Red vs Blue

In college I wrote for The Hoosier Review, a now-defunct unofficial alternative to the official university paper that the School of Journalism put out.  I mostly wrote for the Arts & Entertainment section, but below is an article I found that I wrote for the main section.  It got some online traction at the time, and as someone born in Indiana who lives in NYC (and as someone who has never labeled myself either a "Hoosier" or a "New Yorker"), I still think of it periodically when people react to learning my home-state by assuming it's the bastion of unsophistication and I must have been so relieved to get out.  So on a day that's sure to be full of a lot of animosity between red and blue states, perhaps it's worthy of a reprint:

The “Red vs Blue” state rubric that keeps popping up in popular culture is beginning to aggravate me.  A few years ago, a family friend who was born, works, and has lived her entire life in New York City visited my parents in our small town in Indiana -- a town with a red brick road as the Main Street, the obligatory small-town water tower, and lots of parks and walking trails.  Although the friend is a world traveler and has great stories about wild cats on Greek Islands, “antiquity salesmen” on the streets of Cairo, and getting lost on Greek hillsides, she had never visited the American Midwest, and the culture shock, for her, seemed almost overwhelming.  She was amazed and unsettled by the acres of undeveloped land as her plane approached the airport.  She seemed dumbfounded that there were actually museums in Indianapolis, incredulous that there was a symphony, live theatre, or dance productions, and simply refused to believe that local movie theaters had current first-run films.  She was extremely angry that drivers here seemed too ignorant to understand they should stop before merging onto freeways, and she was intensely unsettled, if not intimidated, by the overly friendly smiles and greetings she got from complete strangers, not to mention the fact that Hoosiers seem unfamiliar with the fact that direct eye contact between strangers should be avoided at all times.  She had known my parents from other, more sophisticated times and places, and made it clear that she was appalled that they had decided to settle in the wasteland of Indiana.

Presumably in an attempt to be amusing, Sunday’s Indianapolis Star printed a Red vs Blue “Survey,” purportedly intended to help readers decide where they might stand on the political/ideological map.  The article implies that liberal spots like Bloomington are culturally more advanced, “islands of blue” in red states.  By extension, non-liberal areas (like the rest of Indiana) are culturally bereft.  The survey assumes, for example, that when making TV choices, brain-challenged Red Staters would opt for NASCAR and “Hoosier Millionaire,” while erudite Blue Staters would choose to watch CNBC and “Frontline.”  Probably as a result of watching too many NASCAR races, folks from red states are also, according to the survey, grammatically challenged, and would say, “I never seen a horse like that before,” while the cultured blue-state folks would comment, “I have never seen such a magnificent steed before.”  Surprisingly, the survey assumes the red-state folks can indeed read -- but would pick up a copy of Guns and Ammo for browsing, while the Blue Stater would pick up Architectural Digest.  You get the drift.  Though the article was a puff piece intended to be lighthearted, it was clear that the writer had made some bizarre assumptions about red-state voters.  Though most of the choices would have been too silly for either red or blue-state voters, whoever put the survey together felt that the “correct” answers for the red-state voter should define him clearly as a rube, a hick, a dolt, or something worse.  Despite its goal of humor, the piece nevertheless reinforced a stereotype -- clearly held by people like my parents' friend -- that those of us who might live in Indiana or other "red" states can be assumed to be unsophisticated and uneducated.  And aren't lighthearted, humorous takes on subjects one of the most effective methods of disseminating an opinion?  Isn't that the key behind the success of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show?

The line between humor and mockery can be very thin, and I must admit I'm getting weary of the popular propensity of classifying and categorizing people according to where they live, assuming that a certain stupidity aura surrounds those in the middle of the country.  The fact is that ignorance is not a function of where you live; being “liberal” or “conservative” is no definer of intransigence or open-mindedness; and being “red” or “blue” does not translate into smart or dumb, or right or wrong, or good or bad.  Labeling as such might be an easy way to pretend to analyze what went wrong, and it allows people to dismiss and mock those who disagree.  But in terms of establishing a national dialogue, not just between parties but among the citizenry, it is also counter-productive.