Posted on 11/10/2004 8:48:04 AM PST by NYer
WASHINGTON – "Call me back on November 3rd," Willis Anthony had said. I had sincerely not intended to do so. But then I did. Because he had been right.
He and his wife had both been right, when in that living room in St. Peters, Minnesota, buried between the grain silos that stood like towers in the vast emptiness of the northern lands, in that little house as polished as a mirror and that atmosphere of neat simplicity, they explained their beliefs, with a bit of embarrassment.
They had been right when, in response to my incredulity in the face of their lukewarm interest in international issues – the war in Iraq, terrorism, security – they replied that theirs was a "social conservatism," similar to but also different from the "compassionate" conservatism of George W. Bush. But they would vote for him, they shyly admitted one week before the elections.
Like the family of Willis Anthony, a farmer to the core, though also a professor of agrarian economics at the University of Minnesota, millions of Americans of the Deep South, the Bible Belt, the Corn Belt, of many different Christian churches and synagogues, cast their votes for Bush.
Another of them comes to mind: Rinaldo Macero, whom I met in Miami, in Little Havana, the main center for Cuban-Americans. He also voted for Bush, and he also did so in the name of a neglected land, an America scarcely represented by the mainstream communications media, but, as has been seen, the majority.
"The yankees," he said, "will never get my vote. Because then they waste it, they tear it to shreds. The yankees have no morality." The "yankees," for Macero and for tens of millions of Americans, are the Anglo-Saxons of the East coast, where Kerry harvested votes, but not hearts; he garnered a consensus, but perhaps did not sow values.
And it is precisely on values that Bush, or we might say his extraordinary electoral strategist Karl Rove, fixed his aim. Not on the war, not on Osama Bin Laden, or not only on them, but on the defense of something profoundly American, as difficult for us Europeans to comprehend as it is easy to denigrate: that "God, country, and family" that has inspired hundreds of derisory commonplaces about the America of the vulgar West and the great open plains, as opposed to the America found on the two coasts, which dines in sushi bars, reads French books, dresses Italian, and obviously votes Democrat.
An example of all of this, Ohio, the state in which a record number of unemployed people voted for Bush, betraying Kerry, and where even the Amish (the religious community well depicted in a famous film starring Harrison Ford[, 'Witness']) brought their buggies all the way to the ballot box – these people who live without electric lights, without telephones, without televisions, without real contact with society. While I drove across the endless plains of the Midwest, I sometimes stopped in the small rural centers. Even here, a typically European stereotype collapsed pathetically.
The “redneck” (the man with his neck sunburned from field work), the “cracker” (the poor white man depicted by Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath"), the “hobo” (the vagabond who travels by freight train in the ballads of Woodie Guthrie); these figures once emblematic of extra-urban American society, no longer exist. In their place there is a generation of young people who have substituted for the Kennedy myth of the new frontier an ethical dimension of such crystalline simplicity that it could almost be mistaken for a domestic moral code. It is domestic, but it is above all shared.
Some define them hastily as "born-again Christians," others as neocons, still others as theocons, but none of these definitions is really appropriate, because the reality is much more complex. Certainly, within this great electoral mass there is room for the "moral majority," as there is for the anti-evolution movement and the county-by-county struggle for the reintroduction of school prayer. But one senses just as surely a transcendent motivation that crosses confessional differences, from Protestantism to Catholicism, passing through Judaism: we could call it a renewed sense of moral urgency, so implicit that if you ask them they have a hard time explaining it to you.
"I had never thought about the problem of abortion, cloning, the environment, stem cells, euthanasia, until I realized that someone wanted to force open the door from behind. Then I thought about it. Bush guaranteed for me that the door would remain closed." This young woman from Altona, Virginia may not say it, but she's thinking it: the Democrats, the pro-European aristocrats of the East, were breaking down this door behind her back.
Two nights ago, I was elbow to elbow with a sea of young people who were spending the night in the Ronald Reagan Building, the Republicans' general headquarters in Washington, awaiting the electoral results. I asked myself how someone could be Republican at twenty; I looked at the beautiful girls waving the pennants of the Grand Old Party, those boys in their excessively serious suits who ended up abandoning themselves to the gyrations of the rock and roll with that absence of malice that is profoundly, terribly American, an attitude that we Europeans strain to comprehend.
I think I did understand, after the fact. They were not lauding Bush's final surge, or not that alone. They were exulting in front of a map of the United States that was being colored in red, the color of the Republicans. And even here, it was not a competitive sort of exultation, "us" against "them," but an exultation in belonging.
That red that colored the continental map from Virginia to Nevada, from Florida to Texas, was the boundary of their enclosure, where one can feel at home again, the enclosure that the young woman of Altona – who is 19, not 80 – did not want to be opened.
Look closely at the electoral map: there is an America within America; one cannot overlook it. It is an America that placed Iraq only in third place among national priorities, in spite of the fact that young Americans continue to die in the Middle East, young people like those White House interns who wept as they sang "Amazing Grace," the most beautiful religious hymn Americans know. It is a hymn that perhaps in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles, in the Democratic strongholds, they would have sung with much less conviction – or they would not have even put it on the agenda.
But on the agenda of the young Republicans, as on that of their parents, of their friends, in the schools scattered throughout America in the countryside and the small cities, the first priority was the defense of a system of values. To avoid deforming that which – over the course of more than two hundred years – American society has laboriously shaped.
"We need a 'macho' leader who can stand up to Castro," said the cigar shop lady, a bit simplistically, whom I interviewed ten days ago in Florida. Millions of voters must have unconsciously said something similar to themselves: we need a strong leader who can defend our values. And that leader was not, and could not be, the gloomy, lukewarm John F. Kerry.
__________
The website of the Holy See's newspaper:
> “L’Osservatore Romano”
And of the Italian bishops' conference:
> “Avvenire”
__________
Notes and links on the November 2nd vote, Vatican-U.S. relations, and Bush's religious beliefs
In "The Wall Street Journal Europe," November 5-7, there appeared two maps that were particularly instructive on the distribution of the vote on November 2nd in the United States.
The two maps highlight the differences in total votes between Bush and Kerry, not state by state, but county by county.
The counties Bush won are colored in red; those of Kerry in blue. County by county, the dimensions of the victory are represented vertically, with a red or blue bar that is shorter or taller depending on the disparity in the vote.
The map of the United States showing the counties won by Bush is extremely red. Bush won also in many of the counties of the states on the Pacific coast that went overall to his rival. The only areas where the red shows continuous gaps is in southern Florida, along the Mississippi, in Massachusetts and other states of the extreme northeast, and west of the Great Lakes, in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The outstanding victories are rare. The county Bush won with the greatest margin (155,010 votes) is Orange County in California, which adjoins Los Angeles, where his rival won handily.
But the map with the counties won by Kerry is only sporadically colored in blue: in the few areas mentioned above, and a few others here and there. So where did he draw deeply? Only in a few counties of the big cities, above which in fact there stand out blue bars as tall as they are isolated. The record is in Cook County, in Chicago, with a margin of 805,857 votes. Los Angeles is next, with 715,577 more votes, then Philadelphia and Manhattan.
NASA has been on life support like Arafat, but for a couple of decades. The new NASA goals and program are most welcome, but true space development won't happen under gov't programs except one--establish private property rights.
BTW, if you want to read an Italian writer that true understands America, read the late Lugi Barzini,
In all of this one is struck, however, by the deep ignorance of America by the EUros. The harking back to archetypes from domestic socialist archetypes of the 1930 - the cracker, the hobo - shows a profoundly distorted view of America, and is quite nettlesome. Are they aware that between the two of them OHI and Penn, boast 4 of the best symphonic orchestra in the world, the Wharton school and world class research Univeristies, universities the like of which exist nowhere in Europe? Do they Understand that, excluding the Louvre, Texas has better museums than France (and better Universities to boot?)
This grotesque mistreatment and disregard for human life, is a stepping stone towards Eugenics. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, introduced this concept back in the '20's. Adolph Hitler picked up on it and followed it through to its final outcome.
What the Nazis did during WWII pales by comparison to what we are doing to our own children. 40 million + have been aborted, in this country alone.
As you so wisely pointed out, one doesn't have to be religious to recognize what is happening, as aborted babies become fodder for the living. As these profiteers continue to age, they may well find themselves 'victims' of their own greed. With 40 million less tax payers, the next generations may seek to euthanize the aged and infirmed. A serious reduction in Social Security funding (from the aborted) may well mandate the necessity of eliminating those who suck dollars from the system, without contributing anything back. What goes around, comes around.
"Those who have accepted the barbarism of abortion are forced to follow it all the way down. Any uneasiness about the reason for a particular "elimination" must be set aside for the greater good."
EUGENICS - Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood.
Sad, is it not?
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