'They Hate Us'
a.k.a. Why a Red State Reader?

Some days after Election Day in November 2004, I was walking to the deli on the corner a few blocks from my apartment on the lower Upper East Side of Manhattan, and I passed two men standing outside a bar, smoking cigarettes and talking. “They hate us down there”, one man said. “They hate us!” “Well,” the other man said, “I don't know. I go to South Carolina every year, and...” The first man cut him off: “No. They hate us. They were glad when September 11 happened.”

That was how it felt in New York after the balloting. There was a sense of betrayal, alienation, things coming apart. And so it went everywhere. Whatever national unity had briefly emerged to do triage after the massacres had long dissipated. Looking at the electoral maps, with all that hostile red and blue ink, it was easy to imagine fences, moats, mine fields. Fantasy maps made the rounds of the Internet. A popular liberal version annexed the East and West coasts into the United States of Canada, and left the rest to something called Jesusland. Likewise, a British acquaintance recounted hearing a conservative South Carolina native wish that the Northeastern states would just float off somewhere into the Atlantic. Kerry voters created a Web site called weresorry.com, with photos of Americans holding signs apologizing to the rest of the world. Bush supporters responded with werenotsorry.com. The national media, still largely based in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, scrambled to figure out how to reach Red State Americans, this exotic population presumed to be so different in outlook and values.

All of which was understandable and maybe inevitable, but also so simple-minded that it made my teeth hurt. As some self-styled moderates tried to demonstrate with maps showing the country as a mass of undulating purple, the nation doesn't break down along such neat lines. There are a lot of voices missing. I know some of them personally, because I lived in the fine city of Knoxville, Tennessee, for nearly a decade before moving to the equally fine city of New York. The history of the country is such that culture and politics and religious zeal, conservatism and radicalism, have intertwined and cross-fertilized each other in mutating recombinations since its founding, and before. No sweeping statement can be made about any region of the nation that can't be quickly tattered by contradictory evidence.

So to some extent, this small publication is an attempt to provide bits and pieces of that evidence. Not to argue for or against any one place, but to remember how complicated all of these places actually are. It is made up of perspectives from and about the areas designated as Red, with the intention – to the extent that there is one – of illustrating the complexity of those tangled masses of history and culture. (I like to remind people that when I left Tennessee for New York, I left a state on the verge of electing a Democratic governor for a state that's been governed by a Republican since 1994.)

This initial effort is scattershot, as initial efforts tend to be. Its content has a distinct Tennessee bias, because that's the place I know best. But it also reaches to Houston, for some thoughts on the lively hip-hop scene there, as well as Louisiana, for a revisiting of Huey Long's “Share the Wealth” speech. (Some materials – a short story by Ambrose Bierce and the cartoon by J.L. Magee – are available courtesy of public domain laws, for which I am grateful to the framers of the Constitution, may their intentions continue to be respected.) As future issues develop, the topical and geographical range of the content will, I hope, both broaden and deepen. In the meantime, I would be happy to hear any thoughts, comments or ideas at all. I can be reached at the email address below.

Many thanks to the several people who assisted me with this first issue (and who I will be calling on again). And thank you for reading.