"What's the Matter with Kansas?"

Class ended early today -- as I noted, I've run out of stuff to teach -- and having some extra time before office hours, I strolled to Labyrinth Books and picked up a few bargains. Then I sat cross-legged on the grass, in the Columbia quad, and read through a beautifully illustrated Katha Upanishad. Damn it, this is what college grounds are for. One of my epiphanies in college was reading The Social Contract, in a field, with the hills of western Massachusetts stretched across the landscape, thinking of Rousseau's idealized Geneva and his vision of a democratic, neo-classical future. The Columbia campus wasn't quite as picturesque as the fields of Hampshire, but it was a pleasant place to read all the same.

After finishing the Upanishad I walked upstairs and started Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? All feelings of serenity and oneness with the cosmos went splat, and by the time I finished the book (late in the evening) I was in a pretty grumpy mood. Frank's describes the way the hard-right has used "wedge-issues" to exploit working-class resentment in Kansas, using it against the sinister "liberal elite" while enabling the corporate interests that are actually destroying working-class neighborhoods. It's an infuriating catalog. We're so used to sneers about "latte sipping liberals" that we forget it isn't true: Conservatives are, and always have been, richer and better educated than their liberal enemies; this is true today and it was true 100 years ago. It's fantasy, just as unreal as Rousseau's fantasy of democratic Geneva, or the Vedic legends of ancient Aryan virtue, but it's a fantasy of virulence and hate that's hard to tolerate for any length of time.