In today's
New York Times, Timothy Egan has a
unintentionally hilarious elegy to the "lost small town" of Spokane (metro area population around 625,000) that was "devastated" when Kaiser Aluminium collapsed. I'm sure Spokane seems like Dogpatch to the New York urban sophisticates sipping their skinny, half-caf, soy milk, no foam lattes and tut-tutting the plight of the poor rubes out there in flyover country. If only they would vote Democratic!
Conspicuously absent from Egan's
apologia of the Obamessiah is the role
labor unions and asbestos lawsuits played in Kaiser's demise. So is the fact that none of the natural resource industries that built Spokane (timber, mining, etc.) would be possible now under current environmental regulations, not to mention concern over "climate changing" energy usage and emissions and the lawsuit-happy NIMBY-state Washington has become. All these business- and job-killing factors, promulgated and championed by liberal Democrats, are somehow Dubya's and the Republican's fault.
And in Egan's eyes, the sins of Crackerquiddick are washed away, because rock star and patron saint of the working class Bruce Springsteen has endorsed Obama. After all, "The Boss" once sang a song that had the line "these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back.”
I especially like some of the online comments on the article:
"The bad lands of eastern Washington have been dead and gone for years."
"From my perspective, there is a cultural inbreeding and resistance to change and better ideas in small-town heartland America that is more responsible for the decay there than any of the factors many inhabitants of the heartland blame."
"Another aspect of small town living is their isolation. Making a sweeping generalization you can say that the people between the mountain ranges are different than those that are on the coasts. The former are protected and look inward the latter are unprotected and look outward. Spokane is even more isolated."
You know, come to think of it, I did see a boy playing a banjo on a front porch the other day while I was driving around Pullman...
As the Dems focus on class and culture, instead of the economy, Iraq, immigration, etc., they are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
