously punitive; arrogantly proud, yet sloppily maudlin ("I've humbled myself," he blubbed at the same hearing); dotingly paternal (Time: "Rader was known as an attentive father who used to take his kids camping and fishing"), and a petty despot (as a compliance officer in his Wichita suburb, Rader was known to measure grass with a ruler and give citations for unkempt lawns).
Rader is vicious proof that punitive control and outlaw behavior feed raw meat to each other. Societies that tightly fasten the lid produce pressure-cooker violence, like the sporadic outbursts of BTK or extended shooting sprees (such as the recently stemmed sniper attacks on bikers and pedestrians in Phoenix), which in turn produce emergency calls for tougher laws, stiffer sentences, bigger prisons, and more lethal injections. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the 10 states with the highest number of total inmates per 100,000 residents in 2003, 9 were red. Of the 10 states with the most female inmates per 100,000 residents that same year, all were red. (Conversely, of the 10 states with the lowest incarceration rates of female prisoners, 9 were blue.) Not only do red states pack a larger percentage of their populations into their sardine cans, they have a near monopoly on capital punishment. Since 1976, the highest number of executions have been carried out in red states, with Texas—no surprise—ranking No. 1 on the hit parade. George Bush may be stingy with the pardons as president, but his wrist was quite limber when it came to signing those execution approvals as governor of Texas. "Now, you would think that all of this imprisonment and death might result in safer, more peaceful Red States, wouldn't you?" asks John Grevstad in his book, Red State, Blue State: Defending the Liberal Jesus and Blue State Morality from Red State Religion and Hypocrisy (which references the above statistics). But nay. "You would be wrong. Red States tend to be the most violent places to live.… Red States dominate the rankings of violent crimes despite their emphasis on judgment and incarceration." It's never fun having your ass shot off, but the odds of that occurring seem higher in the red states, which account for all of the top 15 states in rates of death by firearms (2003). Methamphetamine addiction is a national scourge, but it's been chewing the heart out of the red Middle West, where Missouri has the tragic distinction of hosting the highest number of lab incidents (meth labs or production facilities raided by authorities), with Indiana, Tennessee, Iowa, and Kentucky also among the top six states afflicted with an outbreak of bootleg chemistry. The 10 states with the lowest meth-lab incidents? Eight of them are blue. Then there's the violence or despair directed selfward. Of the 15 states with the highest adjusted rates of suicide (2003), 14 are red.
Animals aren't safe, either. Although "canned hunts"—the shooting of (often tame) animals in enclosed habitats so that white guys can claim exotic trophies and feel Hemingway-esque on the drive home—are staged from here to Hawaii, they are most common in Texas, according to the Humane Society.
In what's known as "victimless crime" to its defenders and "vice" to its detractors, the picture is no prettier. Take gambling, for example. Raised Catholic, I'm familiar with the tawdry allure of a rousing game of bingo, and each day I see busloads of mortgaged souls being shuttled to Atlantic City, where slot machines await to swallow their incomes and where the boardwalk teems with ghosts of suckers past. So I'm aware of how even a boulder of integrity such as Bill Bennett could succumb to gambling's baccarat beat. But it is still passing strange how accepted gambling—or gaming, as it is euphemistically known—is in red states that otherwise pride themselves on shunning temptation, neon lights, and Jezebels in tights carrying cocktail trays. If The Music Man's Professor Harold Hill were to tour present-day America, he'd find that the trouble in River City runs the length and width of the red states. He'd throw up his hands to high heaven at the spectacle of all these fine Christian folk frittering away their souls and savings. According to a 2005 publication by Ernst & Young, of the 11 top-grossing gaming markets (excluding Native American gaming revenues—see below), 8 are in red states. Five of the six states that offer riverboat gambling are red, and they should be red with shame, because you know what goes on on those riverboats: Fancy Dans with diamond stickpins and concealed derringers fleecing honest cardsharps to the rhythm of Dixieland music. Some red states are so economically parlous that casinos are the only thing between them and Desolation Row. Mississippi made its own deal with the Devil, until Nature upped the ante. "Until Katrina, [Mississippi] casinos were restricted to floating seafront barges to appease opponents of gambling in one of the Bible Belt's most God-fearing states," Andrew Ward noted in the Finanical Times. After Katrina, this drooping member of the Bible Belt loosened its buckle and lunged at the cash cow. Governor Haley Barbour's battered Mississippi has gone on a casino-building orgy clustered around the city of Biloxi, where black Americans and Vietnamese fishermen are being displaced by redevelopment. Biloxi may have around 20 new casinos a decade from now, becoming the ruby in the navel of "the Redneck Riviera."
When gambling interests slap on the feed bag, greed makes them sloppy. It's hard to pace yourself when so much money's sluicing through. The growth spurt in Native American casinos, scattered across 20 red states and 8 blue states, gave us the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal—la grande bouffe of greed, where millions of dollars were diverted for campaign donations to Republicans, illegal gifts, luxury trips, and sniper equipment for West Bank settlers. (In Newsweek, an associate labeled Abramoff a "super-Zionist.") Few glad-handing facilitators have worn an uglier frown. It is an index of the contempt Abramoff had for his clients that he referred to Native American contacts as "monkeys" and "mofos"—"we need to get some $ from those monkeys!!!" he ejaculated in an e-mail. Abramoff and his former business partner Michael Scanlon might not have been able to get away with their egregious palm greasing for so long had they not been dancing cheek to cheek with a rising political star and princely pretty boy named Ralph Reed. They were the rough to his smooth. Former executive director of the Christian Coalition, Reed was an impeccable natural on TV—unlike Jerry Falwell, whose jowls belonged to an earlier era, or Pat Robertson, with his elfin ears and daffy pronouncements—and a slick operative in the executive suites, the perfect envelope for the multiple payload of Republican conservatism, evangelical outreach, and old-fashioned power brokering. In a profile of Reed in The Nation, Bob Moser wrote, "As executive director of the Christian Coalition from its founding in 1989 till his departure in 1997, Reed got—and took—the lion's share of credit for transforming the politically unsophisticated evangelical right into a disciplined Republican Party machine. 'Ralph Reed symbolizes the rise of the Christian right to political power,' says Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy." Now he has the stubbed-out look of any other rejected prospect. Unable to diffuse the Abramoff skunk aroma, Reed lost his bid for lieutenant governor of Georgia in July's Republican primary, and with his defeat the red states lost one of their most promising avatars.
The red states may be more churchgoing than the blue states, but they're no strangers to Peyton Place. The 10 states in the union with the highest divorce rates in 2004 (among the 45 states for which figures are available) were all red! The fireball center of the red states when it comes to getting unhitched is, no surprise, Nevada, whose marriage laws encourage major turnover in the honeymoon suites. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, until the spouse finds out, and then it's say hi to your new friend, Al Imony. (A joke, I'm ashamed to say, I saw printed on a Vegas cocktail napkin.) Illegitimacy rates? Once again, the red states can hang their baseball caps in shame. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, of states with the highest percentages of births in 2003 to unwed mothers, 9 of the top 10 were red. Considering how ardently the hard-core Christian right is campaigning against abortion availability and birth control, this percentage could conceivably (no pun intended) rise, giving the red states an added advantage in the birth race. In an essay adapted for USA Today, Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, noted that progressives have fewer children, and that if demography is destiny: "[This] augurs a far more conservative future—one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default."
Red-state pathology incorporates another uncontrollable appetite, the unceasing gnaw of gluttony. I took umbrage when a right-wing blogger who posts under the handle Horsefeathers, reveling in Bush's 2004 re-election and the suicidal dismay of "Luxury Liberals," jeered, "And so we must take our leave of New York's Upper West Side where all the women are strong-minded, all the men are overweight, and all the children are spoiled." Admittedly, upper Broadway seldom resembles Copacabana Beach, bodies taut and oiled undulating snake-hipped down the avenue, but before haters label Luxury Liberals as emasculated fatties, they should take a look in the mirror, if they can find one wide enough. According to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, supported by the C.D.C., in 2004 14 of the 15 states with the highest percentage of obesity were red. Moreover, there is a correlation between corpulence and economic deprivation. Based on a three-year average of obesity rates, "the five states with the highest obesity rates—Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky—exhibit much higher rates of poverty than the national norm," the Associated Press reported in August. All five states are red states.
It is no shame that so many in the red states waddle to the checkout counter. Most Americans could afford to drop a few. It's the direction that they waddle, the Pied Piper tune that they follow, that makes one fear for their future, and ours. Thomas Frank's best-seller asked the question What's the Matter with Kansas? Why does a red state such as Kansas vote against its own economic interests? As Frank himself put it in an online interview, "Large parts of the state are in deep economic crisis—in many cases a crisis either brought on or worsened by the free-market policies of the Republican party—and yet the state's voters insist on re-electing the very people who are screwing them, running up colossal majorities for George Bush, lowering taxes [for corporations and the already affluent] and privatizing and deregulating, even when these things are manifestly unhealthy for the state." Part of his explanation for why Kansas voters keep laying their heads on the chopping block involves the Republican superiority at waging culture war and exploiting animus. A shallower, more disturbing, and definitely more obnoxious hypothesis is that the red states are where the dumbing down of America has achieved rock-bottom success. In a survey done by Morgan Quitno Press, an independent, private research-and-publishing company in Kansas, blue states accounted for 8 out of the top 10 "Smartest States" as measured by pedagogical criteria. (And one of the 2 red states that did make the top 10—Montana—is trending blue.) As for the bottom 10 states, 8 of them were red. Blue states not only put a premium on education but are also willing to pay the premium. Nine of the 10 states paying the highest average salary for schoolteachers in 2004–05 were blue; the 10 states with the worst-paid teachers were all red. This gap helps explain why our children isn't learning, to paraphrase President Bush.
Under Karl Rove's sorcerer's spell, Republicans learned how to exploit the intelligence gap, herding the dopey faithful to the polls, and depending on their docility between elections. "Karl Rove was there to recognize that there were substantial powers to be obtained by catering to stupid stubborn people, and George W. Bush would be the man to harvest such resources," Norman Mailer brilliantly proposes in The Big Empty (a series of dialogues between Mailer and son John Buffalo). "George W. understood stupid people well. They were not dumb, their minds were not physically crippled in any way. They had chosen to be stupid because that offered its own kind of power. To win a great many small contests of will, they needed only to ignore all evidence. Bright people would break down trying to argue with them." It's like trying to reason with a box of rocks. If Rove's vision of a permanent Republican majority comes to rotten fruition, America may well devolve into the moronic dystopia of Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy—a mentally handicapped superpower buried under a mountain of garbage where the Fox News Channel is the sole source of information.
Progress in this country depends upon maneuvering around this solid bloc of recalcitrant dunces. Fortunately, there is room to maneuver, the differences between red- and blue-state Americans being less fixed and primary, more flexible and subtly hued, than advertorialized. In The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida cites the findings of political scientist Morris P. Fiorina, who, after sifting through a grain silo of polls and data for his Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (written with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope), disputed the notion that American citizens are at bayonet points, poised for civil war. Compared with the Vietnam-era turmoil, the American people are feeling quite cousinly. It's the political class that is polarized and is inciting polarization among the apathetic masses. "A polarized political class makes the citizenry appear polarized, but it is only that—an appearance," Fiorina argued. The good news is that some of the most heavily made-up clown faces fronting this charade are melting into a pool of batter: The previously mentioned Ralph Reed. The once omnipotent and fearsome Tom "the Hammer" DeLay, forced to resign in disgrace as majority leader of the House. Virginia senator George Allen, a would-be son of the Confederacy, whose re-election campaign took a turn for the ugly after Allen singled out a Democratic volunteer of Indian descent as "macaca" at a campaign stop and mockingly welcomed him to "America and the real world of Virginia," that is, White People Land. Conrad Burns, Republican senator from Montana, who made himself a prime candidate for anger management and foot-in-mouth removal when he (a) berated exhausted firefighters for doing a "piss-poor job," (b) called his housepainter "a nice little Guatemalan man" and hinted he might be an illegal alien, and (c) said at a fund-raiser with First Lady Laura Bush present and pretending to be awake that America faced a terrorist enemy whose members "drive taxicabs in the daytime and kill at night"—kind of like Travis Bickle, only duskier. And Nip/Tuck's woman of the millennium, Katherine Harris, who earned infamy for her role as secretary of state in the Florida recount follies of 2000, is spiraling earthward and streaming mascara into the atmosphere in her disastrous run for the Senate, in which she has given Jewish voters a nervous scare by declaring, "If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin." So many flameouts in one year must be more karmic than coincidental. These downfalls and others won't stop NASCAR, the comedy stylings of Larry the Cable Guy, and intelligent design from being forced down our throats, but it's a start.
James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
Copyright © CondéNet 2006.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/11/wolcott200611
[F6 note -- in addition to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply and preceding and (other) following, see also in particular (items linked in):
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=12258062 and preceding and following;
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=6725040 and preceding and following;
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=5720199 and preceding and following;
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=5578478 and following; and
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=4752272 ]
If the blue states are sinkholes of moral decay, as right-wing pundits insist, how come red states lead the nation in violent crime, divorce, illegitimacy, and incarceration, among other evils? To a bus-riding innocent on Manhattan's stroller-filled Upper West Side, it looks like a case of hypocrisy meets stupidity.
by James Wolcott
November 2006
In contemporary lore, the good people of the red states walk in Jesus's sandals while the rest of us are following Satan into the licking flames. Twenty-plus years of conservative propaganda have convinced millions of Republicans and their pet Beltway pundits that they inherited the legacy of frontier values and dwell in baptismal light, unlike modern Democrats, who crawled out from under rocks and prefer the ambiguous dark, where there's no right or wrong, only "personal choices." Newt Gingrich once spouted that Susan Smith's murder of her two children in 1994 was a sign of the evil that liberal Democrats had wrought: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things.... The only way you get change is to vote Republican." According to the gospel of Saint Newt, William J. Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and similar blowholes, the dying raptures of Sodom and Gomorrah can be found in the cultural duchies of the blue states. Here sin and moral sloth have set up shop, and venereal outbreaks of trendy ideas go unchecked. Conservative pundits and politicians regularly jeer that these Jurassic Parks of geriatric do-gooders and brainwashed college students don't represent the "real" America—the God-fearing, flag-waving, decent-living, high-octane, steeped-in-common-sense, everyday-low-prices heartland. Yet even as blue states hug the coasts and red states spread like a bloodstain across America's outstretched body, the influence of these elitist enclaves remains pervasive, corrosive, rotting away the pillars of moral order and foisting abortion, divorce, pornography, gay marriage, snail-darter environmentalism, secular humanism, dovish appeasement, moral relativism, and Rosie O'Donnell's TV comeback upon a once virile nation. The very names of the enclaves breeding such bacteria make the nostril hairs quiver. Hollywood. Berkeley. San Francisco. Madison, Wisconsin. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Martha's Vineyard. Georgetown. And, worst of all, New York City, especially Manhattan, most especially its Upper West Side, disparaged by its critics as the outpatient clinic for last-gasp liberalism.
It's so unjust.
As a resident of the Upper West Side and a regular bus rider, I must protest that the truth has been perverted and inverted. Yes, the Upper West Side is liberal, socially conscious, multi-culti, gay-friendly (Rosie's brother Daniel—also gay—is our state assemblyman), and occasionally itchy with political correctness. And, yes, it's true that we care, perhaps care too much, rattling our Zabar's bags as we nag the nation's conscience to no avail. Really, though, such little harm we do, what unracy lives we lead. It's like Jewish-Hispanic-Amish country up here! The broad sidewalks present a wholesome cavalcade of baby strollers, Columbia University students, diabetics on canes, and tourists posing in front of Tom's Restaurant, the diner made famous on Seinfeld. It isn't the cultural bastions of the blue states such as the Upper West Side that are greasing America's slide into the disco inferno. It's the Republican red states that are lowering the country's moral standards and dragging us through muck and malaise, the red states that are pustulating with horny hypocrites, rampant crime, polygamy, crystal-meth labs, federal handouts (The Economist recently christened Alaska "America's welfare state"), illegitimate births, blimping waistlines, and future generations of dumb bunnies. JonBenet Ramsey, dolled up and immortalized in her beauty-pageant footage, is the pre-pubescent red-hot-mama mascot of red-state Babylon.
"Red States cling to double standards like a drunk holds on to the last beer he can afford," writes Justin Cord Hayes in the semi-humorous survival guide Blue State/Red State. Hypocrisy is the hallmark of the red-state bull-roarer. Gingrich, who makes Hayes's dishonor roll of "conservative scalawags," has been married three times and has been known to have problems keeping it zipped [F6 note -- see http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=13863833 ]. Limbaugh has three marriages in the loss column. He is also a prancing Tartuffe on the drug issue, condemning addicts and users on his radio show for their weak wills and moral failings (and wanting to chuck them behind bars), only to be revealed as a painkiller anteater himself. Bennett expended volumes of wind preaching virtue and decrying seamy decadence, only to be exposed as a high-stakes slot-machine love monkey. But these are minor-league hypocrisies, as much a by-product of male prerogative as of Republican humbug. It is at the extremes that the red-state double standards are most sharply defined.
For the purposes of lurid illustration, no one is a better, more bitter distillation of red-state double standards than Dennis Rader, the monster who achieved lethal renown in Wichita, Kansas, and across the nation as the "BTK" killer (BTK: Bind, Torture, Kill). Convicted and sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms after a reign of terror that lasted decades, Rader was a methodical sadist, murdering his victims as if staging his own theater of cruelty, a Black Mass of the sacred and profane. The Los Angeles Times reported, "After killing neighbor Marine Hedge in 1985, Rader took her body to his church and photographed it on the altar. Then he hid her body, changed into his Scouting uniform and went off to chaperon a camping trip." It was the Scout-leader uniform and the other trappings of patriarchal authority that enabled him to blend into the community, elude suspicion. He played the role of respectability to the hilt. Rader was not only a Scout leader but also an officer at Wichita's Christ Lutheran Church and a registered Republican—a psychopathic parody of the Upstanding Citizen. Because he fit so well the stereotype of how a pillar of the community should conduct himself in daylight, his church congregation didn't have a collective clue. ("Nobody, nobody saw this coming," said the Reverend Michael G. Clark, the church's pastor, regarding Rader's arrest.) On the outside he couldn't have been more conformist; inside, he was an icebox of finely chiseled rage. Rader is the nightmare embodiment of the red-state personality at its most self-conflicted: piously Christian (he quoted the Bible at his sentencing hearing), yet torturously punitive; arrogantly proud, yet sloppily maudlin ("I've humbled myself," he blubbed at the same hearing); dotingly paternal (Time: "Rader was known as an attentive father who used to take his kids camping and fishing"), and a petty despot (as a compliance officer in his Wichita suburb, Rader was known to measure grass with a ruler and give citations for unkempt lawns).
Rader is vicious proof that punitive control and outlaw behavior feed raw meat to each other. Societies that tightly fasten the lid produce pressure-cooker violence, like the sporadic outbursts of BTK or extended shooting sprees (such as the recently stemmed sniper attacks on bikers and pedestrians in Phoenix), which in turn produce emergency calls for tougher laws, stiffer sentences, bigger prisons, and more lethal injections. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the 10 states with the highest number of total inmates per 100,000 residents in 2003, 9 were red. Of the 10 states with the most female inmates per 100,000 residents that same year, all were red. (Conversely, of the 10 states with the lowest incarceration rates of female prisoners, 9 were blue.) Not only do red states pack a larger percentage of their populations into their sardine cans, they have a near monopoly on capital punishment. Since 1976, the highest number of executions have been carried out in red states, with Texas—no surprise—ranking No. 1 on the hit parade. George Bush may be stingy with the pardons as president, but his wrist was quite limber when it came to signing those execution approvals as governor of Texas. "Now, you would think that all of this imprisonment and death might result in safer, more peaceful Red States, wouldn't you?" asks John Grevstad in his book, Red State, Blue State: Defending the Liberal Jesus and Blue State Morality from Red State Religion and Hypocrisy (which references the above statistics). But nay. "You would be wrong. Red States tend to be the most violent places to live.… Red States dominate the rankings of violent crimes despite their emphasis on judgment and incarceration." It's never fun having your ass shot off, but the odds of that occurring seem higher in the red states, which account for all of the top 15 states in rates of death by firearms (2003). Methamphetamine addiction is a national scourge, but it's been chewing the heart out of the red Middle West, where Missouri has the tragic distinction of hosting the highest number of lab incidents (meth labs or production facilities raided by authorities), with Indiana, Tennessee, Iowa, and Kentucky also among the top six states afflicted with an outbreak of bootleg chemistry. The 10 states with the lowest meth-lab incidents? Eight of them are blue. Then there's the violence or despair directed selfward. Of the 15 states with the highest adjusted rates of suicide (2003), 14 are red.
Animals aren't safe, either. Although "canned hunts"—the shooting of (often tame) animals in enclosed habitats so that white guys can claim exotic trophies and feel Hemingway-esque on the drive home—are staged from here to Hawaii, they are most common in Texas, according to the Humane Society.
In what's known as "victimless crime" to its defenders and "vice" to its detractors, the picture is no prettier. Take gambling, for example. Raised Catholic, I'm familiar with the tawdry allure of a rousing game of bingo, and each day I see busloads of mortgaged souls being shuttled to Atlantic City, where slot machines await to swallow their incomes and where the boardwalk teems with ghosts of suckers past. So I'm aware of how even a boulder of integrity such as Bill Bennett could succumb to gambling's baccarat beat. But it is still passing strange how accepted gambling—or gaming, as it is euphemistically known—is in red states that otherwise pride themselves on shunning temptation, neon lights, and Jezebels in tights carrying cocktail trays. If The Music Man's Professor Harold Hill were to tour present-day America, he'd find that the trouble in River City runs the length and width of the red states. He'd throw up his hands to high heaven at the spectacle of all these fine Christian folk frittering away their souls and savings. According to a 2005 publication by Ernst & Young, of the 11 top-grossing gaming markets (excluding Native American gaming revenues—see below), 8 are in red states. Five of the six states that offer riverboat gambling are red, and they should be red with shame, because you know what goes on on those riverboats: Fancy Dans with diamond stickpins and concealed derringers fleecing honest cardsharps to the rhythm of Dixieland music. Some red states are so economically parlous that casinos are the only thing between them and Desolation Row. Mississippi made its own deal with the Devil, until Nature upped the ante. "Until Katrina, [Mississippi] casinos were restricted to floating seafront barges to appease opponents of gambling in one of the Bible Belt's most God-fearing states," Andrew Ward noted in the Finanical Times. After Katrina, this drooping member of the Bible Belt loosened its buckle and lunged at the cash cow. Governor Haley Barbour's battered Mississippi has gone on a casino-building orgy clustered around the city of Biloxi, where black Americans and Vietnamese fishermen are being displaced by redevelopment. Biloxi may have around 20 new casinos a decade from now, becoming the ruby in the navel of "the Redneck Riviera."
When gambling interests slap on the feed bag, greed makes them sloppy. It's hard to pace yourself when so much money's sluicing through. The growth spurt in Native American casinos, scattered across 20 red states and 8 blue states, gave us the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal—la grande bouffe of greed, where millions of dollars were diverted for campaign donations to Republicans, illegal gifts, luxury trips, and sniper equipment for West Bank settlers. (In Newsweek, an associate labeled Abramoff a "super-Zionist.") Few glad-handing facilitators have worn an uglier frown. It is an index of the contempt Abramoff had for his clients that he referred to Native American contacts as "monkeys" and "mofos"—"we need to get some $ from those monkeys!!!" he ejaculated in an e-mail. Abramoff and his former business partner Michael Scanlon might not have been able to get away with their egregious palm greasing for so long had they not been dancing cheek to cheek with a rising political star and princely pretty boy named Ralph Reed. They were the rough to his smooth. Former executive director of the Christian Coalition, Reed was an impeccable natural on TV—unlike Jerry Falwell, whose jowls belonged to an earlier era, or Pat Robertson, with his elfin ears and daffy pronouncements—and a slick operative in the executive suites, the perfect envelope for the multiple payload of Republican conservatism, evangelical outreach, and old-fashioned power brokering. In a profile of Reed in The Nation, Bob Moser wrote, "As executive director of the Christian Coalition from its founding in 1989 till his departure in 1997, Reed got—and took—the lion's share of credit for transforming the politically unsophisticated evangelical right into a disciplined Republican Party machine. 'Ralph Reed symbolizes the rise of the Christian right to political power,' says Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy." Now he has the stubbed-out look of any other rejected prospect. Unable to diffuse the Abramoff skunk aroma, Reed lost his bid for lieutenant governor of Georgia in July's Republican primary, and with his defeat the red states lost one of their most promising avatars.
The red states may be more churchgoing than the blue states, but they're no strangers to Peyton Place. The 10 states in the union with the highest divorce rates in 2004 (among the 45 states for which figures are available) were all red! The fireball center of the red states when it comes to getting unhitched is, no surprise, Nevada, whose marriage laws encourage major turnover in the honeymoon suites. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, until the spouse finds out, and then it's say hi to your new friend, Al Imony. (A joke, I'm ashamed to say, I saw printed on a Vegas cocktail napkin.) Illegitimacy rates? Once again, the red states can hang their baseball caps in shame. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, of states with the highest percentages of births in 2003 to unwed mothers, 9 of the top 10 were red. Considering how ardently the hard-core Christian right is campaigning against abortion availability and birth control, this percentage could conceivably (no pun intended) rise, giving the red states an added advantage in the birth race. In an essay adapted for USA Today, Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, noted that progressives have fewer children, and that if demography is destiny: "[This] augurs a far more conservative future—one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default."
Red-state pathology incorporates another uncontrollable appetite, the unceasing gnaw of gluttony. I took umbrage when a right-wing blogger who posts under the handle Horsefeathers, reveling in Bush's 2004 re-election and the suicidal dismay of "Luxury Liberals," jeered, "And so we must take our leave of New York's Upper West Side where all the women are strong-minded, all the men are overweight, and all the children are spoiled." Admittedly, upper Broadway seldom resembles Copacabana Beach, bodies taut and oiled undulating snake-hipped down the avenue, but before haters label Luxury Liberals as emasculated fatties, they should take a look in the mirror, if they can find one wide enough. According to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, supported by the C.D.C., in 2004 14 of the 15 states with the highest percentage of obesity were red. Moreover, there is a correlation between corpulence and economic deprivation. Based on a three-year average of obesity rates, "the five states with the highest obesity rates—Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky—exhibit much higher rates of poverty than the national norm," the Associated Press reported in August. All five states are red states.
It is no shame that so many in the red states waddle to the checkout counter. Most Americans could afford to drop a few. It's the direction that they waddle, the Pied Piper tune that they follow, that makes one fear for their future, and ours. Thomas Frank's best-seller asked the question What's the Matter with Kansas? Why does a red state such as Kansas vote against its own economic interests? As Frank himself put it in an online interview, "Large parts of the state are in deep economic crisis—in many cases a crisis either brought on or worsened by the free-market policies of the Republican party—and yet the state's voters insist on re-electing the very people who are screwing them, running up colossal majorities for George Bush, lowering taxes [for corporations and the already affluent] and privatizing and deregulating, even when these things are manifestly unhealthy for the state." Part of his explanation for why Kansas voters keep laying their heads on the chopping block involves the Republican superiority at waging culture war and exploiting animus. A shallower, more disturbing, and definitely more obnoxious hypothesis is that the red states are where the dumbing down of America has achieved rock-bottom success. In a survey done by Morgan Quitno Press, an independent, private research-and-publishing company in Kansas, blue states accounted for 8 out of the top 10 "Smartest States" as measured by pedagogical criteria. (And one of the 2 red states that did make the top 10—Montana—is trending blue.) As for the bottom 10 states, 8 of them were red. Blue states not only put a premium on education but are also willing to pay the premium. Nine of the 10 states paying the highest average salary for schoolteachers in 2004–05 were blue; the 10 states with the worst-paid teachers were all red. This gap helps explain why our children isn't learning, to paraphrase President Bush.
Under Karl Rove's sorcerer's spell, Republicans learned how to exploit the intelligence gap, herding the dopey faithful to the polls, and depending on their docility between elections. "Karl Rove was there to recognize that there were substantial powers to be obtained by catering to stupid stubborn people, and George W. Bush would be the man to harvest such resources," Norman Mailer brilliantly proposes in The Big Empty (a series of dialogues between Mailer and son John Buffalo). "George W. understood stupid people well. They were not dumb, their minds were not physically crippled in any way. They had chosen to be stupid because that offered its own kind of power. To win a great many small contests of will, they needed only to ignore all evidence. Bright people would break down trying to argue with them." It's like trying to reason with a box of rocks. If Rove's vision of a permanent Republican majority comes to rotten fruition, America may well devolve into the moronic dystopia of Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy—a mentally handicapped superpower buried under a mountain of garbage where the Fox News Channel is the sole source of information.
Progress in this country depends upon maneuvering around this solid bloc of recalcitrant dunces. Fortunately, there is room to maneuver, the differences between red- and blue-state Americans being less fixed and primary, more flexible and subtly hued, than advertorialized. In The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida cites the findings of political scientist Morris P. Fiorina, who, after sifting through a grain silo of polls and data for his Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (written with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope), disputed the notion that American citizens are at bayonet points, poised for civil war. Compared with the Vietnam-era turmoil, the American people are feeling quite cousinly. It's the political class that is polarized and is inciting polarization among the apathetic masses. "A polarized political class makes the citizenry appear polarized, but it is only that—an appearance," Fiorina argued. The good news is that some of the most heavily made-up clown faces fronting this charade are melting into a pool of batter: The previously mentioned Ralph Reed. The once omnipotent and fearsome Tom "the Hammer" DeLay, forced to resign in disgrace as majority leader of the House. Virginia senator George Allen, a would-be son of the Confederacy, whose re-election campaign took a turn for the ugly after Allen singled out a Democratic volunteer of Indian descent as "macaca" at a campaign stop and mockingly welcomed him to "America and the real world of Virginia," that is, White People Land. Conrad Burns, Republican senator from Montana, who made himself a prime candidate for anger management and foot-in-mouth removal when he (a) berated exhausted firefighters for doing a "piss-poor job," (b) called his housepainter "a nice little Guatemalan man" and hinted he might be an illegal alien, and (c) said at a fund-raiser with First Lady Laura Bush present and pretending to be awake that America faced a terrorist enemy whose members "drive taxicabs in the daytime and kill at night"—kind of like Travis Bickle, only duskier. And Nip/Tuck's woman of the millennium, Katherine Harris, who earned infamy for her role as secretary of state in the Florida recount follies of 2000, is spiraling earthward and streaming mascara into the atmosphere in her disastrous run for the Senate, in which she has given Jewish voters a nervous scare by declaring, "If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin." So many flameouts in one year must be more karmic than coincidental. These downfalls and others won't stop NASCAR, the comedy stylings of Larry the Cable Guy, and intelligent design from being forced down our throats, but it's a start.
James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
Copyright © CondéNet 2006.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/11/wolcott200611
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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