> The long excerpt from Tom Frank's new book on his home state of Kansas
> in the April Harper's paints a pretty different picture. As the opening
> notes, some of the poorest counties in the U.S. are on the Great Plains
> - and went something like 75% for Bush. Towns rave against fluoridation
> (no doubt Mitch Cohen & Gary Null would agree), the state board of ed
> purges references to evolution from textbooks, a prominent female
> politician doubts the wisdom of women's suffrage, etc. "If Kansas is the
> concentrated essence of normality, then here is where we can see the
> deranged graudally become normal, where we look into that handsome,
> confidnet, reassuring, all-American face - class president, quarterback,
> Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of industry - and realize that we
> are staring into the eyes of a lunatic." And Tom's no coastal elitist
> either.
I haven't seen the excerpt, so I can't comment on it. I like Frank's writings, so I will go seek it out.
Does he talk about how the more rural parts of the Great Plains are becoming depopulated?
Again, I wouldn't take what the State Board of Education did vis a vis creationism as being representative of Kansas. I believe that this incident was a result of stealth conservative extremists who managed to get their people on the board. But don't get me wrong, there are many people in Kansas who believe this nonsense, which is one reason why I think that we (leftists, anarchists, etc) need to fight ignorance in Middle America instead of simply laughing or making jokes about it. What kind of efforts are *any* leftist organizations doing to organize on the Great Plains? Is anybody doing a caravan? How about efforts to introduce our media (i.e. Democracy Now) to small towns?
I'd be curious to hear Frank's opinion about the level to which rural Kansans are wedded to the Republican party. Is there enough populism out there that a new political movement would attract these folks? Don't even think about selling the Democrats to these people. The Democrats would have to purge all the Kennedys, Clintons and other career liberal hacks before people out here would even think about switching to the Democrats.
I just got back from driving to and from Columbia, Missouri. On the way back we drove around a bit of rural western Missouri. I kept an eye out for patriotic stickers and American flags. I saw a few, but the level was not much more than around Kansas City.
Hey, if any of you find yourself driving across Missouri on I-70 and are looking for a cool place to have dinner or lunch, there is this nice winery/bistro called Les Bourgeois Winery just west of Columbia. It sits on the bluff overlooking the Missouri River valley. The food is good and so is the wine.
Chuck0