“I live in a liberal community, which is happy to bring into question things about this country.”
That’s Stephen Sondheim talking to Time magazine earlier this year. The line came back to me after November 2, when the losers, momentarily stunned to discover their arguments had been unpersuasive, quickly recovered to damn the majority of the electorate as boobs and bigots. One doesn’t wish to overplay the red state/blue state thing, but it seems to me that, pace Jane Smiley, Maureen Dowd, et al., the “ignorance” is not on the red side. Red staters are very aware of the blue states because we live in a blue-state culture: I don’t mean just Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and the boring local Gannett monodaily staffed by “diverse” J-school graduates who all think alike, but 99 percent of movies and sitcoms and non-country pop songs. A red stater is exposed to blue-state thinking every time he switches on the TV.
By contrast, except for the biennial trauma of election day, blue staters can live blissfully unaware of red-state culture. There are occasional disruptions: the tenured professor picks his car up from the body shop, pulls out on the highway and finds the grease monkey’s re-tuned the radio to some frightful right-wing talk-show. But he punches the button and he’s back on NPR and all is well again. Who knows what those hayseeds in the heartland get up to? Bible study? Deer camp? Gay-lynching night? Whatever.
That’s what you hear
