A Washington Media type visits flyover country. Gasp! Folks there like conservative Web sites!
An editor might want to tease out the assumptions that led Mr. Finkel to add an article to the following sentences.. "a Web site called WorldNetDaily … .a Web site called FreeRepublic … ."
For a Conservative, Life Is Sweet in Sugar Land, Tex.
By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 26, 2004; Page A01
Second of three articles
SUGAR LAND, Tex. -- This is the home of Britton Stein, who describes George W. Bush as "a man, a man's man, a manly man," and Al Gore as "a ranting and raving little whiny baby."
Forty-nine years old, Stein is a husband, a father, a landscaper and a Republican. He lives in a house that has six guns in the closets and 21 crosses in the main hallway. His wife cuts his hair with electric clippers. His three daughters aren't embarrassed when he kisses them on their cheeks. He loves his family, hamburgers and his dog. He believes in God, prays daily and goes to church weekly. He has a jumbo smoker in his back yard and a 40-foot tree he has climbed to hang Christmas lights. He has a pickup truck that he has filled with water for the Fourth of July parade, driving splashing kids around a community where Boy Scouts plant American flags in the yards. His truck is a Chevy. His beer is Bud Light. His savior is Jesus Christ. His neighbors include Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), the House majority leader, who says of Sugar Land, "I think it is America."
Pollsters and political consultants have a more specific definition of Sugar Land, as part of what they call Red America. The term is shorthand for the roughly half of the U.S. population that tends toward conservative values, the Republican Party, gun ownership, church as the preferred way to express faith, and moral absolutes.
"You find communities like this all over the place," DeLay says of Sugar Land. "This is what the future is about."
Stein has his own description of it:
"My life."
Sense of 'Utopia'
It's a life that Stein concurs is, in many ways, the very stereotype of Red, from the guns to the truck to the vote he will be casting in this fall's presidential election.
When a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press concluded that the American electorate is "further apart than ever in its political values," one of its emblems could be Stein, who says that it would take "a frontal lobotomy" for him to vote for Sen. John F. Kerry, that "I would need to have my brain cleansed of all reason and thought."
When Catholic University political professor John Kenneth White says that Kerry and Bush are navigating for votes in "parallel universes," the universe of Stein is the one in which the president is Republican, the U.S. senators are Republicans, the congressman is Republican, the county commissioner is Republican, the Inspector of Hides and Animals is Republican, the neighbors are Republicans, the friends are Republicans, and the mayor is a Republican named David Wallace, who says of Sugar Land: "When you drive around here, you get the sense that you're in Utopia."
Brick homes, clean streets, good schools, plentiful churches -- "it's the typical white-picket-fence, 2.1-children atmosphere," Wallace says of Sugar Land. No litter, landscaped boulevards, approved-plant lists, recommended-rose lists, strict zoning, a town square called "Town Square," logos everywhere, and the ever-present smell of just-mown grass in a voting precinct that went Bush 72 percent, Gore 25 percent -- this is the landscape of Stein, whose path here can be condensed to this:
In 1977, he bought a pair of hedge trimmers for $25. A month later, he went back to the same store and bought a second pair of trimmers, but now they were $30. That's when he angrily learned about inflation and began paying attention to politics. Then he learned about the notion of American weakness during the Iranian hostage crisis. Then he learned about responding to a politician's message when Ronald Reagan talked of America's greatness coming from its people rather than government. Then, about the time thousands of people were said to be in danger of losing their jobs because of an endangered species of owl, he decided there are two kinds of Americans, those who live in the world of "emotion and feel good," and those, like him, who live in "the real world." And now his version of the real world is a two-story house in a neighborhood of like-minded people, where he begins every day by turning on his computer.
Time for the news.
Some people get their information from the TV networks or the paper. Stein starts with the Drudge Report Web site, where he scans the headlines and clicks on one that says, "Rallying Cry For Dems: Vote Bush Out of Rove's Office." "This is the kind of stuff that pisses me off," he says. "They don't give Bush the respect he deserves. Not only because he's president, but because he's a helluva good man."
Next he goes to a Web site called WorldNetDaily.com. He clicks on an article that says, "Poll: Bush's Approval Sinking," but dismisses it as untrustworthy when he sees the poll was done by CBS. "Of course I have a suspicion of CBS," he says. "Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw -- they don't have any credibility with me."
Next he goes through a site called FreeRepublic.com, which calls itself "the premier conservative news forum," and then moves on to a site called sftt.org. "Soldiers for the Truth," he says, scrolling through another list of articles and watching a video of what the site says is a U.S. Apache helicopter targeting and obliterating three Iraqis. "Another guy moving right there," one voice on the video says, all business. "Good. Fire. Hit him," another voice says.
"It's amazing, the military, the men and women who are serving us," Stein says. "You think about the sacrifices, the idea of spending Christmas in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in West Africa, in these hellholes. In the civilian world, they get some injury, carpal tunnel syndrome, and they want to go sue their employers, and these guys . . . I'm so proud of them. I'm so glad they're on our side."
Next he goes to Military.com, where there's a photograph of an American soldier holding a wild-haired Saddam Hussein on the ground moments after his capture. "Look at the contrast," Stein says. "There's the American soldier coming to liberate the country, and there's the tyrant who ran the rape rooms and the children's prisons. That inspires me."
Next he goes to AmericanRhetoric.com, where he has listened to an "awesome" speech by Bush, an "amazing" speech by Reagan, and a "great" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. from a time before "things got so distorted," and then he goes to townhall.com, which calls itself a "conservative news and information" site, where he begins hopscotching from Pat Buchanan to Robert D. Novak to Ann Coulter.
This is how Stein gets his information, along with watching Fox News and skimming the local paper, to which he once canceled his subscription because he was so offended by an opinion column about Bush that began, "The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached." He recognizes that the information he seeks out reinforces his beliefs rather than challenges them, but "I feel I'm more informed than most people," he says. "Most people don't read all of this."
Living in a 'Bubble'
Stein's breakfast is scrambled eggs over congealed grits fried in butter, and coffee that comes not in bean form but already ground and is brewed not through natural brown paper filters but unnatural white ones. " 'Melitta plants four trees for every one used in the production of our filter paper,' " he says, reading the side of the box of filters. He puts the box back in the cabinet. "I could care less."
Stein's lunch is a brisket-and-sausage barbecue sandwich in a restaurant where he wonders what people categorized by pollsters as Blue Americans would think about him. "I would guess they would say I am mean-hearted and mean-spirited. They'd probably think I'm for big business at the expense of poor people. They'd think we want to hurt the poor, hurt the environment, do away with the school system. They'd think that we believe everybody should be able to own Uzis or any kind of gun, and that we want to impose God on them," he says, and then says what he thinks of them:
"Some of what they're saying may be found on good intentions, but a closer look will show it's really not going to work. Their solutions come from government rather than from themselves. . . . Every year they take more and more and more money. And when you see some of these programs, and you're paying thousands of dollars into them, at some point resentment begins to build."
Stein's dinner is hamburgers with American cheese, salad and Tater Tots. He gas-grills the burgers while the salad is assembled by Patrice, Stein's wife of 23 years and counting. They met when he saw her standing on an apartment balcony and presumed to tell her how to water her plants. Now, three children later, he oversees their business's landscape crews and she manages the office. He hunts on weekends, and she makes gumbo with deer sausage. He drives the truck, she drives the minivan. He takes the La-Z-Boy, she takes the couch. According to a recent poll by Zogby International, 70 percent of voters in states that voted for Bush say marriage should be between a man and a woman, and the Steins, who agree on most everything, agree on that, too.
"Anything else is not marriage," Stein says. "In my opinion, it's wrong. It's not just that I don't like it. It's wrong."
The heart of the issue isn't homosexuality, they say -- "My attitude toward them is I really don't care," he says; "Would it change how I feel about someone? I don't think so," she says -- but God-given, Bible-based morality. Even if the relationship involved one of their daughters, Stein says, "We wouldn't have a wedding."
"Eww, that's allowed?" says Carolyn, 14, who has been listening.
"No," Patrice says.
"Let's have a party, and a big ceremony, and if they want to call themselves married they can," Stein says as Carolyn dips a cracker into a 40-ounce jar of peanut butter. "But, well, it wouldn't be a marriage, and I'd say to her, that's not a marriage."
Now Carolyn begins paging through a copy of Teen People.
"There's got to be a point as you go from Ozzie and Harriet to the most total perversion there is, to child molestation, or bestiality, where there's a line, that from here on it's right on one side and wrong on the other," Stein continues. "Where homosexuality falls, maybe it's inside the line, but somewhere we have to say: No farther. Our society, our culture, our religion, our history all revolve around the family. The traditional family unit. There are variations, sure, but go too far, and somebody has to say that's wrong."
Where is the line? That's what the Steins are thinking about when Carolyn interrupts them. "Ouch," she says, holding up a finger with a fresh paper cut. "My second one this week," she says and explains that she got the first one when she and other members of a school club were at the house of a woman who provides emergency foster care for children in crisis, that helping the woman is their project this year, that the project is so different from last year's project -- Let's Keep Sugar Land Beautiful -- that there are kids everywhere in the house and old furniture and writing on the walls, that they were wrapping gifts for a birthday party when a piece of wrapping paper sliced into her hand.
So life isn't perfect in insular Sugar Land. There are children who need emergency foster care. There was a Christmastime double murder a few planned communities away from the Steins', and the suicide of an Enron executive just up the street. There is a teacher at the high school with leukemia for whom Patrice donates blood, and a homeless woman with a "Food Please" sign to whom Britton gives money to as he rolls past in his truck.
There was the night the Steins were upstairs, and "we hear this crash downstairs, and my heart started racing because it sounded like somebody kicked the door in," Stein says. "I said, 'Okay, I'm going to go downstairs and run straight to the closet and get my gun,' and that's what I did." He ran downstairs to get a gun to save his wife and three sleeping daughters, and even though the noise turned out to be the clatter of a falling cookie sheet, he now keeps a gun upstairs, always within easy reach, because sometimes, even in Sugar Land, bad things happen.
But not often.
"I don't know," Patrice says. "Maybe I just want to live in a little bubble or something."
In this bubble, then, the conversation turns to the time one of the girls and her friends were alone in the house watching a video of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and Britton and Patrice, coming home after having dinner out, decided to play a joke.
"It was Patrice's idea," Britton says.
"I was laughing so hard I just about wet my pants," Patrice says.
"I got my gas-powered leaf blower," Britton says. "I got it good and warmed up in the garage so it would start first try, and I came inside and got to the bottom of the stairs and started that thing up."
"And the girls thought it was funny once they stopped shrieking," Patrice says, laughing, as is Britton, as is Carolyn, who closes her magazine, which has a cover photo of the actor Orlando Bloom and the headline, "What Really Turns Him On."
"Orlando Bloom?" Patrice says, seeing it. "Whatever happened to good old names? Like Rock Hudson. And Tab Hunter."
Now she and Britton are laughing, but not Carolyn, who doesn't know anything about Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, including that they were gay.
"Hey, remember that old joke?" Britton says. "What would happen if Rock Hudson and Gomer Pyle got married?"
Patrice and Carolyn look at him.
"Rock Pyle."
Now no one is laughing.
A Churchgoing Family
Sunday. Time for church.
According to the Zogby poll, 51 percent of Red State voters attend church at least weekly. In Blue America, it's 34 percent. In Red America, 32 percent go to church on holidays, rarely or never. In Blue America, it's 46 percent.
Into the minivan go the Steins. Past the community swim club, where the Modifications and Deed Restrictions Committee meets once a month. Past the country club, where one of the members, referring to Sugar Land's large number of Indian residents, keeps saying, "That's with a dot, not with a feather." Past the turn to the high school, where the SAT scores are reassuringly above average. Into the church parking lot, which is filling rapidly, past the "Monument to the Unborn," which Stein helped install near the church's entrance, and into the front row, where Britton and Patrice can be found every week.
They are front-row Catholics, seated all the way to the right. Their daughters are somewhere in the middle, along with 200 or so other teenagers who are the focus of this Mass, called Life Teen. There's a guitar. There are drums and amplifiers. There's a choir of girls any parent would be proud of, led by one with glowing blond hair long enough to cover the "Notre" on her Notre Dame sweatshirt and teeth so white they can be seen clear across the church.
"And so we are a big church," the pastor, Drew Wood, says, looking around as the service gets underway, and so they are: 1,000 seats, five Masses each weekend, each Mass filled to overflowing. "I know some people say it's just me and God, I never go to church, and that's very sad," he continues. "That's not what God wants. He wants people to go to church."
It isn't only the Catholic church that's full, it's all of them in Sugar Land. The seats are full at Christ United Methodist, 900 per service, where the Rev. Tom Pace III, when asked what concerns are on the minds of his congregants, says, "family issues"; and it's that way at the 1,800-member River Pointe Community Church, where the Rev. Patrick Kelley's answer is, "How do we grow strong, healthy, balanced families in today's culture?"
"Once you say, 'I believe what the Bible tells me,' that brings certain responsibilities, and one of them is going to church," Stein is saying now, after the service. There has been a lot of singing, including a solo by David Wallace, the mayor, during which people closed their eyes and raised their arms into the air, charismatic-style. There has been a sermon calling marriage "a noble, sacrificial way of the cross," and communion, during which Patrice, a Eucharistic minister, offered wine to a long line of communicants, including her husband, to whom she said, "The blood of Christ," as she raised the cup to his mouth. "Amen," he said to her, and now the two of them are walking outside.
"There were times when we didn't go to church much," Patrice says. "But it kind of changed when we had kids. They don't come with a set of instructions. They need some guidance. They need morals and examples."
"Belief in a superior being," Stein says. "Forgiveness. Goodness. Service."
"Where do they get the information that leads to their morals?" Patrice wonders about people who don't go to church.
"What's their higher being?" Stein wonders.
"There's a sense of community," Patrice says of what else a church offers.
"You're around like-minded people," Stein says. "Good people."
Here comes one now, the mayor, hurrying out of the church with his wife, and Stein, seeing him, says that if anyone is an example of what God can do, it's David Wallace. That two years before, Wallace was just about dead at the bottom of a swimming pool and that the only thing that brought him back to life was the power of people praying for him to live.
It's a story that Wallace will expand on later. He will say he remembers floating on his back and looking up at a bird, and next it was eight hours later and he was in a hospital. "I drowned," he will say. "When they found me I was flat on the bottom of the pool. My lungs were filled with water. My heart had stopped." He will say he was put on a ventilator, his wife was told he would not survive, a prayer chain was begun, and "literally within an hour of being found at the bottom of the pool I had thousands and thousands of people praying for me." He will say that "in the medical community, even to this day, they can't figure out why I lived," and then make clear the single, indisputable reason he did: "The faith community."
That's what he will say, but now, walking with his wife, what he says is, "Hello, Britton, Patrice. We're trying to think of a restaurant to go to."
"C'mon over for pork loin," Stein offers, and Wallace smiles and says he wishes he could, and the Steins get back in their minivan for the short ride home.
They pass the road that leads to Tom DeLay's, where Stein has done some landscaping over the years.
They pass by hundreds of road-bordering live oaks that were planted by the community association, whose executive director, Sandra Denton, describing her job, says, "We spend a lot of time making sure the trees are lined up straight."
"Schools, churches, grocery stores," Stein says, almost back home now. "It's all close by."
'The Life I Wanted'
All except Hooters, which is in the city of Stafford, just beyond the Sugar Land line.
It's Wednesday afternoon now and Stein is there with two friends, Craig Lannom and Lance May. They are three husbands, three fathers, three Bush votes, three guys watching ESPN and drinking some beers.
Round Number One:
"They make me feel like I have no hope. They make you feel like, why wake up in the morning?" Lannom says of Blue Americans he sees on TV or hears on the radio. "It's like every time I hear Al Franken speak, the world we live in is sooo bad, everything is going sooo wrong. Is it really that bad?"
"We see life as it is," May says.
"They seem bitter," Lannom says. "They just never seem happy. Every time you hear them talking, they're bitching about something."
"They're whiners," Stein agrees.
Round Two:
"I have a cappuccino maker," May confesses.
"You have a what?" Stein asks.
Round Three:
"It's early in the morning, when the sun comes up behind that bank of fog," Stein says, describing his favorite thing about hunting.
"It's when you're fishing, and you look around, and you're the only guy around," May says.
"Fly fishing in Colorado. It was a religious experience," Lannom says.
Round Four:
"I feel it's safer out here. I feel it's more stable. More my kind of people," Lannom says of the appeal of Sugar Land.
"Where the grass is green and the trees are trimmed," Stein says.
"You live in planned neighborhoods where your investment is fairly safe," May says.
"The first time I put my trash out, I put it by the curb, and my neighbor came out and said, 'We don't curb our trash here in Sugar Land.' " Lannom says, laughing. "I had some cinch bugs in my front yard or something, my neighbor says, 'Craig, I want to talk to you about your brown patch.' "
"It's so predictable here," Stein says.
"But that's not bad, though," Lannom says.
"No, that's not bad," Stein says.
Time to go.
The lovely drive home is under what Stein calls a "bluebird sky." In a few hours, Carolyn will have soccer practice. On Friday, Stein is supposed to go quail hunting. In a few weeks, when the pear trees bloom, work will get so busy Stein will be running from morning till night. "They'll be snow white," Stein says of the blooms, in anticipation.
He is, at his core, a sentimental man, Patrice says, and Stein wouldn't disagree.
"I mean, she's my soul mate," he says of Patrice.
"They're everything to me," he says of his daughters.
"I'm very thankful," he says of his life in which nothing, so far, thank God, knock on wood, has gone wrong. "This is the life I wanted and created with help from God, from Patrice, from the kids. We have a vision of what we want life to be."
It's a vision visible through the windshield, right now, as he parks the truck. There's his house. Inside is his family. What more is there?
"Yeah, I like my life," Stein says, approaching the front door. "Absolutely."
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