Red State Reading

Yo, kids. Although you likely have not noticed, this space has been a bit on the sleepy side recently. For the most part, this is due to the usual predictable factors. Work has been busier, certain social diversions have demanded to be sampled, and, of course, roommates have been slipping in and out of various states of employment such as 1) employed 2) unemployed and 3) recently employed until that one night when the boss decided to beat the crap out of you. With his fists.

All of this takes time away from playing on the internets. But the most significant leisure time sucker for me of late has been the fact that there has been an awful lot of good stuff to read laying around my apartment. I've fallen into a spot of luck lately with books that follow the loose, Boboian theme of Red State interest.

In earlier episodes you may recall that I highly recommended this year's One Book One New Orleans selection, Rising Tide The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America by John M Barry which contains a great deal of fascinating material on the Mississippi Delta region, the New Orleans Carnival aristocracy, Herbert Hoover, and the ill fated history of river control policy. When I finished it in late March, it was my favorite book read in 2005.

Shortly afterwards, I began my favorite book read in 2005. Most of the folks who occasionally glance at this site are likely to have read or at least are familiar with the content of What's the Matter With Kansas? Tom Frank is, for my money, perhaps the most clear eyed political observer and social critic going these days. The basic thesis of Kansas is pretty standard stuff. The current mode of populist politics often leads working class Americans to organize and vote for candidates who implement programs which are contrary to the economic interests of these voters. The most often quoted passage from Frank's book puts it up thusly

"Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."

Frank, a native Kansan, takes great pains to trace the rich populist impulse in his home state back to the socially Christian, but economically progressive movements of the Abolitionists and Bryanists. Some of the more colorful characters he speaks with in the book include a female politician famous for lamenting the extension of the franchise to women and a schismatic Catholic who regards the post Vatican II Church as a heresy and has consequently declared himself the true Pope. While I am, of course, pleased to see this subject matter analyzed, what I really liked about this book was Frank's ability to treat his "red" and often nutty Kansans with an empathy and affection that contains not even the slightest hint of condescension. In other words, exactly the way I wouldn't have done it.

And then, of course, along came my favorite book read in 2005. In a lot of ways, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is a fitting companion piece to What's the Matter With Kansas? New York Times reporter, Alabama native, and devoted Crimson Tide fan Warren St. John spends an entire football season as a member of one of the infamous RV caravans that follow college football teams across the South. Along the way we encounter a man who is on the waiting list for a heart transplant but puts his life at risk each week by leaving the proscribed forty minute radius around the hospital just to attend football games, a couple who missed their daughter's wedding for a Bama game, as well as countless similarly obsessed football fans. The RVers themselves are, predictably, the nuttiest type of football nut available. The book is never short on the theater of the absurd. The social phenomenon St. John investigates, the irrational passion of certain stereotypical "red staters", is obviously parallel to Frank's book. St. John's success, like Frank's, derives, yes, partly from his ironic sense of humor aimed at absurd and easy targets, but is sold by his genuine affection and sense of camaraderie with his subjects. A fan himself, St. John shares the RVers' apprehensions, their superstitions, and their moments of agony and ecstasy as the Crimson Tide recover from a humiliating early season loss to LA Tech and go on to win the SEC championship. Throughout I was continually impressed with St. John as a talented descriptive writer. Sports fan or no, everyone should try this one out.

Next on the "red state" list:

The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, And Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920 Looks interesting but dense. I may abandon it if something fun comes up.

The Pirates Lafitte: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf If it ever comes in. This one was reviewed in the T-P last Sunday and already the library's request list has grown rather long.