TASTE COMMENTARY
What a Country!
Every four years, candidates and journalists discover America--or do they?
BY BILL KAUFFMAN
Friday, February 6, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110004657
Every four years, the national media rediscover those exotic entities known as the 50 states--or at least those states whose legislatures are savvy enough to schedule primaries and caucuses early in the bleak midwinter. For a frenzied month, even the smuggest cosmopolitan correspondent has an inkling that he has stumbled upon the great hidden strength of America, which is--not to sound like a college administrator--its diversity.
The worst reporters experience nothing and think it's America. Their time in the provinces is a flash of prisonlike airports, chain hotels and the monotonous Interstate Highway System, all set to the soporific hum of CNN. They fall back on the hoariest stereotypes, depicting Iowans as hearty, honest farm folk (like Prof. Harold Hill?) and New Hampshireites as flinty Yankees who say "A-yup" and give laconic directions to Laconia. If confronted by an actual manifestation of regional pride--say, the Confederate flag in South Carolina--they squeal like six-year-old girls finding a snake.
Yet the persistence of regional clichés in the age of MTV gives reason for hope. Missouri is not indistinguishable from New Hampshire. Even Peter Jennings can sense this. Despite the ubiquity of pop culture, not every boy in Darlington, S.C., prefers Britney Spears to the girl next door. We are not a nation of interchangeable "Friends"-watchers--yet.
Certain self-evident truths assert themselves as we watch the Men Who Would Be President hopscotch across the country. The most obvious is that our places are far more interesting than our politicians, who in their pursuit of power shed every oddity, mute every color and efface every idiosyncrasy until they achieve a state of nothingness that might be called Gephardtism.
The relentlessly uninteresting men who dominate American politics are poor reflections of our variegated states. Take Iowa, a place so rich in characters and loveliness that it gave us "Music Man" composer Meredith Willson, the Herbert Hoover-reverencing, New Left historian William Appleman Williams and Donna Reed. Can such a glorious trio be distilled into, say, the faux-populist Sen. Tom Harkin? I don't think so.
How did a bland New South ambulance chaser like John Edwards even dare show his face in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, artistic home of that sardonic painter of Middle America, Grant Wood, and birthplace of that iconic American company, Quaker Oats? (The recent absorption of Quaker Oats into Pepsi--over the heart-wrenching objections of loyal old Quaker employees--is a sign of these distressing times.)
Grant Wood was no diffident Midwesterner, deferential to coastal bosses. He loved the distinct culture of his region, urging a "revolt against the domination exercised over arts and letters and over much of our thinking and living by Eastern capitals of finance and politics." Iowans cannot achieve such a revolution by gathering in caucuses to vote for a boarding-school liberal like John Kerry, but the incongruity serves, again, to contrast the vitality of our places with the lifelessness of our candidates.
What can a rootless military bureaucrat like Wesley Clark think when he walks into a diner in Littleton, N.H., whose patrons are bound to each other by a web of kinship, friendship, love, hate and secret histories that outsiders can never know? Gen. Clark can choke down the coffee and mumble platitudes about health care, but the encounter means nothing to anyone.
Unlike the placeless Gen. Clark, Sen. John Kerry at least secretes that New England preppie sense of entitlement that repels any townie with an ounce of pride. Odor of hauteur, we might call it. Thus Mr. Kerry does embody something of his region, albeit its least attractive aspect.
If, on the other hand, Howard Dean's candidacy heard its death knell in New England, perhaps it's because Gov. Dean was always more New York than Yankee. Frank Bryan, the author of "Real Democracy," the authoritative work on the New England town meeting, says that Gov. Dean "was raised in an environment as completely estranged from town meetings as one can imagine . . . and never participated as a citizen in a town meeting." Gov. Dean is about as "New England" as the Patriots, by which I do not mean Sam Adams and John Hancock.
In fact, the Super Bowl champs are a nice, if brutal, illustration of ersatz regionalism. Many of us vent our vestigial local loyalties by cheering for transient athletic mercenaries whose ties to the cities in which they play are no stronger than a free-agent contract. But the Patriots are as "New England" as Wal-Mart, and the Panthers are no more "Carolina" than Starbucks. For displays of authentic local pride in flyover America, drop by one of the high-school basketball tournaments getting under way later this month--and watch games in which the teams represent real communities and play without stopping for TV timeouts.
"Locality gives art," said Robert Frost, who as a Grover Cleveland Democrat would have scorned the statist vote-beggers swarming North of Boston every fourth winter. Alas for art's sake, Frost's road less traveled is filling up with Olive Gardens and Applebees. Concord, N.H., and Columbia, S.C., are looking too much alike for comfort these days. If the sameness is getting you down, join the club. (Not Sam's Club or BJ's, please.)
A great war rages in the forgotten--yet quadrennially headline-making--America of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina. This battle pits locally based institutions against the grim forces of homogenization. It's "Sex and the City" vs. the Sadie Hawkins Dance; Home Depot vs. mom-and-pop hardware stores; Justin Timberlake vs. the volunteer fire department. I haven't heard a single candidate even acknowledge the existence of this conflict. And I'm sure it's not uppermost in the mind of Teresa Heinz Kerry or her husband.
The more perceptive reporters left Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and the Groundhog Day-after primary states in a pleasant daze. They had seen a few pieces of America, pieces that weren't cut by the Washington jigsaw. And then it was back to the antiseptic newsroom or the TV studio, where the America that exists underneath the drone of Clear Channel and the witless smut of the Super Bowl halftime show is a half-remembered dream. There is still a mighty lovely country to be discovered. Just don't look for it on CNN. At least not until midwinter 2008.
Mr. Kauffman's "Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette" will be published in paperback by Picador next month. |
