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.
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