Should America be Soup or Salad?

Reading over the letters to the editor in the "Failing New York Times" this morning, in response to Paul Krugman's piece on the the "Senate America" in which he decried the structure of our government which allocates 2 United States Senate seats to 600,000 Wyoming residents but only 2 to the 40 millions in California, I was struck by the argument that we need to honor local sentiment, folkways, beliefs, customs which distinguish life in the smaller states from that of the "elite" coastal urban states. A law professor from Berkeley, no less, suggested we can have our cake and eat it too if we simply remember the 21st amendment, which struck down a national prohibition against alcohol and allowed local jurisdictions to decide whether or not the risks of demon rum were worth the benefits of legalizing it.

But that professor fails to recognize the 18th amendment which was put into place because of outsized power of Bible Belt states.  Today, 50 United States Senators represent just 17% of the American population, which puts the Bible Belt in the driver's seat.  A man from Terre Haute, MO tells Mr. Krugman, "Quit whining about how stupid the voters are and work harder to convice us in flyover country that your policy beliefs are the best way forward for our nation." 
As if you can actually fix stupid.

But another writer (from New York) noted: "In the 21st century, the United State is not a federation of separate states, as it was in 1776 or 1787. It is a radically integrated nation in a radically integrated world." 

All this crystallized the basic problem: significant parts of the country have not been integrated into the global hole, and they fear and resent the idea that they ought to be.

Of course, the good citizens of Iowa who sent the repugnant Steve King to Congress do not object to being integrated, some would say, "homogenized" into the rest of the country and the world by commercial forces: I have never driven through Steve King's district, but I would be astonished if I did not see Home Depot, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Staples, Starbucks, Walmart, Target and all the other big national chains, with their recognizable and uniform logos and colors. 

Obadiah Youngblood

It's the "blindfold and the parachute" test: Drop me blindfolded over any big American city: New York, Washington, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Miami, and allow me to whip off that blindfold and look around, walk around for 5 minutes and I will be able to identify where I am. But drop me into any rural area of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Kansas, Iowa and it's all "Alabama in between." Most of rural and even suburban America looks pretty much the same. You might pick up a regional accent in the South or in New England, but even in Pennsylvania what you will hear is a "rural" accent, not a Pennsylvania accent. 

The fact is, our states no longer are sufficiently different from one another to actually represent distinct entities. Yes, Montana is vast and different from Maine, but the problems of low population density and small industrial base are pretty much the same. And yes, water rights and grazing rights are more ascendant in Utah and New Mexico  than in Connecticut and Vermont, but the dividing lines of thought and concern are not contained within the state lines any more, "state and local concerns"  are historical relics, the shed chrysalis of  the of a country which has metamorphosized beyond its larval stages.

State boundaries do more to hinder the progress, financial and economic well being of the USA than they serve any justifiable purpose in the 21st century. 

Edward Hopper

This is not to say there are not cultural differences between Mississippi and New Hampshire. 

It is entirely possible people in Ohio and Mississippi may decide that life begins at fertilization and will not allow abortions because there are enough people there who cannot be budged from that conviction. Ohio is on its way to passing legislation to forbidding  abortion after a heartbeat is audible at 6 weeks.

Mad Dog, for one, could certainly live with a reversal of Roe v Wade, and sending the question of abortion back to local control. 

Within our current state structure, that would mean if you are carrying an unwanted pregnancy, you would have to leave Ohio or Texas  and get thee to a Northern state for your abortion. Unless, of course, you can buy abortion pills over the internet and have them sent to your home in Akron or Biloxi.


But  even if you are too far along for an abortion pill, you could get a safe, legal abortion. You'd just have to make plans and travel. 

Mad Dog realizes this would mean poor, uneducated women, women with little in the way of financial resources would likely opt to have unwanted children, then give them up, or they might go back to the back alleys.

Edward Hopper

Likely, this will result in a substantial  increase in births of unwanted infants in these states. Ohio, Texas and other states who insist on bringing into the world these children, unwanted, predestined to sad, violent lives would not be the only places to suffer the consequences as these children come of age. 

Likely, many of these unwanted children would be sent North, where adoptive parents would care for them, much as Southern states are now the main source for "rescue dogs" in New England. 

But we can make accommodations for all this. The better educated "elite" in the coastal cities have supported the less educated populations of Ohio, sending government munition contracts to Jim Jordan's district there, and sending defense contracts to the poor Southern States. These less educated, determinedly ignorant are the educated man's burden. 

Trump and all his Trumplings are fond of saying "countries need borders." And Mad Dog emphatically agrees: Nations need borders. If 300 million Chinese and 300 million Indians and Pakistanis decided to immigrate to the USA tomorrow, we would have a country Mad Dog would not recognized or desire. 

But one might ask, why do these United States need state borders? The framers of the Constitution settled on agreements which the current European Union now envy: Louisiana cannot tax goods coming in from Illinois; no passport is required to travel from New Hampshire to Massachusetts; and since Marbury v Madison, a law which forbids denial of voting rights, public education and restaurant use to Negroes/African Americans in South Carolina cannot stand if the Supreme Court of these United States says borders cannot be used to deny basic human rights.

Photo by Obadiah Youngblood

The impulse toward empty space protections, whether it be in Idaho, Wyoming or Montana is an impulse to say, "Leave me alone. I do not want to be part of anything larger. I want to reject the rest of the world and live on my own land, with my six wives, my 20 white children, who will never be vaccinated, never learn to read, and I will be king of my own castle. I will graze my cattle on land no matter who may claim it; if I can string up barbed wire, it's mine. I will teach my children the White Race is under siege and we will live here awaiting the final Armageddon." 

Mad Dog can live with that. Let the Aryan nation claim parts of Idaho.  Hopefully, they'll stay on their reservations. 

Seventy seven years ago, when Pearl Harbor exploded, Americans from very different worlds within the same country amalgamated to form an army, produce war materials and boys from Georgia joined boys from Wisconsin and discovered they were more like each other than they were like Frenchmen, Belgians or Italians or even the English. Exposure to the greater world changed Negro men from Alabama, so when they returned home they were no longer docile. Women who worked in factories  were no longer content to sit home with children and their new refrigerators. 

Photo by Obadiah Youngblood: Lock 8

Until the 21st century, there were only three TV networks disseminating news, and Hollywood formed values and desires. In that sense we were, even then, radically integrated. With the Internet, we can be even more so.

It's a new world now, but we still  have an 18th century government. 

It used to be America was like a salad: you could stick a fork into one part and get a tomato and into another and get an anchovie. Now, it is more like soup--dip a spoon into any part of it and you get to taste the whole of it. Of course, there may be clams in there, like the difference between the cities and the rural areas, but the differences in different parts of the soup are minimal, compared to the salad. 

Fact is, things will not change without a fight. Montana has the power to exert outsized effect and will not give that up willingly. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it. 
But eventually, if we keep pushing, we can change.