Blue-State Britain; Red-State Iran?

A reader offers a provocation:

You print a letter that says Boston, MA is more like a "foreign country", i.e. the UK, than it is like Arizona. Once again, the tired reactionary Rovian slur that red states are real America while blue states are "foreign".

Let’s set this straight. Here’s the letter you should be printing:

"I am a native of Boston, Massachusetts, the epitome of Bunker Hill, Minutemen, Thanksgiving blue state America. I also have traveled extensively in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other fundamentalist theocracies. I have lived in North Carolina for the past year, and it is very intriguing to realize that North Carolina, and indeed the entire Bible Belt, is culturally and even politically much closer to a foreign country – the theocratic Middle East – than it is to other contiguous parts of the same country like Massachusetts."

Remember: the Northeast was and is the cradle of American ideals. It’s the Bob Jones theocrats who are, once again, attempting to create a foreign country on U.S. soil.

Fighting words – more inflammatory than I think justified. I might add to my own observations that Blue State Britain is perhaps closest in sensibility not to Boston but to Seattle, if only for climate and cultural reasons. And to my mind, the most fascinating development of the last two decades has been the conversion of freedom-loving California from a Republican stronghold to a Democratic bastion. Reagan’s home became Clinton’s base. Tells you something about where Reagan conservatism now lingers, I think.