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BOOKS-US: A Liberal's Travels in "Flyover Country"
By Aaron Glantz*
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 23 (IPS) - "What are they thinking?" is a question my mother screams at the television every election season. A union nurse in overwhelmingly liberal, Democratic San Francisco, she cannot believe that the presidential election is even close.
"What is wrong with these people?" she asks, amazed that about half the country will vote Republican this year.
Who are these people who will vote Republican even after the Grand Old Party started a war based on lies, ruined the economy, fouled the environment while enriching the oil companies, and created a situation where tens of millions of citizens lack even basic health insurance?
"Who are these people?" indeed. Inside the comfortable political bubble of San Francisco, it is possible to go through daily life without meeting a real live Republican. Like other big U.S. cities on the East and West Coast, many San Franciscans feel under siege - their future held hostage by a strange species of conservatives they in many cases have never met.
Many wish they could reach out and convince these conservatives that the right doesn't have the answers they're seeking, but they don't know where to start.
Enter Rose Aguilar, a journalist and political blogger who grew up in Sonoma County, about 40 miles north of San Francisco and now hosts a daily talk show on KALW, an affiliate of National Public Radio. After George W. Bush's re-election in 2004, Aguilar rented a van and hit the road with her boyfriend. Their goal: to meet and speak with as many Republicans as possible on their own turf.
The result of their travels is the book, "Red Highways: A Liberal's Journey into the Heartland", which records the dialogues Aguilar had with conservatives in four traditionally Republican states: Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Montana.
"I realised that it was time to leave my comfort zone," she writes. "I needed to turn off my computer and get out into the streets to find out why people vote the way they do and find out if we're as divided as we're led to believe...I wanted to get past the superficial sound bites and engage in real conversations, hopefully respectful conversations."
During her travels, Aguilar meets the types of people we hear a lot about in the media. She sits in the pews at conservative evangelical mega-churches in Texas and attends a gun show in Oklahoma City.
But Aguilar also talks to many people in these "Red States" who never get any press. In Jackson, Mississippi, Aguilar walked past a throng of anti-abortion protesters as she visits the only legal abortion clinic in the state. She interviews working class Latinos along Mexico's border with Texas, gay drag queens in Montana, and the group Republicans for Environmental Protection.
In most cases, these progressives feel isolated and many are afraid to let their neighbours know their liberal beliefs. In an interview, Aguilar blamed this feeling of isolation on the media.
"All the media does is spew sound bites," she told IPS. "So it's very easy for people to feel alone. In Mississippi, I met pro-choice women who lived next door to each other but neither of them knew what the other one was doing. If pro-choice Republicans were given a voice in the mainstream media, they would realise they're not alone."
Over the course of her travels, Aguilar does her best to get a balanced view of the U.S. population, and often that takes her to the parking lots of Wal-Mart, the country's largest retailer and biggest employer.
"I did quite a few interviews in Wal-Mart parking lots because they are always filled with a diverse range of people constantly coming and going," she wrote. "The people I met who made six to seven dollars an hour told me that while they miss mom and pop shops, they wouldn't be able to afford the basics if it weren't for Wal-Mart. The workers I met said they rarely asked for raises or health care because they were grateful to have a job at a time when so many people were struggling to find one."
Given the stories of personal struggle she heard in her travels, Aguilar is angry there isn't more discussion of poverty coming from Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. She said she was hopeful that the issue would break through to the mainstream after former Senator John Edwards made it the centrepiece of his campaign for president. But after Edwards lost to Obama, and then admitted to an extramarital affair, the issue was buried by the political elite.
"The most interesting thing that I learned was how well-informed people are," she told IPS. "These people aren't reading The Nation [a progressive newsweekly] or listening to Air America and their issues aren't being discussed in the mainstream media but they still know what's going on."
"It don't take a rocket scientist to figure out the world," a single mother with three kids told Aguilar in Kansas. Tanya told Aguilar she worried because the education system was broken, the schools were decrepit, after school programmes didn't exist, the costs of college was constantly rising, and the job market was bleak.
"I pay attention 'cause I'm in this world too," Tanya said. "I watch CNN, but I'm tired of seein' those lying politicians. They give tax cuts to the rich and keep us poor."
Aguilar hopes liberals who read her book will "get out of their bubble" and travel to red states and cities between now and election day on Nov. 4. From San Francisco, she notes, conservative Reno, Nevada is just three hours away. Conservative, rural parts of California are even closer.
"Drive an hour and hand out materials at a strip mall. Find a neighbourhood in the Central Valley where everyone has a flag in front of their house and go talk with them. Go to Nevada and register voters," she said. "Or just go out to the mall and talk to people. That's the message."
*IPS correspondent Aaron Glantz is author of "The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans" and co-author of "Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations."
(END/2008)
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