Red State Blues

by Martha Bayne

  Into the grandstands, you’ll find up to 2,000 demo derby fans, people rearing for smashed metal, fires, and burnt fuel, all that kicked up dust and mud. Hours of heats amplified by the dangerous rev of motors not meant to sustain certain levels of stupidity, punctuated with multiple fire truck horns at the flicker of flame. Rows of barking joy from the peanut gallery, with not-infrequent fights and spilled cups of Genny.

  Those first years we went, I cheered simply at any smashing by my family and friends-called-family. Dad could never hold my interest in fixing up the 25-year-old cars that we inevitably drove around town, but with the demo he had me. It’s easy to succumb to the freedom of being as loud as possible while you soaked up swears and clumsy entendre that had made it onto the demo cars.

  A few years on, summer car preparation became a tactical matter. Junkers were hidden for months in cornfields and behind garages to avoid city zoning infractions. Spring meant shop bays reserved for cars pounded into place for repeat thrill rides. The paint jobs also got serious. Out were sleazy gags and lame shout-outs. Mom tapped the bliss of art school she couldn’t finish on account of dropping out to have me. She gave serious treatment to logos for Ford and Strike’s Bar. Proudly, she covered one hood with a fiery orange-and-white rendition of Ghost Rider from a Mark Texeira cover she borrowed from my comic book stacks. Cars and driving in Texas felt all about intimidation and machismo. Everything blunt and no interest in other people. At the Dunkirk demo, there was group acceptance in destruction. We would gather to root on your neighbor’s decision to gut his grandma’s Pontiac, paint it purple, and drive it a lopsided 30 m.p.h. for a collision with a station wagon that just … won’t … restart.

  Could be we were all gormless hicks, an easy answer, if that’s all we’re after nowadays. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the demo grandstands had plenty of rednecks from various body shops but also not a small number of adjunct professors from the state college up the street. Drunk cops off-duty, rowdy unionized teachers and boilermakers, cheering black families, hustling photographers from the right-wing hometown newspaper … a loose, yelling and joyous conglomeration of people, in a split-in-half political city surrounded by an island of Republican counties in a Democratic machine state.

  A sliver of Donald Trump’s potential to actually fucking win was in plain view in summer 2016 at the fair.

  In my first trip back to the fair in about a decade, the typical political party booths and Pataki hot dog consumption had given way to a more splintered climate.

  First was, a mixed bag of Libertarian ideologies sold at a fair stand as a party platform that was one part anti-Federal Reserve, another part pro-prepper, with random nods to the First Amendment, aliens, and pot. Really, this wasn’t too surprising, at least judging proclivities of a few of my friends who had stuck around Dunkirk. In a city swatted back from the supposed gains of the rest of the country, it may have seemed downright foolish to stick with mainstream Albany and Washington, D.C. hucksters.

  Next up was a longstanding suspicion of the Democratic frontrunner. In western New York, Hillary Clinton had already been the subject of special dismay from the empty promises of a Senate election. Incumbents were lousy enough. But a presumed incumbent so clearly using your placement on Lake Erie as their stepping stone? On demo cars, then, there was space reserved on rear bumpers—that best spot to beat and be beaten—for rival cars to “hit Hill.” For sale in the expo hall were stickers with cartoon character Calvin pissing on the word “Clinton” (your preference which one, I suppose) next to more traditional cartoon urine targets like logos for Chevy or the Miami Dolphins.

  And then there was Donald Trump. He might as well have sponsored the fair. His mirage bid for the Buffalo Bills and outsized television personality had cast a spell on enough locals to make an impact. For sale in the expo hall and midway were any number of memes-turned-shirts: a silhouette of Trump firing terrorists or illegal immigrants or Hillary Clinton. Next to POW-MIA and Confederate and Seneca Nation flags were red “Make America Great Again” designs. Heat after heat rolled out demo drivers who had carefully professed their allegiance to Trump on the untouchable tops of rickety Dodges and Toyotas.

  My wife and I took this as an outlier. Dunkirk and Chautauqua County had been left to their own devices for too long, right? Sure, we had seen a bit of the same months prior in Texas, on a visit to those who have since retreated down South, including my mother and little sister’s family. But the lawns of the Lone Star state lacked the enthusiasm they displayed during the Bush years. More, it seemed just a seething resentment that this would all drag into high school and Cowboys football season.

  Back in Wisconsin, where I live, political problems are easily split along that common Midwest line between a blue city or two (Milwaukee and Madison, in our case) and the rest of the state. And so, in our sneaky cool lakefront Milwaukee neighborhood of Bay View, in a Democratic city that was once downright socialist decades ago, it was easy to insulate ourselves. Outside, far away, are the frothing right-wing rants of surrounding Waukesha and Ozaukee counties, two of the most stalwart GOP bastions in the U.S. With Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt conservatism since shaken off, this part of Wisconsin conjures a particular electoral party champion, from Scott Walker to Paul Ryan to Reince Priebus to F. James Sensenbrenner. All cut from the same overtly political mold, echoing Ronald Reagan. As a result, election night in Milwaukee simply exacerbated the ultimately unsurprising chasm between those who heard what they wanted and those who hadn’t heard all that had been happening.

  By mid-2017 in Dunkirk, handfuls of locals were disappointed, already, in President Trump, whose rudimentary electoral map of course included Chautauqua County but also bled across the center of the state. Pissy retired white guys at one of the two Polish Falcons clubs muttered about Trump both not getting a chance and not deserving one. Some people, like my mellowing father who followed the union line and voted for Clinton, have lost that freaked out election night edge. Even the treason or impeachment talk has softened. Outside decisions across the board. Mostly, a familiar feeling that has settled in—one where you’re left to fend for yourself.

  In the last few years, the pier has gotten prettier while the coal-burning power plant smack on the Lake Erie waterfront went dormant. Social club members stay buzzed on sign-in weekdays while no one still quite knows how to treat the ailing populace easily connected to painkillers. Delays plagued a promised pharmaceutical manufacturer, the first big potential project in 50 years outside of the Nestle factory’s steady growth and a Saturn plant that never materialized. The mayor, Willy Rosas, became the first Hispanic mayor elected in the state, a nod to the city’s long-present Puerto Rican population. One of the recent mayors, Richard Frey, died not too long after he was sentenced to six months of home confinement for federal wiretapping related to his use of campaign money.

  When you’ve had working parents and family sent to prison for dealing drugs across the first Bush Administration and into Bill Clinton’s, you learn different. If you’ve lived in Dunkirk, stuck around, left and came back, you’re inevitably, confusingly suspicious. And if the result is a hodgepodge of political decisions out of step with the state or nation or big city one county away, so be it.

  At the 2017 Chautauqua County Fair, the demolition derby may have hinted at a nadir more inevitable and deeper than politics. The nights of demo heats and side action were reduced to about four rounds. Patches of the stands were empty, according to my sister Barb, a creative lightning bolt who works in manufacturing logistics and had my wonderful nephew with her longtime electrician boyfriend whose presidential pick I never asked.

  Turns out the heavy metal Imperials and Cutlasses are gone, and the primarily plastic Neons and Camrys hardly make for smash ‘em up fun. With fewer icons of America’s chrome automotive hubris left, there’s a smaller bang for the drivers and the crowd. The chance to smash into your neighbor, and secretly tell off the ghosts of a too-big-to-fail car industry, fade from the re
arview mirror you already ripped out as per demo heat regulations. Call power whatever you want when you hardly have any, for high-up decisions. Rather, go crashing through political norms and social expectations. Bash out the windshield of a Ford Country Squire, if you can find one without a lot of rust, and cover it with crass rhymes about the president or Plymouth Rock settlers or Ghost Rider before you speed it rear-end first into cheering public ruination.

  MIDWESTERN BUBBLES

  THE OTHER “FORGOTTEN PEOPLE”: FEELING BLUE IN MISSOURI

  SARAH KENDZIOR

  In January 2016, shortly before the inauguration of Donald Trump, I was invited to a conference for people in the media and tech industries to discuss the future of news. Like every conference of this nature to which I’ve been invited, it was held in a city I could never afford to visit on my own, much less live—Palo Alto, California, where the average home sells for three million dollars. That would be two million, eight hundred and seventy thousand more than what the average home sells for where I live, in St. Louis, Missouri: a struggling, blue city in a once purple, suddenly bright red state.

  I arrived at the conference anxious to share my concerns about the future of media under Trump: the role Russian propaganda had played in the election, the mainstreaming of white supremacists by the national press, the gutting of local papers that had steered so many to conspiracy sites as an alternative.

  These concerns, while shared by some attendees, were mostly dismissed, since the prevailing belief in blue, wealthy, tech-savvy California was that somehow democracy would work itself out. Once in office, Trump would surely be checked and balanced, they told me; freedom of the press could not seriously be challenged, as it was a constitutional right. What they were really struggling with, they said, was how to better understand “the red state people”—those poor, exploited Midwesterners who had bought into Trump’s fantasy and shocked the nation by propelling his win. Those poor, exploited Midwesterners who had somehow—according to the coastal publishers and tech gurus in attendance—all suddenly become white, male, conservative manual laborers.

  It is a terrible thing to be in pain and ignored—as a place, as an individual. It is perhaps worse to finally be recognized, but only as a symbol—to be given a mask and told that it’s your face.

  This is what it has been like to be both a member of the national media and a citizen of the Midwest since Trump’s win, as the coastal media views our long-ignored region through a narrow journalistic kaleidoscope, twisting and turning on the same images again and again until the view is utterly distorted. It is true that the national media—so disproportionately represented by the coasts that one out of every five journalists now lives in New York, Los Angeles or Washington DC—had long ignored the white, male, conservative manual laborers of the Midwest. But now, apparently, their plan was to ignore everyone else who lived there too: black, brown, Muslim and Jewish citizens; workers who toiled not in a field or plant but in a Walmart or a university; intellectuals and immigrants; and anyone else who was appalled at the election of Donald Trump. We lived in Trumpland now, we were told, and our blue city was an inconvenient island.

  In some sense, this dynamic is not new. For decades, as national media consolidated on the coasts and regional papers died out, the Midwest got used to being ignored. The national media would show interest when there was a disaster—a tornado, a murder, an act of negligence so spectacular it would merit the occasional check-in (Flint still doesn’t have water, by the way) or, in the case of 2016, a grotesque election. Now, due to surprising Republican wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania alongside more predictable wins in every state but Illinois and Minnesota, the Midwest was suddenly standing in as Trump’s mandate.

  This, of course, was a lie: the Midwest boasts an incredibly diverse array of citizens held together, perversely, by little other than a shared sense of neglect. We are not red or blue but mixed, purple like a bruise. But that wasn’t the kind of pain or complexity the national press typically examines—not an individual level, where the ambiguity of lackluster choices propelled votes certainly as much as fanaticism; and not on a structural level, where the irregularities of our voting system have left the legitimacy of the election somewhat in doubt.

  With a few exceptions, the national press was not interested in the gerrymandering that had plagued our states for decades, or the new voter ID laws that disenfranchised over 200,000 people in states like Wisconsin, where Trump won by a miniscule margin of roughly 20,000 votes. They were not particularly interested in how Trump won—that is, in structural barriers that challenge the narrative of ideological conformity within the Midwest—but in who Trump claimed as the “new winners” of his America, the “forgotten people” whom he claimed to have uniquely remembered. In order for the self-conscious coastal press to lay claim to Trump’s narrative—to prove that they were not, as he claimed, the “media elite”—another group needed to be forgotten for Trump’s “forgotten people” to shine.

  And that group of “forgotten people” was the group who remain an inconvenience to everyone: the mostly liberal, often non-white residents of the Midwest’s sprawling cities, where people are far more likely to work in the service industry than in the manufacturing fields Trump presented as the heart of the “real America”. That heart was torn out decades ago, and while Trump was correct in identifying the pain of that economic loss and the social upheaval in its wake, he showed no understanding or even interest in our current plight.

  And why would he? Blue city Midwesterners were, by and large, not his people. Blue city Midwesterners were, to his horror, his protesters—the people most likely to see through Trump’s bullshit due to a lifetime spent navigating an abundance of bullshit in their midst; the people most likely to see Trump’s autocratic policies not as horrifying fantasies, but as a federally instituted implementation of what they had witnessed on a local level for a very long time.

  When Trump arrived in St. Louis for his first rally in March 2016, he was greeted by a large, ethnically diverse array of protesters, including members of long-standing citizen movements fighting for higher wages, LGBT rights, and, especially after Ferguson, an end to racist police brutality. Having suffered under local and state repressive policies, this was not a group of people who would take Donald Trump in stride, or dismiss him as a joke or a longshot. St. Louis was the first city to shut a Trump rally down, though Chicago got the credit after his appearance there was canceled hours later.

  As the campaign wore on, and Trump’s team began proposing a series of measures so autocratic that many pundits dismissed them as unfathomable, urban Missourians countered that this was indeed possible: Trump was merely a variant on what we had known. (You may recall we spent the bulk of November 2014 under martial law.) And life has only gotten worse for us since. The 2016 election turned the Missouri legislature overwhelmingly Republican, and they have passed policies so sadistic that outsiders often mistake them for a sick joke: lowering the hourly minimum wage from $10.00 to $7.70; being so racist the NAACP gave Missouri a travel warning and told black people not to visit; passing a law making it possible for your boss to fire you if he discovers you are taking birth control; being one of very few states to give private citizen voting data to the Trump administration under the pretense of countering “fraud”, and so on.

  Often thought of as an irrelevant backwater, Missouri is arguably a harbinger of America’s brutal future under Trump. We are indeed the “Show-Me State”, as in Trump says “Show Me” and our legislature of lackeys—in violation of basic democratic norms and laws—complies.

  As I write this, the Trump administration is considering an array of policies that mirror those Missouri has managed to pass on a local level. These policies will disproportionately affect the red state voters about which he pretends to care. His tax plan will raise taxes most on households making $75,000 or under, meaning the bulk of states affected are in the Midwest or the South instead of the wealthier blue states
on the coast. The possible repeal of Obamacare similarly hurts red state voters, who are poorer and more poorly served by their state governments in terms of receiving basic medical care than blue states. If net neutrality is eliminated, the vast rural stretches of the Midwest that are already denied affordable broadband access will find their prices raised even more, while Midwestern media—already gutted—may die out completely if fewer residents can afford to access it.

  We are in an incredible amount of trouble out here in the red state of Missouri, and over the past year there have been an incredible number of protests in our blue cities—and even in our redder cities in the Ozarks, like Springfield—that reflect this anxiety. Missourians have protested against low wages, for women’s rights, for immigrants’ rights, for LGBT rights, for black rights, for a full investigation of the Russian interference scandal, for science, for healthcare, for tax transparency, and more. Indivisible and other new activist groups have joined an already robust protest and organizational infrastructure. This is a painful fight, as we watch our friends and neighbors lose their civil and economic rights, but it is one to which we are sadly accustomed.

  But it is a fight that is scarcely covered by the national press. It was only after the neo-Nazi Charlottesville that the media began to consider that it wasn’t “economic anxiety” that guided the Trump case after all. This is not to say that people in red states don’t have economic anxiety—pretty much everyone does, given that the recession never really ended here. But that does not seem to be what attracts Trump’s hard-core base—and furthermore, that hardcore base is not particularly representative of the electorate even in red states like Missouri. Trump’s numbers sit as a record low, while protests against a sitting president occur, arguably, at a record high. That story remains largely untold in my state, along with the fear and determination that propels those attempting to hold the administration accountable.