What’s the matter with Kansas?: Thomas Frank’s best-selling book is transformed into an acclaimed do

Lawrence Journal World ^ | Dec 11, 2009 | Jon Niccum

[posterchild]

Author Thomas Frank was just another buttoned-down, Ronald Reagan-loving suburbanite when he headed to college in 1983.

The transition from Johnson County to Douglas County proved jarring. Within his first semester at Kansas University his ideals tilted to port. And it wasn’t politics per se that spurred the shift.

“There was a moment I remember vividly to this day when I was in Lawrence and I heard on the radio they were playing The Sex Pistols,” Frank says. “In Kansas City in the early ’80s no one ever played The Sex Pistols. It struck me as so incredibly right. It was ‘(God Save the Queen)’ with the singer’s voice screaming ‘No future!’ It was a conversion experience.”

Flash-forward to 2004 when Frank published “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.” Suddenly, the author was the one singing the refrain of “no future” — only this time it was in reference to his home state.

[rwfromkansas]

I have grown to love Texas since moving here in August 2008, but man, I miss Kansas.

Nothing wrong with it at all except for electing Dems to governor because of Republican infighting occassionally.

The film actually sounds interesting and very opposite of the book since Frank didn’t have anything to do with it. It actually sounds complimentary.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks justiceseeker93.

[Dumb_Ox]

Perhaps I'm naive, but this closing comment from Frank gives me hope he's grown:

“At the New York screening, somebody got up from the crowd and asked the ‘luminaries’ who were onstage with us, ‘How do we teach these people from Kansas?’ I’m thinking, ‘It’s not the people from Kansas who need to learn, it’s you.’”

I enjoyed Frank's The Conquest of Cool, but Caleb Stegall is a better Kansas populist than Frank.