One Nation, Slightly Divisible: A Report from “Red” and “Blue” America

The Atlantic Monthly | December 2001 | David Brooks

[rface]

Sixty-five miles from where I am writing this sentence is a place with no Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Noble. No blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways on Sunday mornings. In this place people don’t complain that Woody Allen isn’t as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny. In this place you can go to a year’s worth of dinner parties without hearing anyone quote an apercu he first heard on Charlie Rose. The people here don’t buy those little rear-window stickers when they go to a summer vacation spot so they can drive around with “MV” decals the rest of the year, for the most part they don’t even go to Martha’s Vinyard.

The place I am talking about goes by different names. Some call it America. Others call it Middle America. It has also come to be known as Red America in reference to the maps that were produced on the night of the 2000 presidential election. People in Blue America, which is my part of America, tend to live in big cities on the coasts. People in Red America tend to live on farms or in small towns or small cities far away from the coasts. Things are different there.

Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors. We sail; they powerboat. We cross-country ski; they snowmobile. We hike; they drive ATVs. We have vineyard tours; they have tractor pulls. When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens.

Different sorts of institutions dominate life in these two places. In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour and hunting. In Blue Americawe have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin and socially conscious investing. In Red America the Wal~Marts are massive, with parking lots the size of state parks. In Blue America the stores are small, but the markups are big. You’ll rarely see a Christmas store in Blue America, but in Red America, even in July, you’ll come upon stores selling fake Christmas trees, wreath-decorated napkins, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer collectable thimbles ans spoons and little snow villages.

We in the costal metro Blue areas read more books and attend more plays than the people in the Red heartland. We’re more sophisticated and cosmopolitan – just ask us about our alumni trips to China or Provence, or our interest in Buddhism. But don’t ask us, please, what life in Red America is like. We don’t know. We don’t know who Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are, even though the novels they have co-writtenhave sold about 40 million copies over the past few years. We don’t even know what James Dobson says on his radio program, which is listened to by millions. We don’t know about Reba or Travis. We don’t know what happens in the mega-churches on Wednesday evening, and some of us couldn’t tell you the difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical, let alone describe what it means to be a Pentacostal. Very few of us knows what goes on in Branson, Missouri even though it has seven million visitors a year or could name five NASCAR drivers, although stock-car races are the best attended sporting events in the country. We don’t know how to shoot or clean a rifle. We can’t tell a military officer’s rank by looking at hi insignia. We don’t know what soy beans look like when they are growing in a field.

All we know or think we know, about Red America is that millions and millions of its people live quietly underneath flight patterns, many of them are racist and homophobic, and when you see them at highway rest stops, they’re often really fat and their clothes are too tight.

And apparently we don’t want to know more about that. One can barely find any books at Amazon.com about what it is like to live in small-town America—or, at least, any books written by normal people who grew up in a small towns, liked then, and stayed there. The few books that do exist were written either by people who left the heartland because they hated it (Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent, for example) or by urbanites who moved to Red America as part of some life-simplification plan (Moving to a Small Town: A Guidebook for Moving from Urban to Rural America; National Geographic’s Guide to Small Town Escapes). Apparently no publishers or members of the Blue book-buying public are curious about Red America’s eyes.

[[The next section is called, “Crossing the Meatloaf Line”]]

[bert]

The man doesn't understand...many doubt the Blue Zone is really ?America.

It is filled with european and african Wannabe's. Few Americans in the bunch. We know the NYC PD and FD are red zoners at heart. There are a few Americans still there.

[newwahoo]

"What do ya do if there isn't any good catfishing locally?"

The fishing is great out off of Long Island. I go fishing for Fluke and Blues every summer, though I usually end up with more empty beers in the bucket than fish. I'd still love to go shark fishing off Monatuk point someday...

"Too loud though, someone needs to say 'shhhhhh' once in awhile."

We wouldn't be the "city that never sleeps" then! Seriously, you get used to it. I live on the second floor of a building that faces a pretty large street. Firetrucks, ambulances and police cars roll through all night and I don't even move. You just get used to it. Humans can adapt to most things pretty well, I guess. You know what makes me stay up all night? When I visit friends upstate and sleep over. Everything creaks and groans like a haunted house! And when it gets totally quiet the absolute silence disturbs me in a way. When I was little, and afraid of stuff, I always drew comfort that if there really was a "boogeyman" that there were plenty of other people in the city for him to go after before me! FReeregards..