Joseph A. Palermo
McGovern Democrats on the Prairie
Way out on a family farm about twenty miles north of Lemmon, South Dakota, across the railroad tracks and technically in North Dakota, I meet for the first time my wife's aunt and uncle and her 93-year-old grandmother. Astonishingly, they are all dyed-in-wool Democrats, and not just DLC centrist Clintonites, but super-liberal, left-wing George McGovern Democrats.
We immediately commenced in a Great Plains version of what Fox News likes to call "Bush bashing," which culminated in the 93-year-old daughter of the original couple who homesteaded these 160 acres back in 1907 asking me why hasn't anyone assassinated George W. Bush yet. Hearing this sentiment from a rural mid-western great grandmother of eight, who later also expressed her hope that aliens from another planet might abduct Bush, sent me into a fit of laughter. I also thought that I better immediately notify Homeland Security and the Secret Service because this elderly farmwoman clearly constituted a viable threat to our national security and could be a senior operative of that feared terrorist group, "Al Qaeda on the Prairie."
(The Bush supporters I spoke with on my trip to the Mountain States and the Midwest expressed their fear of terrorism, saying that 9-11 "changed everything." It seemed that those who are least likely ever to be victims of a terrorist attack were the ones who feared it the most and see the occupation of Iraq as somehow protecting them.)
If you stand still in silence outside the two little houses on the farm you can hear the rustling of the grasslands. The wind hums in your ears as if it traveled across a continent unimpeded. The ear cilia seem to vibrate at the same frequency as the prairie grass. The tractor sits idly by waiting to be set free on the land, and spools of hay dot the landscape receding into the distance playing an optical trick worthy of M.C. Escher. With no moon the plains are an empty blackness at night, vacant, the cones and rods of your eyes don't know what to do, and your retinas snap shut blocking light from tickling your occipital lobe. Now I know what agoraphobia feels like...
...The McGovern Democrats in these parts are severely outnumbered by the Bush lovers, but the fact that they've hung on to their New Deal values shows that Karl Rove's brand of "politics" has its limitations even in the remote heartland of America...[Open in new window]
McGovern Democrats on the Prairie
Way out on a family farm about twenty miles north of Lemmon, South Dakota, across the railroad tracks and technically in North Dakota, I meet for the first time my wife's aunt and uncle and her 93-year-old grandmother. Astonishingly, they are all dyed-in-wool Democrats, and not just DLC centrist Clintonites, but super-liberal, left-wing George McGovern Democrats.
We immediately commenced in a Great Plains version of what Fox News likes to call "Bush bashing," which culminated in the 93-year-old daughter of the original couple who homesteaded these 160 acres back in 1907 asking me why hasn't anyone assassinated George W. Bush yet. Hearing this sentiment from a rural mid-western great grandmother of eight, who later also expressed her hope that aliens from another planet might abduct Bush, sent me into a fit of laughter. I also thought that I better immediately notify Homeland Security and the Secret Service because this elderly farmwoman clearly constituted a viable threat to our national security and could be a senior operative of that feared terrorist group, "Al Qaeda on the Prairie."
(The Bush supporters I spoke with on my trip to the Mountain States and the Midwest expressed their fear of terrorism, saying that 9-11 "changed everything." It seemed that those who are least likely ever to be victims of a terrorist attack were the ones who feared it the most and see the occupation of Iraq as somehow protecting them.)
If you stand still in silence outside the two little houses on the farm you can hear the rustling of the grasslands. The wind hums in your ears as if it traveled across a continent unimpeded. The ear cilia seem to vibrate at the same frequency as the prairie grass. The tractor sits idly by waiting to be set free on the land, and spools of hay dot the landscape receding into the distance playing an optical trick worthy of M.C. Escher. With no moon the plains are an empty blackness at night, vacant, the cones and rods of your eyes don't know what to do, and your retinas snap shut blocking light from tickling your occipital lobe. Now I know what agoraphobia feels like...
...The McGovern Democrats in these parts are severely outnumbered by the Bush lovers, but the fact that they've hung on to their New Deal values shows that Karl Rove's brand of "politics" has its limitations even in the remote heartland of America...[Open in new window]
posted by Dan at 3:30 PM
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