Real America

Another shot at Newsweek for Smart People. I'm really getting obsessive about this; I need to cancel the subscription.

Jeremy McCarter, in a piece that should have been titled "Chicken Soup for the Liberal Progressive Soul," makes roughly ninety-seven assertions that are baloney stuffed with baloney. I shall comment on the one that strikes closest to home for me. The article pretends to be about Henry Fairlie, a dead writer imported from Britain (imported before his death), who embraced an elite, pro-government, Tory version of conservatism. McCarter shamelessly uses Fairlie (a pitiful drunk as well as a gifted observer) as a springboard for his own viewpoint.

McCarter admits that he thought that some of Fairlie's anti-Republican conservatism was "overheated," but "then I watched Sarah Palin speak. Fairlie's disgust at the GOP's small-minded demagoguery anticipated the day when it would reach its fullest expression—when the movement would have no farther to fall." Fairlie, McCarter writes, "would have been thrilled by Barak Obama's story and what it demonstrates about the possibilities of American life... and he would have eviscerated Palin's notion that there's such a thing as 'Real America.'"

Oh, please. Okay, Palin is a nitwit. A great-looking, vivacious, appealing, populist nitwit. There's no getting around that. But she's entirely right about the Real America. Oh, you can argue the semantics. If you really wanted to annoy McCarter, you might dub it the Silent Majority. Perhaps McCarter would like the sound of "the Little People." But there is an America out there that few smart journalists, politicians, or business executives have ever experienced. Intellectually, they know it's there, and they make gestures in its direction, but it plays no role in their daily consciousness. They underestimate its size and importance. They have never vacationed there, much less adopted citizenship.

I learned about the Real America through my wife's wonderful family, and their roots in cities that sprawl around refineries. I learned about it watching their military service, an abstraction to the elite. I learned about it after moving to a small town in the Texas Hill Country, where people purposely choose locations, lifestyles, incomes, and principles that would make McCarter sneer.

I like Real America. I've seen the other version. I lived in it for decades. Real America is better. There's a whole lot of Real America out here, and from time to time its inhabitants get pissed off about people like McCarter, then the country—and the government—jerks to a new direction.

Don't mistake me for a Cheney-Wolfowitz-Feith-Rumsfeld fan (though there is an anti-Rumsfeld pretend book review in the same issue of NFSP that I find hilarious). The direction toward which Real America jerks the nation is not always my first pick. There are indeed small-minded and uninformed people out here, and I recognize that there are none in New York City. But to deny that Real America exists, to ignore the clear, compelling differences between the world that McCarter inhabits and the world that many, many Americans have chosen is to expose the ignorance of smart people who proclaim truths in their smart magazines.