Reading through some of the letters blasted my way, I’ve discovered a form of prejudice that I didn’t know existed until just now. The mere fact that I live in Montana has drawn, from some, such wild bile and spittle that I’m shocked. And it’s hard to be shocked these days. One guy, some nut, said he was tired of being lectured on morality by people from the sticks — people who think of New York as “Jew York City.” What would that be called? Knee-jerk anti-anti semitism? This stupid business of classifying one another according to state-of-residence is exactly what I’m complaining about when I say that political conversation nowadays has gotten awfully tiresome in certain aspects. This red-blue thing isn’t real: it’s a grid put down on the landscape by lazy pundits in order to foster a conflict that isn’t there so the poeple who profit from conflict can work their way with us. It reminds me of the 1990s, when Clinton blew the so-called “Militia Movement” into a threat much larger than it was (turn your guns on Osama, dumbass)and used it as a pretext to set his snipers on hermits in Idaho and religious separationists in Texas.
Here’s what Montana’s like, if anyone’s interested. First, it’s one of the most urbanized places in the country, where most of the people cluster up together due to lack of water in the landscape. It’s full of back-the-landers from the 70s, populist out-of-work miners in cities like Butte whose ancesotrs bloodily started the union movement, ranchers and farmers who keep the land open for their hay and wheat and cattle instead of just selling out and cashing in so second-home types can build their gated developments (though there are more and more of those), and refugees from places like LA who’ve taken their equity out of booming housing markets and put it into modest houses so they don’t have to work in cubicles 24/7. We’ve got a vicious drug problem — crystal meth — and a lot of other contemporary ills that keep us from being the lazy wooded paradise full of smug evangelicals that others picture us as. We legalized medical marijuana last year and if there’s a governing political culture it’s live and let live and don’t make too many rules, because people just break rules, which means more police, etcetera, and a cycle of hypocrisy by which everyone condemns the neighbors for doing pretty much the same things they’re doing themselves. And as state constitutions go, ours is as progressive as they come in terms of civil rights, outdoing the federal constitution.
– posted by Walter
The Dish 