Red and Redder

In late 2004, after the election, a film maker named Michael Shea decided he had to find out what makes heartlanders tick.

Shea didn't understand how Bush could have gotten re-elected. He didn't know anybody who'd voted for him, and lived in one of the bluest states (California). So he and some friend/assistants set out for the intercoastal heart of the country, with the idea of interviewing red-state Republican/Christians. They planned to approach their subjects politely, avoid confrontation, and just ask them what they believe and to describe themselves.

I haven't seen the movie Red State, but I've read some partial transcripts. I'm finally beginning to understand why it's impossible to talk, or relate to many of our fellow citizens, probably even a majority, who appear to live in a parallel universe.

For example one interviewee, Dennis Mansfield of Boise, Idaho, who describes himself as a "Republican activist," says:

Those of us who are conservatives and call Christ the king of our lives realize that we really serve a kingdom and not a democracy. In a sense we're citizens in two cultures at the same time. We are Americans, but we really realize that the longer, bigger picture, sort of the eternal picture, is that we're also citizens of a king, and his name is Christ; his name is Jesus...Christ is love, but he's also the god, Jehovah, that had tons of people taken out because of their complete idolatry.

This is the first I've ever heard of God's bipolar disorder.

Equally perplexing was the testimony of Gladys Gill, Director of the Mississippi chapter of Concerned Women for America:

Mrs. Gill: I think we lost more than we gained with civil rights. I hope to see them repealed...I don't know where you folks were when we were trying to hang on to state's rights.

Shea: I was two I think.

Mrs. Gill: Yeah, right

Shea: In fact I was born in the year the Civil Rights Act was passed.

Mrs. Gill: Yeah. Right. So you don't remember what life was like when we had liberty to do what we needed to do in our own lives.

The blogger Digby, who saw the movie day before yesterday, says, "My favorite moment was when Mrs Gill, the Mississippi director of Concerend Women For America, gets upset that she's been 'worked over' by this interviewer who had just asked her what she believed in. It's clear that when the totality of Mrs Gill's racism and intolerance became manifest in the few minutes that she spoke, she suddenly realized that she had given herself away as a white supremecist (sic) and Christian nationalist. Naturally she claimed victimhood and ended the interview."

The people in the Red State movie aren't just from another country; they're from another planet. Welcome to Uranus.

You can see clips of this parallel reality on the movie's site.

Digby's got one more interesting thing to say: "One of the things that's obvious in this film is that these people are practiced phonies too. They say things like 'we took us a trip to California and couldn't believe what we saw out there!' like it's 1952 and they're Andy and Barney. You can't tell me these people don't watch TV. There's a good part of their schtick that's pure poseur --- the 'heartland hick fer Jesus' is very often a thoroughly modern American who's playing just as many games as anybody else. Taking their 'moral concerns' at face value and thinking they can be persuaded by tweaking issues and changing rhetoric is to be a chump. This is a tribal game."

Digby's word "tribal" hit me like a silver bullet between the eyebrows. Suddenly I understood why debate, appeals to reason, the marshalling of factual information, and the revelation of lies and criminal behavior is futile in today's political climate. Progressives, who tend to be educated, secular, and committed to rationalism, are wasting their time documenting their carefully constructed arguments, hoping to find the combination of facts and persuasion that will burn off the fog of ignorance, superstition, and bloodthirsty, enraged fanaticism.

We had the right idea in the sixties. We're not going to win any elections. What we need to do is put some distance between ourselves and that other tribe.