Sunday, November 14, 2004
Is It the Cities, Stupid?
[Via Tom Tomorrow]
As a true-blue-state liberal transplanted, over ten years ago, to a left-leaning island in the deep South, I can attest to much of the truth behind this:
Still, the whole thing gives me a bad case of the squirms. It seems to be a continuation of the us-vs.-them mentality which had everyone so freaking "polarized" (as the media kept telling us) going into the election and, for that matter, since.
When somebody goes into a voting booth, he or she casts one and only one vote. (Let's put aside considerations such as "voter fraud" for now.) So it's only natural to set one vote against another, one voter against another -- hell, let's put them at each other's throats. But it seems to me that the one vote issuing forth from each voter is the outcome of, well, let's call it an averaging effect within him or her.
I've got violently authoritarian impulses inside me, on the order of "Shut your piehole, you stupid knee-jerk Rush-hearing Hannity-watching Coulter-reading cretin!" It's only by virtue of, um, well, let's call it internal political mathematics that I don't carry that anger over into everyday life -- where I deal with a lot of such cretins -- and, ultimately, into the voting booth.
No polls or other statistics to confirm this suspicion, but as a matter of habit I assume that even the cretins carry within them "islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion." And what I hope for is that the votes of those islands will eventually carry the day. We can speak to such islands: We don't have to win the hearts and minds of right-wingers "one at a time" (as the slogan goes); we just have to help those bare-minority islands within them to find their voices. No wingnut is 100% wingnut, and we don't need to make them 100% lefty. All we need is for them to be 51% lefty when they go into the booth.
As a true-blue-state liberal transplanted, over ten years ago, to a left-leaning island in the deep South, I can attest to much of the truth behind this:
Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. And we are the real Americans.
Still, the whole thing gives me a bad case of the squirms. It seems to be a continuation of the us-vs.-them mentality which had everyone so freaking "polarized" (as the media kept telling us) going into the election and, for that matter, since.
When somebody goes into a voting booth, he or she casts one and only one vote. (Let's put aside considerations such as "voter fraud" for now.) So it's only natural to set one vote against another, one voter against another -- hell, let's put them at each other's throats. But it seems to me that the one vote issuing forth from each voter is the outcome of, well, let's call it an averaging effect within him or her.
I've got violently authoritarian impulses inside me, on the order of "Shut your piehole, you stupid knee-jerk Rush-hearing Hannity-watching Coulter-reading cretin!" It's only by virtue of, um, well, let's call it internal political mathematics that I don't carry that anger over into everyday life -- where I deal with a lot of such cretins -- and, ultimately, into the voting booth.
No polls or other statistics to confirm this suspicion, but as a matter of habit I assume that even the cretins carry within them "islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion." And what I hope for is that the votes of those islands will eventually carry the day. We can speak to such islands: We don't have to win the hearts and minds of right-wingers "one at a time" (as the slogan goes); we just have to help those bare-minority islands within them to find their voices. No wingnut is 100% wingnut, and we don't need to make them 100% lefty. All we need is for them to be 51% lefty when they go into the booth.
