Is the homeland where America's heart is?
A 4 pp review of Brian Mann's [link|http://www.amazon.com/gp/explorer/1586421115/2/ref=pd_lpo_ase/102-1439772-4504115?| Welcome to the Homeland] -- for those who wish to pursue the present form-of-the schism back to ~Voltaire, rather than just curse the candle and light the darkness.
Is the homeland where America's heart is?
In his compelling book, Brian Mann casts our blue state vs. red state divide as metro vs. homelander -- and blasts the right-wingers who claim to represent the best of our national character.
By Andrew O'Hehir
What kind of American are you? Red-state or blue-state? Secular humanist pinko or Bible-thumping loon? Tribe of Coulter or tribe of Franken? If you're a citizen of the United States of America, the odds are good that your sense of identity over the last couple of decades (and especially, exaggeratedly, since the undigested trauma of the 2000 election) revolves around the question of where you belong in this perilously polarized nation.
Sometimes it seems as if the dichotomy in American cultural and political life has itself become the only subject of public discourse. It's contained in every Supreme Court nomination, every death in Iraq and every Gulf Coast hurricane, but it also lies in wait within every hit movie, every No. 1 song, every debate about public architecture, every spoiled superstar athlete, every "American Idol" contestant. Our country right now reminds me of the old joke: There are two kinds of people, the ones who divide the world into two kinds of people and the ones who don't.
One could go further and suggest that, ideological frothing at the mouth aside, we're all the same kind of people, all sharing the same deluded conviction that we live in a functioning democracy. Setting aside such cynicism, if only for the moment, we should notice that the origins of America's bifurcation go back long before the invention of electronic electoral maps coded in warring primary colors. They go back through Nixon and FDR and William Jennings Bryan and Lincoln and Darwin and Jefferson and Voltaire, clear back to the birth of the Enlightenment.
It's not like angry divisions are a new phenomenon in American politics. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was plagued by intractable disagreements, whose resolution, as Brian Mann points out in his book "Welcome to the Homeland," has directly contributed to today's problems. In our great-great-grandparents' time, the nation pretty nearly destroyed itself, fighting a bloody civil war whose bitterness has not quite faded after 140 years. Bryan's 1896 presidential campaign was a full-fledged populist rebellion, pitting the people of the Great Plains and the West against the moneyed Eastern establishment. Franklin D. Roosevelt may be an untouchable icon of pop history today, but during his 13-year presidency many Americans viewed him as a pseudo-socialist tyrant.
Even if our contemporary political schism is just an old one duded up in new clothes and endlessly blabbed out over the airwaves, that doesn't make it any prettier. Sure, there was a middle-ground liberal consensus that dominated American politics in the postwar years -- if you're willing to skate past the Red Scare and a couple of near-misses with World War III -- but in retrospect its reign looks very short indeed. By the mid-'60s it was crumbling, by the Nixon-McGovern election of 1972 it was fatally undermined, and by the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan in 1980 it was gone for good.
What happened? Well, one could say that old fires of tribal hatred (country vs. city, populace vs. elites) were rebuilt and carefully tended by politicians who could benefit from them. In that sense, what has happened in America in the last quarter-century is not altogether different from what has happened in the Balkans, the Middle East, Rwanda, Sudan and countless other exotic locations. The modalities of conflict are different, for the most part, and that's something to be grateful for.
Neither side in America's cultural and political wars -- Brian Mann calls the two camps the "metros" and the "homelanders" -- can quite get what they want. Homelanders have controlled Congress for 12 years and the White House for six. They've packed the federal judiciary with right-thinking conservatives who view our Constitution as a form of Talmudic writ whose interpretation requires reading the minds of those bickering 18th century farmers, the ones who got together in Philadelphia to figure out how to govern a rural nation of 13 states with a combined population smaller than present-day Arkansas. Yet big government has done nothing but get bigger, abortion remains a legal and (in most states) commonplace medical procedure, HBO programming includes the word "fuck" every 38 seconds, homosexuals show no signs of melting away in shame, fewer and fewer people go to church, and undocumented immigrants have shown up in virtually every corner of the country, where they work hard at the jobs nobody else will do at all. On the other hand, the metropolitan liberals and moderates whose values seem to dominate the texture of actual American life can do nothing to stop a governing party that starts overseas wars for bad reasons, punishes poor people for living in the path of a hurricane, encourages environmental destruction and eagerly hands over as much power as possible (except that of the police state) to big corporations.
This mutual discontent can lead to a fury and frustration, an air of permanent grievance, that makes both ends of the political spectrum seem unstable. Once, seven or eight years ago, I had to get up and leave Christmas dinner after a relative began to speak, with tears in his eyes, about the noble and indeed Christ-like mission of Kenneth Starr. But I also don't want to hear anyone I otherwise admire launch into any more conspiracy theories that connect (or even mention) the 9/11 attacks, the Ohio vote count, Hurricane Katrina and Judith Miller.
Mann, a reporter on rural affairs for National Public Radio and various of its local affiliates, presents himself as a mild-mannered middle-grounder who understands both of America's warring cultures and can translate between them. He was raised in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma and Alaska, and now lives in northern New York state. He's a metro, all right, but one seasoned with rural mellowing. He describes himself as a lifelong Christian, for example, but writes, "It never occurred to me to believe that the Bible was literal truth." He holds liberal social views on issues like abortion and gay marriage, but says he is fiscally conservative and has voted for Republicans at least as often as Democrats. He remains close to his brother, Allen -- a foil throughout this book -- a bedrock family-values conservative who lives in Washington, Mo., on the exurban-rural fringe outside St. Louis.
Yet the remarkable thing about "Welcome to the Homeland" is not Mann's mostly commonsensical and mildly heterodox analysis of our national divide, nor his admirable attempt to present heartland conservatism as a coherent ideology, nor even his flights into full-fledged hallucinatory idiocy. It's how pissed off he is.
Next page: Mann does not see the homelanders as sheep or dupes controlled by the barons