It's official: Oklahoma is Rachel Maddow's favorite state to hate. But while viewers settle in for a comfortable serving of communal disdain, tirades like these serve the right by erasing voices of democratic voters and ignoring how we got here.
I didn't expect my first posts on Daily Kos to be about Oklahoma. I was born in Oklahoma, grew up there, but my nativist tendencies are limited. My parents came from other places, moved to OK for work, stayed put. I left for grad school, entirely without bitterness (it's just home, and they're just people), and I've never talked about it much. When I did, most folks just said, "Oh, I drove through there once." And that's about it. Oklahoma is a place you roll through, on your way to somewhere else: Southwest, South, Chicago, Texas. It's the middle of nowhere, the Capital of Nowhere.
Until now.
Since 2010, Oklahoma has become a poster child for total governance by the GOP. Like other states, its governorship, house and senate all went red in 2010, and a barrage of ALEC legislation has been enacted top down by the ruling GOP. Unlike other states, however, the political situation in Oklahoma is presented in the media as if it has no past and no history. It is made to sit like a child on a stool in a corner, dunce cap on, while Rachel Maddow yells at it for being so red. Redder than red. So red that even the color red won't have anything to do with it.
It's never part of the story that just prior to Fallin, Oklahoma was governed by a Democrat, re-elected in 2006 by record numbers.
That bit of history gets in the way of gleeful descriptions of Oklahoma as a deep-throated, whole-hearted bellow of a Republican stronghold, lost to sanity and hope.
That bit of history disappears behind maps. Red Maps. Really red maps that annihilate all of history. Who cares about 2006? Old news. In 2010, all the counties are red! They're redder than red!! They're the reddest goddam counties in the whole goddam country!!! Yee Haw!!! Oklahoma's a Republican cesspool - let's kick it in the face some more!! There's no one there that matters anyway!!!
As for the democrats, a quick public service message. If you are watching Rachel Maddow from a couch in Oklahoma and you vote or have voted for Democrats, it's important for you to know that you don't exist. There are no democrats where you live. You did not vote. You are not working every day for change or progress. You don't have a voice. Or at least, she can't see or hear you. And it's your fault she can't. After all, you're the one covered by a bunch of red maps. All 443,547 of you who voted for Obama in 2012 (33.23% of the electorate), all 409,261 of you who voted for Jeri Askins over Mary Fallin in 2010 (39.55% of the electorate), you nearly half a million people don't exist because, you know, red maps.
It can't be that painting with such a broad, bright red brush is appealing because it washes away any responsibility on our part to have made our message a little more clear to voters in Oklahoma or to actually field candidates, any candidates in state and local races.
It can't be that the people of Oklahoma are now at the mercy of the GOP because Progressives and Democrats told themselves (and each other) that it was a lost cause.
When have they ever voted for Democrats, anyway? Oh, right, nearly all the time. But...maps?
Like most people, Rachel Maddow will drive straight through Oklahoma on her way to some place else. And really, why stop? She already knows all she needs to know. They elected Republicans. What more is there to say?