Wolcott-Red State Babylon

Red State Babylon
by James Wolcott November 2006
Vanity Fair

In contemporary lore, the good people of the red states walk in Jesus's sandals while the rest of us are following Satan into the licking flames. Twenty-plus years of conservative propaganda have convinced millions of Republicans and their pet Beltway pundits that they inherited the legacy of frontier values and dwell in baptismal light, unlike modern Democrats, who crawled out from under rocks and prefer the ambiguous dark, where there's no right or wrong, only "personal choices." Newt Gingrich once spouted that Susan Smith's murder of her two children in 1994 was a sign of the evil that liberal Democrats had wrought: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things.... The only way you get change is to vote Republican." According to the gospel of Saint Newt, William J. Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and similar blowholes, the dying raptures of Sodom and Gomorrah can be found in the cultural duchies of the blue states. Here sin and moral sloth have set up shop, and venereal outbreaks of trendy ideas go unchecked. Conservative pundits and politicians regularly jeer that these Jurassic Parks of geriatric do-gooders and brainwashed college students don't represent the "real" America—the God-fearing, flag-waving, decent-living, high-octane, steeped-in-common-sense, everyday-low-prices heartland. Yet even as blue states hug the coasts and red states spread like a bloodstain across America's outstretched body, the influence of these elitist enclaves remains pervasive, corrosive, rotting away the pillars of moral order and foisting abortion, divorce, pornography, gay marriage, snail-darter environmentalism, secular humanism, dovish appeasement, moral relativism, and Rosie O'Donnell's TV comeback upon a once virile nation. The very names of the enclaves breeding such bacteria make the nostril hairs quiver. Hollywood. Berkeley. San Francisco. Madison, Wisconsin. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Martha's Vineyard. Georgetown. And, worst of all, New York City, especially Manhattan, most especially its Upper West Side, disparaged by its critics as the outpatient clinic for last-gasp liberalism.

It's so unjust.

As a resident of the Upper West Side and a regular bus rider, I must protest that the truth has been perverted and inverted. Yes, the Upper West Side is liberal, socially conscious, multi-culti, gay-friendly (Rosie's brother Daniel—also gay—is our state assemblyman), and occasionally itchy with political correctness. And, yes, it's true that we care, perhaps care too much, rattling our Zabar's bags as we nag the nation's conscience to no avail. Really, though, such little harm we do, what unracy lives we lead. It's like Jewish-Hispanic-Amish country up here! The broad sidewalks present a wholesome cavalcade of baby strollers, Columbia University students, diabetics on canes, and tourists posing in front of Tom's Restaurant, the diner made famous on Seinfeld. It isn't the cultural bastions of the blue states such as the Upper West Side that are greasing America's slide into the disco inferno. It's the Republican red states that are lowering the country's moral standards and dragging us through muck and malaise, the red states that are pustulating with horny hypocrites, rampant crime, polygamy, crystal-meth labs, federal handouts (The Economist recently christened Alaska "America's welfare state"), illegitimate births, blimping waistlines, and future generations of dumb bunnies. JonBenet Ramsey, dolled up and immortalized in her beauty-pageant footage, is the pre-pubescent red-hot-mama mascot of red-state Babylon.

"Red States cling to double standards like a drunk holds on to the last beer he can afford," writes Justin Cord Hayes in the semi-humorous survival guide Blue State/Red State. Hypocrisy is the hallmark of the red-state bull-roarer. Gingrich, who makes Hayes's dishonor roll of "conservative scalawags," has been married three times and has been known to have problems keeping it zipped. Limbaugh has three marriages in the loss column. He is also a prancing Tartuffe on the drug issue, condemning addicts and users on his radio show for their weak wills and moral failings (and wanting to chuck them behind bars), only to be revealed as a painkiller anteater himself. Bennett expended volumes of wind preaching virtue and decrying seamy decadence, only to be exposed as a high-stakes slot-machine love monkey. But these are minor-league hypocrisies, as much a by-product of male prerogative as of Republican humbug. It is at the extremes that the red-state double standards are most sharply defined.

~snip~

The rest at:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/11/wolcott200611

This is a terrible article. Is this guy trying to channel H.L. Mencken? It's a cartoonish depiction of "the rubes." This is the kind of thing that turns Red States against those smarty-pants elitist Democrats. Has the writer ever been out of New York City. New Yorkers can be as provincial as small-town Indianans. This is proof.

This characterization seems pretty damn accurate to me.

you would be CORRECT

Truth hurts huh?

"how come red states lead the nation in violent crime, divorce, illegitimacy, and incarceration, among other evils?"

He is actually being moderate in his criticism.

and New Yorkers, heartily advanced by all those people he names throughout the article, by your use of a phrase like "those smarty-pants elitist Democrats." How easily it came to you.

Woolcott is defending against that, initially, and briefly—and quite understandably, in my view—but his larger point is to show how people in the Red States aren't exactly practicing what they so loudly preach. He is "depicting" with facts. Sobering, unstereotyped facts.

There is a cartoonish stereotype of northeastern liberals. But answering one cartoonish stereotype with another doesn't make you clever. It makes you Bill O'Reilly, with a big vocabulary.

He's more than clever, he's brilliantly incisive. Whether you take umbrage at this piece or not.

And that is good, because the tone coming from the right has been low since Reagan.
Now, the dominent paradigm of political discourse is invective. Get mean or lose*, surely Kerry proved this.
I believe that we have lost enough.

*or win with a margin that is stealable.

a leader of the state's Christian Coalition.

http://www.answers.com/main/ntq-tname-susan%252Dsmith-fts_start-

....

She was spared the death penalty in a decision by her South Carolina jury, after her stepfather, Beverly Russell, a prominent Union County citizen, Republican Party and Christian Coalition leader, testified that he had sexually molested her when she was a teenager (until the intervention of the local Department of Social Services), and again in the months before the drowning of the two boys. Russell was never charged with a crime, despite the fact that he was accused in court of, and did not deny, the molestation and incestuous sexual abuse of his teenaged stepdaughter. <2>

While she has been in prison, two guards have been punished for having sex with Smith <3>,...

....


These claims/charges by the the RW must ALWAYS be paired with the truth, whenever they are mentioned. Otherwise the lies linger.

I'm not sure this info was ever in M$M; I believe I read it in a Molly Ivins column.

IOW, Gingrich et al blamed her murder of her children on democrats' low morals when in fact it's republicans that have despicably low morals.