Pastor Molly, who preaches where my wife and daughter are right now, and who volunteered for McGovern-Eagleton (with the buttons and sign upstairs in her home out of sight; her husband's Roy Rogers shrine has a place of honor downstairs, where it makes them seem quirky but not dangerous), one of the first things she said to me when we met was this:
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."
For a long time I thought it came from Emerson, which would have made sense. But it's from Swift, which makes a different kind of sense.
If you will follow me over the fold, I will try this morning to make sense of what I have learned these last few weeks about my adopted home in Kentucky. (Upon reflection, I will fail) In Appalachia, which is even more descriptive.
The headline on the front page of this morning's Lexington Herald reads: "Will Obama fight for rural voters?" and begins with a few words from Washington Monthly founder Charles Peters, comparing Obama's race problem to JFK's Catholic problem and arguing that Obama should follow Kennedy's lead and spend time in Appalachia gaining the trust of voters here.
Except that he won't. Kentucky isn't going to be in play. There's going to be an uninteresting Senatorial race between Mitch McConnell, who at least has power even if he's not very likable (even to my Republican friends), and Bruce Lunsford, who has money and nothing else obvious to recommend him. And though Kentucky has a Democratic governor, Steve Beshear, who is said to be a very smart man and a good lawyer, he has been notably ineffective leading the state's part-time legislature toward any kind of reasonable budget, and has been in the thrall of casino gambling interests.
Obama won't come here because his time is limited. And maybe, just maybe, because it's dangerous to do so, though I shouldn't think anybody would admit that until some kind of after-action report decades off.
The notion that Kentucky is a Democratic state is a chimera. Kentucky is a patronage state, and the Democrats have, in the main, controlled the patronage. It is axiomatic here that the roads get paved around election time, both to remind voters who they're re-electing and to remind the contractors who their friends are. Party affiliation is far less important than the Ten Commandments in the widow of the beauty parlor on Main Street, or the Creation Museum up in Northern Kentucky, or the fact that you can't schedule a meeting or an event Wednesday night because of church.
I am not from here. I am from a long, long way away. This has its advantages, and its limitations. And sometimes it is scary how little I know.
I have commented in defense of Kentucky several times here, observing regularly that it is easy to find a dumb hillbilly missing teeth and mangling facts. And so I quote this from the Herald's piece with some reluctance:
"I think one of the big problems for him [Obama] is he's Muslim," sais Jimmy Sizemore, the highest elected official in [Leslie] county. "It's his religion, plus when his pastor came out and started talking, that was a problem, but that's just my opinion.
"I don't think it's because he's black, what everybody says is he is a Muslim."
When asked if he had ever researched the fact that Obama -- and the rev. Wright -- are Christians, Sizemore said: "I don't care about finding out because I'm a Republican."
The Herald-Leader cites two polls indicating that one in five Kentucky voters felt Obama's race made him less electable. I live here. I'm a middle-aged straight white guy, living in a small university town that seems unusually gay friendly, but I also know there was a black-on-white fight up at the high school that nobody officially talked about, and the black kids -- the ones initially assaulted -- were sent to be home schooled (for their safety, it was said), while the white kids -- who got thrashed -- were sanctioned and admitted back into school.
I am reminded of sitting a few rows from the stage when Living Colour's Vernon Reid turned to his white audience and spat out this: "Unelectable is just the new word for n----r," and that was when Jesse Jackson was running.
(I typed the word originally, but...it's one thing for Vernon Reid to say it, or for me to remember him having said it. I don't have the right to use the word.)
Comments to other posts have been consistent: How can those ignorant people in Appalachia NOT know the truth? How can Jimmy Sizemore make of Barack Obama a Muslim when it's his pastor whose views he reacts against?
Because this isn't the coast, friends. Because the information economy is a luxury item here. Because cable TV and satellite dishes are expensive, because computers and high speed internet access are expensive, because schools here are still badly funded, because the welfare state has -- this is my father-in-law's summation, and he's from Leslie County -- sapped the initiative from generations of working people. Because the mines are largely shut down and no jobs have come to replace them. Because the agrarian society of fifty years ago is only half a memory, and an astonishing number of poor and working people I meet simply do not know how to cook, much less grasp the rudiments of nutrition. Because Oxycontin is pervasive here, and only law enforcement (certainly not big pharma) cares.
Sorry. I'm ranting a little. Just a little. And so I will pause for whatever comments.
Kentucky would like Obama if they got to know him, even if he was seen scrimmaging with the North Carolina squad. His story is their story, or could be. But they won't get to know him because he won't come here and he probably shouldn't come here, because our population is small and our problems are intractable, because we've been on the dole so long it hasn't helped and nobody seems to have new answers. Just write the check and move on.
I live here. It is a beautiful place, as everybody's home is (or should be). The people are kind and generous and smart. Smart. Even the ones not associated with the university or the hospital. But there are places I don't go, trailer parks where bathtub speed and Oxy and full-time disability checks are rampant. And I don't go where the mountaintops are being removed, and tearing them down are the only jobs left. So there's a lot I don't know.
But fundamental to our humanity should be this: There needs to be a floor beneath which we will not allow our fellow humans to fall.
And the problem with Obama not coming to Appalachia, not polling well with my neighbors, that problem is this: They cannot be forgotten people.
Can you grasp the symbolism of Obama going to the Crow Indian Reservation -- and good for him -- but not coming here?
Again, no tip jar. Not what I came here for. I am a professional writer working slowly to regain my amateur status. I come here for the exercise, and the ideas. And that's enough.