Commenting: The Solypsisyphisticate #3

I'll Prob'ly Die in a Small Town

The reader will forgive me if I depart from my usual sardonic tone and appeal directly to your sense of decency and reason, should you have any remaining after the last eight years of being browbeaten into, if not fingerbiting resignation, then severe apathy. Furthermore, I will refrain from writing “what the fuck” in all caps until I reach 500 words. I should warn you, however, that I have been drinking steadily since the end of the Republican National Convention, which I believe was last week, but I’m currently in no state to make value judgments about time and/or space. That said, I take as my topic today the hijacking of “small town values” by the Republican Party in contemporary American politics.

I’m from a small town in Northeast Ohio. I spent a good part of my formative years throwing beer bottles out of moving cars at backroad stop signs, and I could show you a thing or two about snipe hunting (not real) and cow tipping (doesn’t exist). It’s the kind of place where everyone thinks they’re middle class, and just about everyone’s white and Christian. A lot of people there work for the local GM plant or for KraftMaid making cabinets.* Now, some of you might be saying to yourselves, every red-blooded American who knows how to bait a hook and changes their own oil must have been born a bible-thumping Republican. You would be wrong. My county has gone Democratic in every presidential election since at least 1960, with the exception of Nixon’s 1972 landslide.

Now consider Hamilton County, on the other end of the state, home of Ohio’s third-largest city, Cincinnati. Procter & Gamble, Macy’s, and Chiquita all have their corporate headquarters there. They even had a race riot a while back. The county also boasts Ohio’s second-most affluent suburb, the Village of Indian Hill, which is infamous for its portrayal in the movie Traffic as the home of crack-smoking prep-schoolers. I may be old-fashioned, but I don’t consider funding right-wing Colombian paramilitary groups, police brutality, or crystal meth addiction to qualify as small town values. Yet Hamilton County has gone Republican in every presidential election since at least 1960, with the exception of LBJ’s 1964 landslide.

That the whole “small town values” thing is some egregious bullshit may seem obvious, but why does it actually play in small towns? The way Republicans use the term, “small town values” seem to include xenophobia, homophobia, and willful backwardness, framed in terms of protecting our borders, preserving the sanctity of marriage, and keeping government off your back and out of your pocket. And these issues are important to people, no doubt about it. But where I come from, we also believe in people getting a fair shake and not taking shit from people who think they’re better than you. In the days when Americans still made things and labor was organized, people at least had an idea of who their real enemies were. Now that many people are on their own, working shit jobs for little pay and no benefits, the enemy is the Eastern establishment and the Washington bureaucracy as presented on talk radio and cable news. Thanks to free trade policies, small towns are rotting and eventually disappearing because fewer and fewer people can get a decent job, so anyone with a sense of self-preservation migrates and leaves their hometown to stew in its own dwindling juices. It’s not that difficult to imagine why so many people are convinced that we are living in the End Times and that it doesn’t really matter how much government and business screw you over as long as you commit yourself to making America more godly.**

In his convention speech, Bush referred to the “angry left”. If anyone knows the address of this organization, please tell them I would like to subscribe to their newsletter. Where is the righteous indignation from the Left? Rather than carting out the usual pity party (“I lost my job, I have no health insurance, I’m voting Democrat”), why don’t we place the blame where it lies? Whose fault is it that you lost your job? Why don’t you have health insurance? It’s fine and dandy for Obama to offer people hope and change, but what we really want is an enemy we can spit on. And I can think of a couple.



* The KraftMaid factory is a non-union shop, as you can see from this blog post, a comment to which will direct you to reviews of KraftMaid products. What a country!

** Astoundingly, actually a word.