My mother's family's name is Sanders. It's Scots-Irish.
Apparently, I like to have my rock fights on the net...
:-).
Cheers,
RAH
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-524-1347653-524,00.html
The Times of London
November 07, 2004
Focus: US Election Special
'Talk to someone in Cincinnati? Are you crazy?'. . . and so the Democrats
blew it
Tom Wolfe on the elite that got lost in middle America
Over the past few days I've talked to lots of journalists and literary
types in New York. I've grown used to the sound of crushed, hushed voices
on the end of the phone. The weight of George Bush's victory seems almost
too much. But what did they expect, I ask myself.
They don't like the war and the way the war is going, they don't like Bush
and they don't like what this election says about America. But where's
their sense of reality?
The liberal elite showed it was way out of touch even before the election.
I was at a dinner party in New York and when everyone was wondering what to
do about Bush I suggested they might do like me and vote for him. There was
silence around the table, as if I'd said by the way, I haven't mentioned
this before but I'm a child molester.
Now, like Chicken Licken after an acorn fell on his head, they think the
sky is falling. I have to laugh. It reminds me of Pauline Kael, the film
critic, who said, I don't know how Reagan won - I don't know a soul who
voted for him. That was a classic and reflects the reaction of New York
intellectuals now. Note my definition of intellectual here is what you
often find in this city: not people of intellectual attainment but more
like car salesmen, who take in shipments of ideas and sell them on.
I think the results in Ohio, the key state this time, tell us everything
we need to know. Overall, the picture of Republican red and Democratic blue
across the country remained almost unchanged since last time. The millions
of dollars spent and miles travelled on the Bush and Kerry campaigns made
no difference at all.
But look at Ohio and the different voting patterns in Cleveland and
Cincinnati. Cleveland, in the north of the state, is cosmopolitan, what we
would think of as an eastern city, and Kerry won by two votes to one.
Cincinnati, in the southeast corner of Ohio, is a long way away both
geographically and culturally. It's Midwestern and that automatically means
hicksville to New York intellectuals. There Bush won by a margin of
150,000 votes and it was southern Ohio as a whole that sent him back to the
White House.
The truth is that my pals, my fellow journos and literary types, would
feel more comfortable going to Baghdad than to Cincinnati. Most couldn't
tell you what state Cincinnati is in and going there would be like being
assigned to a tumbleweed county in Mexico.
They can talk to sheikhs in Lebanon and esoteric radical groups in
Uzbekistan, but talk to someone in Cincinnati . . . are you crazy? They
have no concept of what America is made of and even now they won't see that.
So who are the people who voted for Bush? I think the most cogent person
on this is James Webb, the most decorated marine to come out of Vietnam.
Like John Kerry he won the Silver Star, but also the Navy Cross, the
equivalent of our highest honour, the Congressional Medal.
He served briefly under Reagan as secretary for the navy, but he has since
become a writer. His latest book, Born Fighting, is the most important
piece of ethnography in this country for a long time. It's about that huge
but invisible group, the Scots-Irish. They're all over the Appalachian
mountains and places like southern Ohio and Tennessee.
Their theme song is country music and when people talk about rednecks,
this is the group they're talking about: this is the group that voted for
Bush.
Though they've had successes, the Scots-Irish generally haven't done well
economically. They're individualistic, they're stubborn and they value
their way of life more then their financial situation. If a politician
comes out for gun control they take it personally. It's not about guns,
really: if you're against the National Rifle Association you're against
them as a people.
They take Protestantism seriously. It tickles me when people talk about
the Christian right. These people aren't right wing, they're just
religious. If you're religious, of course, you're against gay marriage and
abortion. You're against a lot of things that have become part of the
intellectual liberal liturgy.
Everyone who joins the military here thinks, Where did all these
Southerners come from? These people love to fight. During the French and
Indian wars, before there was a United States, recruiters would turn up in
the Carolinas and in the Appalachians and say, Anyone want to go and fight
Indians? There was a bunch of boys who were always up for it and they
haven't lost that love of battle.
My family wasn't Scots-Irish but my father was from the Shenendoah Valley,
in the Blue Ridge mountains
