Showing posts with label elitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elitism. Show all posts

Friday, April 26, 2019

It's one of those flat states in the middle. . . .


I've lived in Omaha for 31 years now, and I have to tell you that it's news to me that Heidi Heitkamp is my former U.S. senator.

Oh . . . wait. She's not. She was a North Dakota senator until January.

Nebraska . . . North Dakota . . . seed caps, John Deere tractors, unbearable winters, old white rustics who wouldn't know a frappuccino from a woke meme. What's the difference?

Am I right?

I mean, if you've seen one part of Flyover Country -- And, really, why would you want to? -- you've seen it all. And now back to our breaking news . . . a gay Black Lives Matters activist is condemning some shit on one coast or the other.

Am I right, Time mag, mag?

Sorry, but as a proud rube out here on the flown-over Great Plains, my "inclusive" media betters out there in D.C. got me on the rag, rag.

And while they're at it, they can take their insults about the queen and shove them up their royal Timese machine.


News flash! Some of us prairie pigf***ers are familiar with Joan Baez.

YOU HAVE to be a lifelong resident of Flyover Country to get how grating it is to be so insignificant that you can have a story actually get onto the effing Time magazine website, and then onto effing Apple News without anyone effing noticing that Heidi Heitkamp is from effing North Dakota and not effing Nebraska. After all the news coverage about how the red-state Democrat would vote on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court after the Me Too furor over his high-school and college "boofing" (and how her no vote likely cost her re-election), how could you not effing know?

One could let it slide as a simple brain fart if it weren't for a lifetime of observing Coastal America being shocked that, for example, Omaha has goddamn paved streets, decent restaurants and broadband Internet connectivity. And that there are no cattle herds wandering down Dodge Street in search of forage.

This actually is an improvement over New Yorkers -- again, for example -- who've been here and point out what a relative backwater it is. Perhaps, but our house payment here might rent a cardboard box over a steam grate there.


What's sad is that folks in these parts actually are, on some level, desperate for the approval of our cosmopolitan "betters" and always have been. We seek validation from those who scarcely know we exist and, with vanishingly few exceptions, we ain't gonna get it.

But that's not the half of the flyover equation. I grew up in Louisiana. No, there were no alligators in my back yard. Yes, we did have indoor plumbing. Many folks can read, write and cipher some.

And you are one Category 5 hurricane in the wrong place from freezing in the dark, America.

LET'S BE honest here. The only damned reason Time magazine gives a good goddamn about former U.S. Sen Heidi Heitkamp of Nebraska . . . North Dakota . . . whatever . . . is that Donald Trump is president of the United States, lots of Forgotten America like Nebraska and Louisiana voted for him, and he's turned out to be a fascist nightmare.

There's nothing like the political equivalent of a global thermonuclear exchange to finally get your attention. Am I right?

Maybe, ultimately, that was the point of his election. After all, the alt-right may be on the upswing, but it's not an Electoral College majority. Plenty of reasonable, decent Americans in Flyover Country were content to throw a bomb into America's entire rigged, classist political and social infrastructure. Oops.

I'm just spitballin' here, but perhaps there was an element of "You can ignore us, but we can kill you" in there as well. Just like the "yellow vests" in France, who largely hail from the forgotten périphérique of the country, flyover folk know who couldn't care less about them -- and they have less and less to lose by blowing the whole damned thing the hell up.

And they also well know the limits of Woke America's inclusivity.