21 July 2004
Robert Oscar Lopez
A Nine-Day Search for Bush's America
In my daily life I don’t run into pro-Bush people. I live in Collingswood, New Jersey, a liberal stronghold. I come from a die-hard New York-Democratic family that branded me a "fascist" when I voted for Rudy Giuliani in 1993. I literally don’t know anyone who likes George Bush. Yet the polls keep pointing to a "tight race" that Kerry might lose.On July 4 weekend, I sat with thirty other flag-waving Northeasterners who spent the whole afternoon talking about how to get rid of Bush. I asked the crowd, "who the Hell are these 45 out of a 100 people who tell the pollsters they’re going to vote for Bush?"
Someone snapped, "Dude, we can’t explain that to you. You’ll have to go down South to answer that question."
That night, I took my wife aside and said, "let’s put our money where our mouth is. We’ll pack our bags and tomorrow, you and I are going to drive across the South, to talk to people who plan on voting for Bush." My wife looked at me like I was crazy. But she was as intrigued by the national polls as I was. So she agreed. We drove out of New Jersey on July 5, 2004, and spent $1,150 and eight days to travel across Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia, on a political quest to answer the riddle: WHO LIKES GEORGE W. BUSH?
The answer to our riddle, which I will explain through the narrative below, is incredibly simple: Nobody, really.
What we figured out by driving through the South, which you can’t figure out by following the news or reading books, is the twist that may in fact sink John Kerry and John Edwards: You don’t have to like George W. Bush to vote for him.
Voorhees, New Jersey
Backtrack to June 25, 2004. Opening night for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. My wife and I have to order tickets in advance. We wait in line for an hour to get decent seats for ourselves and the eighteen other people who are going to watch the debut with us. Every chair in the spacious screening room is taken and people overflow into the stairwells. For the first ten minutes of the film, the audio system in the movie house malfunctions. We see moving images but hear nothing.
"Hell no!" people start chanting. Someone in the fifth row screams that there’s a Bush conspiracy behind the sabotage of the sound system. Adolescents a few rows above us crumple up the flyers that an activist passed out at the door and start throwing paper bombs at the screen while the theater managers scramble to fix the projector. The scene turns into an impromptu rally, with clapping and rounds of "drop Bush, not bombs!"
"You fucked up!" the crowd growls at the frightened employees in their usher vests and bowties. I turn and catch a prim couple through the corner of my eye, one row ahead of me. They’re shaking their heads. As the guy, a thirtyish blond with a crew cut and silver-rimmed glasses, whispers something in his girlfriend’s ear, he doesn’t think I can hear him, but I do.
"This settles it," he tells her. "I’m voting for Bush and nothing will change my mind.”
Northeastern Alabama
Fast-forward now, to the days after July 4. We’ve blazed through Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, but haven’t seen a Confederate flag or even a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker until entering Alabama. It’s a hot day in July. July 7, to be exact. We pull off the interstate highway an hour or so before passing through Birmingham. The beauty of the rest stop shocks me. I’m used to stations up north, looking like lifeless concrete strip plazas of the 1970s, with black glass doors and crappy gift shops. The Alabama Welcome Center is quite a different scene. They’ve planted lovely magnolia trees, perfectly spaced apart. A colonnade in Greek-revival style keeps a peaceful walkway shaded and cool. Elderly travelers can step in the shade and use rocking chairs just in front of the entrance, where a dainty lady in a business suit asks us to sign a guest register and offers advice on planning our stay in Alabama. It’s so enchanting I almost forget that at the entryway there’s a bronzed relief of George Wallace’s face, decorated with a flowery wreath that someone has propped close to it, "in remembrance of all the great things that Governor Wallace did for Alabama."
A trio of toothless old men with sunburned white skin rock and rock, in the chairs next to the George Wallace memorial.
"Good morning," I say.
They nod faintly but don’t say anything back. I don’t need to ask the $64,000 question, because they’re already talking about it among themselves.
"It’s a sorry day when we have another President lying through his teeth in the Oval Office," one of the men mutters to his friends. "I wonder if we’ll ever have an honest President again."
"You’re right," one of the others says. "Bush is lucky that no matter how much he lies, he can never lie as much as a Democrat."
Later in the day, my wife and I veer off the interstate, and venture into a small town where a mining company has ripped through the earth and left long squares of bright red mud where fields used to be. I find the red clay pretty. It reminds me of Faulkner. My wife just thinks it’s messy-looking and probably hard to clean from our shoes, so she forbids me from walking around in it. The only public place where we could possibly talk to anyone is a Waffle House a few miles down the road.
A pretty black woman with long braids brings us our grits and we win her over by telling her how much we’re loving our joyride across the South. I ask her the $64,000 question.
"You can bet who I will not be voting for, Sir," she says, sucking her teeth. "But 2004 or 1804, you know, Bama’s still Bama. And I won’t stop you-know-who from taking the state’s electoral votes in November."
"Do folks down here like him?" I ask her.
"It’s habit, Sir," she tells me. "You may not like a dog, but if it’s yours, you’re still gonna feed it when you need to."
The Esplanade, New Orleans
By Thursday, July 8, my wife and I are in New Orleans. We’ve gotten a room in a restored inn a few blocks from the French Quarter, where every morning the guests congregate around an antique wooden table for their complimentary breakfast. Free sherry also flows during the afternoon in an upstairs parlor. There are two sets of fiancés there to get married, in addition to a couple in town for a cat show (their Burmese beauty has already been named one the 100 most beautiful cats in the United States), a pair of Arkansas teachers touring historical sites, and a duo of Texans in New Orleans to hunt for antiques.
There’s no way to sip sherry in New Orleans without feeling a little reckless. I throw all caution to the wind and ask the whole room the $64,000 question.
Everybody agrees that Bush is awful.
"I’m embarrassed to say that he’s from Texas," one person tells us.
"Hell," say one couple almost in unison, "I’m embarrassed to say that he’s our President."
One couple launches into a detailed history lesson about Northerners’ misperceptions about the South. Which serves entirely to explain that even though they think Bush is an ignoramus, they will never vote for a Democrat. Bill Clinton, their native son, apparently damaged the image of the South beyond all repair, and somehow Bush has restored the region’s moral authenticity in the eyes of the nation at large.
"It doesn’t bother you at all that he lied about those weapons?" I ask.
They shake their heads emphatically. "Oh, that was the mistake of the CIA," the wife explains to me. "You see Bush isn’t bright enough to second-guess those folks."
The rest of the table is skeptical about the Arkansan couple’s definitions about morality. But they do agree that marriage is an important institution and only George Bush will risk his popularity to defend it.
"It was Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act," I mention.
"Yes, but Bush is brave enough to fight for the constitutional amendment," one of them tells me. "That’s why he’s got my vote. I think Kerry’s going to hesitate too much and won’t stop gay marriage from destroying family life as we know it."
Unlike the Arkansans, the antique-hunting guy gets the whole table feeling warm and fuzzy. They’re unanimous: Bush, the fool who embarrasses them, will be rewarded for his gallant defense of matrimony, with their grand collective total of ten votes.
"If Bush loses," one of the almost-newlyweds adds, "the gays will take over."
Vacherie, Louisiana
It’s July 9, 2004, and my wife and I are standing on the veranda of a 19th-century plantation, Oak Alley, preserved by a historical restoration society. The tour guides are effervescent white women dressed in hoop skirts and cloth white blouses with bows and ribbons. They lead us through the parlor, the dining hall, the "fainting room," and a terrace overlooking symmetrical lines of 300-year-old oak trees. The Mississippi River runs in the distance. On the other side of the house, we look at the swampy sugar cane fields. After describing in meticulous detail the life of a Creole plantation mistress, our brunette guide tells us, "now, you all need to remember that slavery is an important part of Louisiana’s history. To honor the sacrifices of our African American people, we have set up a plaque right next to that crepe myrtle tree, which was planted in the general area where the slave huts used to stand." If I squint, I can see the plastic tableau, about the size of an opened newspaper, with a few paragraphs about the plantation’s slaves on it.
After the tour’s over my wife and I get sloshed on mint juleps, so that I can mingle with the other vacationers and pop the $64,000 question.
"Oh, he is so uncouth," exclaims a Louisiana woman, about thirty-seven years old, who tells me about the emphasis that the French Creoles – her people – place on refinement and manners. "I go to France at least once a year, and let me tell y’all that it is no small bother to hear how Bush has the people over there talking about us."
She’s seconded by countless other southerners around, who share her underlying belief that the true South is classy and decent, which George Bush is not. They lapse into misty-eyed talk about John Breaux, the conservative Democrat who served as a Louisiana senator but stepped down for personal reasons. They refer to him as "John."
"Now, I didn’t always agree with John, but he was a good man," a local man – a sort of cattle breeder cum restaurant supplies trader – tells me, while his wife and children nod. "That’s the kind of Democrat I would vote for. But the Democrats would never nominate him, because he isn’t liberal enough. He’s not good enough for their plans on the national level. And that bothers me. That’s why I can never vote for a Democrat for the President. I might have voted for John, but they ran John out."
Except for three people, everyone in that crowd dislikes Bush’s demeanor but plans to vote for him in November. The Democrats’ values are too much of a stretch for them to consider it.
Vieux Carré, New Orleans
Even though I grew up in New York, Bourbon Street shocks me on July 9, 2004. I’m not used to walking down city streets with open containers of beer. Nor have I ever seen dancers in see-through bodysuits beckoning customers right on the sidewalk. Laissez les bons temps rouler, we’ve been told, which means, "let the good times roll." We put the advice to good use and get entirely hammered. My wife and I recognize some of the people from the tours we took of plantations around Vacherie, over the two previous days, but now, of course, the priggish airs are gone and they’re acting like the rowdy drunks they are.
At some point we’ve wandered into a nightclub where men walk around in their underwear and sell Hurricane shots and cigarettes. "Is this a gay club?" I ask a man in a tank top with a scorpion tattooed on his bicep. My wife is dancing on a stage with two blonde women from Alabama who keep flashing me their unmentionables, even though I don’t have any beads to throw at them.
"Are you asking me if I’m gay?" he asks me.
"Do you want me to ask you if you’re gay?" I decide to play the endless question game, hoping to reach the $64,000 question.
"I am gay," he tells me. "But the purpose of this club is for gay men to meet straight men. That’s why nobody can say whether this place is gay or straight."
"What do you think of the vote coming up in Congress next week?" I ask, after gathering my courage. I am referring to the procedural vote of Wednesday, July 14, 2004, in which the Senate will have to decide whether or not to pursue a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage.
"Oh, I hope they pass the ban," the man tells me with a flick of his hand. "Gays should stop complaining. I hate the way they complain."
I pop the $64,000 question.
"I’m a Marine," he tells me. "I’m from Pensacola, where everyone’s in the military. Who do you think I’m gonna vote for?"
"Maybe the candidate who really served in Vietnam, as opposed to dodging the draft?" I poke.
"Oh, you shut your trap," he answers. "I can tell you’ve never been in the military. You don’t know what it’s like. Bush is a shithead and we all know it. But you have to fall in line with your leader or nothing works in the world. So I’m standing behind my President. And I’m going to vote for him, come November, if I vote at all."
"Do gay rights matter to you at all?" I ask.
"Gay people have freedom and they need to pay a price for that freedom," he says to conclude our little talk. "They need to learn how to follow orders, like everyone else. And they need to stop whining all the time. Now go dance with your wife and leave me alone."
Cajun Country
July 10-12, 2004, my wife and I explore the magical world of southwestern Louisiana. This is the "prairie" country and must never be conflated with the bayous. In the towns that surround Lafayette, like Eunice and Churchpoint, the residents also tell us that we should never confuse Cajuns with Creoles. Creoles were the French and Spanish plantation crowd; they tended to live close to New Orleans. Cajuns were much more mixed, having migrated from Canada among other places, and they settled in the rural parishes west of Baton Rouge.
"Cajuns are a world unto themselves," a woman in her seventies tells me, at a gumbo shop in downtown Eunice. "We don’t think of ourselves as Southern. In fact, we call the folks from Northern Louisiana Yankees, because they only speak English and they’re Protestant."
I try popping the $64,000 question, but this particular dowager is highly skilled at changing the subject. I decide to save my questions for the next day, when my wife and I are set to attend a Sunday barbecue in the town of Richard, Louisiana.
Our guides for three days are Christine, an old friend who worked with me in a Manhattan law firm ten years ago, and Adrian, her husband who writes plays. Christine is a native of Cajun country, the second of six children born to a World War II veteran. She was Miss Churchpoint 1967, having beaten out eighteen other girls in Acadia Parish, but she left the prairies in the early 1970s and went to New York with the goal of becoming an actress. After three decades of performing on stages in New York, DC, and Eastern Europe, she returned to Cajun country with her husband to put on a show called Lache pas les patates ("Don’t drop the potato when it’s hot"). Christine and Adrian, often called "bleeding heart liberals" by the folks in the prairies, plan to vote for John Kerry. Bush is a monster to them.
Because of Christine, our passage through Cajun country is the deepest and most multidimensional exposure my wife and I will get to the South. She lets us stay in her deceased grandparents’ old house by Pitreville, with the lush flatlands full of cypress and fig trees extending around us on all sides. The nearest highway, the I-10, is over an hour away and our interactions with people strengthen our sense that we are in a different country. French creeps into conversations. People do their shopping at the Piggly-Wiggly in nearby Churchpoint. There, they can buy a brand of seasoning called "Slap Ya Mama." At night we hear a "zydego" band play at a party house with a stone driveway edged by grassy meadows, where black musicians combine an accordion, a washboard, guitars, and drums, into a blend of bluegrass, French love songs, and jazz.
On Sunday, July 11, we get to attend a wonderful barbecue in Richard, Lousiana, the smallest town I have ever seen. When asked its population, the town residents estimate as low as thirty and as high as fifty-five. It has only four corners, on which one finds, respectively, a public school, a Catholic church, a water tower, and an empty field. I have heard about the Bible Belt, but this is the first time that I realize how important a church must be, in a town where that church is the only public building beside a school. Christine’s father, a Methodist farmer who began as a sharecropper, is more somber than the garrulous Catholics related to his wife. The barbecue serves up some of the best food I’ve ever tasted – boudin, rice dressing with smoked sausages, baby back ribs, and spiced catfish. The beer also has everyone relaxed enough for me to ask the $64,000 question. But I start, this time, by asking them what they think about John Edwards.
"I don’t know enough to say," they all say about Edwards.
"You’ve got to remember that we have nothing in common with North Carolina," a handsome local attorney, named Lewis, tells me. Lewis is in his late fifties and has a few children who moved away to places like San Diego and Boston. "We think of ourselves as Cajun, not as Southerners. John Edwards has nothing at all in common with us."
"But Bush does?" I ask.
"Bush has less in common with us than John Edwards does, actually," Lewis tells me. "As a lawyer I can’t stand that Patriot Act."
"So you’re going to vote for John Kerry, I take it?"
Lewis laughs and the whole table laughs along with him.
"You must be crazy," Lisa pipes in. She’s the other lawyer in the nearby town (it has only two attorneys) and also works as an Assistant DA for Lafayette Parish. "Hell, John Kerry voted for the Patriot Act. I’d rather vote for a man who says he supports all those laws and sticks by them, than a man who votes for them and won’t admit it now!"
"Do any of you actually like Bush?" I ask the seven people around me.
Lewis answers for all of them, with a quiet and charming sense of authority, "Sometimes when you like people it means they’re wishy-washy. I could never vote for a wishy-washy President in good conscience. And that man from Boston is very wishy-washy."
Of the thirty or so people at the barbecue, Christine, her husband, her mother, and her sister are the only ones who plan not to vote for Bush. But nobody at the party actually has anything good to say about the President.
Mississippi
By Monday, July 12, my wife and I are making our way out of Cajun country and plodding toward Memphis, where we plan to do our once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Graceland. To get from Lafayette, Louisiana, to Memphis, we have to drive the entire length of Mississippi, the poorest state in America. The scenery around us is breathtaking. Yet every time we leave the interstate and explore small towns on side roads, the people glare at us. Sometimes they don’t even speak, but stand with their arms crossed and pretend they can’t hear us. I wonder if it might be the 100-degree weather, or the particular hostility toward out-of-state travelers at shops close to the interstate. Our instincts tell us not to dally too long in this part of the South and to move on to Tennessee without asking too many questions.
The only radio stations that come in clearly are, interestingly enough, a Christian channel with a political program hosted by "Matt Freedom," and an African-American channel emceed by "Lee Hall."
Matt Freedom has a gentle, slightly raspy voice. His message for today is to tell his listeners not to go easy on George Bush. "We’ve got to ask him tough questions. We’ve got to be critical of him sometimes. We cannot be blind sheep just letting him do whatever he wants."
A few lines down the radio dial, Lee Hall is basically giving the same message to black listeners about the Republicans. He tells blacks not to forget how "dirty and low-down" Cheney is. But commentators on Hall’s show also say it’s wrong for the Democrats to assume that they can always count on blacks voting for them.
Back on Matt Freedom’s show, the message seems like an echo of Lee Hall’s. "Evangelicals are easy to take advantage of, and we can’t let the Republicans keep doing this to us again and again. We’ve got to make them fight for our vote."
Finally after four hours of bouncing back and forth between Matt Freedom and Lee Hall, I hear Matt Freedom say what I’ve been thinking all through our slow drive along Interstate 55.
"Look what the Democrats have done to the blacks," Matt Freedom laments. "That’s what the Republicans are doing to us. We’re the blacks of the Republican party."
Neither Matt Freedom nor Lee Hall urge their listeners to abandon their respective parties and vote for the other side, however. Matt Freedom never tells his Christian listeners to withhold their votes from George Bush. Instead, Freedom keeps asking folks who call in, "how can we help Bush beat Kerry?" And it’s very clear, by the time we approach the Tennessee line, that Matt Freedom’s listeners, mostly white, outnumber Hall’s listeners in the state of Mississippi. Bush is going to win the state, even with his evangelical base giving him these tongue-lashings over the radio.
Memphis, Tennessee
Early in the morning, on Elvis Presley Boulevard, there are already hundreds of pilgrims crowding the ticket lobby of the Graceland Tour. It’s 100 degrees outside, but at 9 AM on a Tuesday morning (July 13), the Elvis worshippers pour in from every corner of the globe. License plates in the parking lot of the Heartbreak Hotel reveal that voyagers have ventured from Utah, California, Michigan, Iowa, Quebec, and, of course, New Jersey.
Something tells me I’m not supposed to empathize with the gaudy excess of Graceland. The yellow and blue record room and the bright red loveseat offend even my weak sense of taste. I know the King was racist. But then again, Elvis Presley was the musician who most inspired my father when he was a teenager prowling the slums of Manila in the 1950s. One of my favorite family photographs shows my dad at age 24, with a gleaming black pompadour, and the words ALL SHOOK UP scrawled along the bottom. So I forgive myself, by the time we wander past the showcases of studded and rhinestone-dotted jumpers. I’m completely into it. I’m there with Elvis in his last days.
My wife can’t believe I’ve fallen for the maudlin veneers and shameless consumerism. "We’re here to do research, remember?" she pokes me. "This is our political enemy in its purest form!"
"I can’t," I tell her, breaking down as we stand over the tomb of Elvis’s dead twin. "This is sacred ground. We can’t ask the $64,000 question here."
We overhear crowds of people muttering in front of the display about Elvis’s tour of military service in Germany in 1958. A looping voice-over explains that Elvis Presley believed "it was every American’s duty, no matter their lifestyle, to serve the country in uniform."
"Tell that to Kerry!" someone mutters from the back of the crowd, to a chorus of "yeps" and "amens."
"God bless America," someone else says. "And let’s all pray that Bush gets another term."
Knoxville
From Memphis to the eastern limits of Tennessee is a whole day of driving. If forced to pick a favorite Southern state, I think I would have to choose Tennessee. There’s something redemptive about the Blue Ridge Mountains, the bouncier accent, and the friendly tone of everyone we meet. By the time we hit Knoxville, it’s around sunset on Tuesday, July 13, 2004. My wife and I meet a sweet Tennessee family (with a BUSH-CHENEY sign and St. Andrew’s cross on their rear bumper) in a small town south of Nashville. They tell us to try out an authentic Italian restaurant called Puleo’s in Knoxville, owned by an immigrant who settled there.
Knoxville is touching on Appalachian country. Here we see obvious anti-Bush signage. A gas station in the quiet downtown, next to a neighborhood of abandoned and collapsing brick warehouses, advertises two things in a massive roadway sign. The right half of the sign says "COLD DRINKS SNACKS & CIGARETTES INSIDE" and the left half reads "KERRY AND EDWARDS FOR PRESIDENT."
Puleo’s serves some of the most interesting food I’ve ever eaten. It’s my first time eating buttery corn bread with veal parmesan. The waitress is a witty blonde woman who speaks with a beautiful Southern accent. Which, I learn, she only picked up six months ago, when she moved to Knoxville from Denver."
It’s contagious," she tells me. "After a week I started saying y’all and it just went from there."
I ask some folks at the cocktail bar the $64,000 question.
"I’m voting for Kerry, and so is my husband, who’s a Tennessee native and in the Guard," another sweet blonde says. "But around here you can’t take anything for granted. A lot of people I know in Knoxville liked Bush until he lied about Iraq. This is the Volunteer State and just about everyone’s got someone they love in the military. You can’t just lie about war and count on eastern Tennessee voting for you."
"Do you think people are upset enough about Bush not to vote for him?" I ask her.
"It depends on the person, of course," she tells me. "But yes, I think around here they really are that angry about Iraq. A lot of people in Knoxville have changed their minds."
Wytheville, Virginia
Our trek across the South is coming to a close, but my wife and I are having so much fun that we do everything we can to draw the time out. We follow the scenic route, 11, through Virginia towns like Natural Bridge, north of Roanoke, where we find a place called the Pink Cadillac Café. Virginians are among the friendliest folks we run into. By now we’re constantly fighting the charm of all the people we meet. We face an internal struggle to remind ourselves – we are voting for Kerry, not Bush! We’ve been exposed to so much convincing logic from Bush-supporters who hate Bush but plan to vote for him, that we’re constantly in danger of forgetting that we’re bleeding-heart quasi-socialist bookworm-hippies.
One of our most delightful encounters takes place in the small town of Wytheville. Our insider informant, a smiling computer saleswoman in her late forties, tells us that the town recently survived an attempt by Wal-Mart to take over all the commerce in the carefully preserved downtown. She points us to Skeeter’s, a sandwich shop built in the 1920s where some of the waitresses have been working there since the 1950s. Before we leave her computer store, I ask her the $64,000 question.
"You know, John Edwards is good-looking and charming," she tells us, "but people are scared of falling for a pretty young face, because around here they still have a lot of bad will toward Clinton. As far as I’m concerned, the only good politician in my lifetime was Jimmy Carter. There’s a good Southerner who never lied and always kept his promises. I love Jimmy. But since he’s not around anymore, we’re stuck choosing the lesser of two evils."
"And who’s the lesser of two evils in your mind?" I ask her.
"Bush," she says. "People in this town are angry about Iraq. But they’re smart enough to know that Kerry didn’t say anything against going into Iraq, until after there was no turning back. On that one point alone, Kerry lost a big chance. Maybe if I knew that Kerry would have really avoided Iraq, then I would vote for Kerry. But as it is now, he just flip-flops way too much. I’m sticking with the devil I know. And that is George W. Bush, I am sad to say."
In between the woman’s store and Skeeter’s there is a local theater showing Spiderman 2 and, the sign out front says, "soon to be showing FAHRENHEIT 9/11." An African American woman and her daughter, passing by, tell us that all the tickets for opening night are already sold out. The computer saleswoman is right: folks in this town are mad as Hell at Bush about Iraq.
But at Skeeter’s, from what we can glean through innuendoes and hints, it’s clear that they’re all voting for Bush. Kerry, one old farmer says, "can’t keep supporting things that go bad and then acting like he didn’t support them. What’s he going to do if he’s the President and has to make all the hard decisions on his own?"
Martinsburg, West Virginia
It’s Bastille Day, and our last hurrah in the South. My wife and I roam through towns in the West Virginia panhandle, and discover a Mexican enclave close to Martinsburg, twelve miles from Winchester, Virginia. There’s a bustling Mexican restaurant called Viva Mexico where a local mariachi band plays once a month. By our good fortune, tonight is their monthly gig.
I’m keenly aware of our geography as my wife and I munch on heavenly enchiladas in a psychedelic dining room full of pastel-colored ceramic saints and chairs painted lime green. In big letters, a sign runs across the ceiling that reads "MY CHILD IS A US MARINE." We’re a few miles away from Harpers Ferry, where John Brown made his famous attempt to start an abolitionist revolution. The Mason-Dixon line is a half-hour’s drive away. And we’re surrounded by a disorienting mélange of Mexican migrant workers and Scotch-Irish coal miners.
"What the heck are all these Mexicans doing in West Virginia?" I ask one of the waiters in Spanish after we’ve gotten friendlier and a few beers are running through my system.
"They came to pick apples," he tells me. "And then they stayed and did things like open restaurants."
"You know, Latinos are everywhere nowadays," I tell him. "I see them in faraway places like Alabama and east Tennessee even. A lot of the ones I meet in the South are going to vote for Bush."
"Not here," the waiter says. "Here all the Latinos are Democrats. And they can’t forgive Bush for Iraq."
As the music starts, an elderly couple sees my wife and me and can’t help but smile. They ask us where we’re from and what we’re doing in Appalachia.
I tell them about the $64,000 question I’ve come to answer.
The old man starts weeping unexpectedly and tells me, "I don’t know nothing about political parties or one set of ideas versus another set of ideas. All I know is that I know a trustworthy man when I see him. Robert Byrd is a good man. George Bush is not a good man. John Kerry is not a good man."
"Who are you going to vote for?" I ask him.
His pink face flushes a bright red and he shakes his head. "It doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I cast my vote, I’m going to feel sad that I voted for someone I didn’t like."
"Enjoy your vacation," his wife tells us. "And go back home and forget your questions. The country’s been through much harder times than this. It will pass."
Gettysburg
An hour later, we cross into Pennsylvania and everything around me feels different. I want to dismiss the logic of the Southerners we met. But that old West Virginia couple keeps creeping back into my thoughts. I wonder, "does it matter whom I vote for?"
"Do you think we’re the crazy ones?" I ask my wife. "Do you think the people who plan to vote for Bush are really right, and we’re wrong?"
"Maybe we’re wrong," my wife tells me, curling up next to her window and going to sleep. "But we should do like the Southerners, and vote for someone even though we know he’s wrong. Things aren’t perfect."
Of course. There will never be a perfect candidate to vote for. So I’ll cast my vote for John Kerry in November and hope that he’s better than Bush has been. At least now, though, when those pollsters say that 45% of the country plans to vote for Bush, I’ll have some sense of what the numbers mean.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.