The Civil War tore America apart and left 600,000 dead. Still, despite its ferocity, it had at its heart only one big issue: whether the Constitution’s promise of individual liberty overrode states’ rights to govern themselves. Otherwise, Americans were much the same: the Bible, hard work, heterosexuality, the nuclear family, anti-crime, etc.
America today actually faces a more profound schism than it did then because we’ve become two entirely different people.
An opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle really hammers the point home, as a regular columnist looks at a county fair in the Heartland and sees a dystopian world.
Soleil Ho identifies herself a plural being who should be referred to as “they” and “them.” She is “an opinion columnist and cultural critic, focusing on gender, race, food policy and life in San Francisco.” She’s even made it to Joy Reid’s show for exposing the horror of parents who are opposed to the push to destroy their children’s biological reality with the lunacy of “transgenderism.”
Image by AI.
Ho recently took a trip to visit relatives in the American heartland (perhaps rural Illinois) and professed herself to be absolutely horrified by what she found there. The headline of Ho’s San Francisco Chronicle essay (and I don’t know whether Ho or the Chron came up with this headline) is “I took a trip to Trump country. It was more bleak than I could have imagined.”
I opened the essay assuming that I’d read about the economic despair that decades of Democrat policies have visited on rural America: Shuttered factories and stores, homelessness, drug addiction, foreclosed homes, crime-ridden communities, illegal aliens sucking up public funds, etc.
Instead, Ho described a bucolic county fair, complete with “rides, the charcoal-kissed meat skewers and the stall that churns out fried cheese curds, those little molten pebbles enrobed in crisp chambers of light-as-air batter,” along with happy people collecting “plenty of award ribbons for photography, cookies, crafts and giant garden-grown vegetables.”
But for Ho, none of this mattered. Attending the fair with Democrat relatives trapped in a Heartland hellhole, the real evil lurked beneath this Arcadian surface. These happy people celebrating their lives and eating wonderful fair food are evil. Truly evil. Why? Because they support Trump:
Along with corny fair merch and anime ponchos, every, and I mean every T-shirt stall was draped with Trump flags: “I’m voting for the felon,” “F— Biden” and the relatively anodyne, “I’m With Trump.” While browsing the pet supply shop across from the local Republican Party’s stall, I saw GOP staff greeted with cheers and raised fists — echoing Donald Trump’s triumphant pose after the assassination attempt on him — by numerous fairgoers wearing red caps and “Ultra MAGA” shirts. “Boo, Kambala!” yelled a woman, laughing.
In packed queues for roasted corn, I squeezed past parents balancing their children’s plastic lemonade cups in their arms with “Trump/Vance 2024” lawn signs tucked under their armpits. “Nice sign!” one blonde, elementary school-age girl shouted above the din, with her thumbs up at a woman holding one of them.
Ho was also confronted with the terrible specter of men in floral Hawaiian shirts.
You and I, staunch conservatives, may just think, “Ooh, I like Hawaiian shirts” or “Oh, that’s kind of tacky,” but the alert woke person knows better.
Ho hears the dog whistle of the “boogaloo” movement, a seriously fringe and ineffective group that no conservatives care about.
I suspect that while a scattering of Hawaiian shirts horrifies Ho, she’s copacetic about hundreds of masked Antifa members attacking people, fire-bombing federal buildings, and otherwise engaging in violent mayhem.
To Ho, the county fair represents everything evil in America:
My family, mostly Democrats or otherwise apolitical, are pragmatic about politics: This is their home. They quietly listen to the daily political rants and ravings about crime, immigrants and “transes” from MAGA colleagues, neighbors and friends, hoping for any opportunity to pivot to the weather.
There’s the divide. The evil Americans think that crime should be punished, immigrants should arrive legally, and that embracing the mental illness of body dysphoria should be discouraged, not encouraged. Ho also boasts that, in the Utopia of San Francisco, she need not fear wearing a “Notorious RBG” shirt, forgetting that conservatives in that Utopia risk physical assault, vandalism, and job loss for daring to voice their political opinions. By contrast, Ho could have worn her “Notorious RBG” shirt to that fair without worry. Republicans believe in free speech.
For Ho, her nightmare in the dystopia of the heartland culminated with the crowd at the rodeo singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The horror was too much for her. “I’d had enough. I stayed seated, head in my hands, and waited for the bulls to come charging out of their pens.”
It took America four years and 600,000 lives to resolve the one question of individual liberty versus state’s rights, a battle that conveniently divided itself along geographic lines. How is our country ever to resolve the fact that we have living cheek by jowl two entirely different cultures, each with values antithetical to the other, all vying for the same political control?
