Blue States Only Please:
Some aspiring law professors include geographic limits on where they are willing to teach on their AALS application forms. For understandable reasons (e.g. family, health), some are more geographically mobile than others. Then, according to Glenn Reynolds, there's the candidate who will only consider jobs in "Blue States, Florida and Virginia" and will not consider "Other red states." Ironically, this means he or she is more likely to end up in a red part of a blue state (e.g. Orange County), than in the blue part of a red state (e.g. Austin, Cleveland). [It also does not say much about his or her open-mindedness and academic temperament, but that's another blog post entirely.]
I imagine that, aside from the *one* candidate -- who evidently is enough for a "meme" -- most professorial candidates would love to teach at UT-Austin. SXSW festival and they denied admission to George W. Bush back in the day.
There is nothing ironic about not wanting to live in Cleveland.
Blue is a great proxy for interesting hi-tech jobs.
Fill in that blank with "political" and it appears some posters (and the original author) here would be ok with that statement.
Fill in that blank with "racial" and I suspect these exact same people would cry "hold on now"....
The applicant didn't say s/he prefered urban over rural.
S/he didn't say anything about wanting to be in a cultural area.
This applicant said no red states. Obviously thinking in terms of his own political intolerance. Obviously. It seems clear to me that this applicant actually wanted to express himself that way, show some progressive bonafides but that it just my imagination.
Obviously however, this applicant was thinking in terms of republican and democrat. Sounds like a pompous jerk.
The idea that red stats lack culture is similarly amusing and ignorant. Places like Austin and Houston or some such certainly do have their own culture. Even ruraly places have a culture, as evidences by how sharply they contrast from the Culture of Manhattan.
I may not like the ruraly farming country culture, but I don't really like the grasshopper eating one either. IT still exists.
This is a problem, however, for those of us who are libertarian conservatives and like the uncrowded countryside but who are also attracted to the arts and culture, good shopping, a divers assortment of foods. Unfortunately, this usually goes hand in hand with large government liberal/left cities. The best answer I have found to this conundrum is New Hampshire.
Oh yes it does.
JN-V, I suppose it's interesting that the applicant will probably end up in a region that is politically hostile. If the candidate is trying to end up in a politically friendly area, that's definitely a bad way of going about it.
If it's a proxy for something else, though, it's just a poor choice of words. For example, maybe the person just wants to be somewhere that touches the ocean, isn't a big fan of the South, and thinks that UVA is too good of a school not to compromise. If so, it's probably better to find some kind of shorthand that doesn't indicate political close-mindedness.
On the other hand, maybe such statements are a boost in the eyes of most law faculties these days. Who knows.
Just a guess.
Is it? Austin and Houston, TX, and... what? Nashville, maybe, but you're looking rather hard after that. New York and Los Angeles are the centers of American pop culture; Boston's the center of academic culture; and most of the other considerable landmarks appear in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. You can resent supposed blue-state elitism all you want, but Indianapolis and Oklahoma City simply doesn't measure up to Manhattan.
Statements like that say more about the speaker than the supposed lack of "culture" in red states.
That was my take, too. Of course, it could have been phrased better, and telegraphing politics - even if misleadingly - certainly doesn't increase one's options. Of course, that might have been part of the point, too (a friend told me that last weekend he asked a woman out, she asked him whom he voted for last election, he said Kerry, and she said no. And this is in NYC. Point? people have all sorts of proxies they use for making decisions, some better than others. cf. cat v. dog people.)
Blue is a great proxy for interesting hi-tech jobs.
I suspect that is not entirely a coincidence.
The candidate probably isn't trying to stay away from conservatives, since there are plenty in even the bluest states. My guess is that she wants to live in a state with a Democratic governor and/or legislature so that she will be happy with the state's policies and programs. This seems a bit odd but reasonable; all else being equal, someone who has to move would usually prefer to be in the new state's electoral majority.
I have heard plenty of conservatives say they would never want to live in Massachusetts, New York or California (all of which, oddly, have Republican governors at the moment). Why is it so wrong for a liberal to have the same kind of preference?
And I agree with Shelby that the candidate's willingness to live in Virginia or Florida is probably due to some personal or family-related reason that trumps her political leanings.
Austin's only redeeming features are the vibrant music scene and the ginormous university. More importantly, SXSW tends to create false impressions about Austin's music scene. It's good, but it's not that good. Take away SXSW and Austin might fall behind El Paso.
Except for popular music, all four Texas cities are above Austin in terms of music. The same for the arts. Austin beats out Fort Worth for diversity of cuisine. Austin and Fort Worth are roughly even for sports, with the edge going to Austin for college athletics. I give Fort Worth the edge based solely on museums, the symphony, and the ballet.
And, Boston is the center of academic culture? That's humorous though, if true, a little frightening.
One thing to note is that in most blue states you're not too far from a big city--this is not true in most red states. Blue/red really is a decent proxy for population density.
It's difficult to imagine the candidates choice for expressing preference is going to help them in their job search. Why not just list the specific states they won't consider?
I personally wouldn't want to live in a single red state. Quite certain I don't even want to live anywhere in Florida or Virgina. Don't care for Houston or even Austin (and I have lived in both, so don't try to tell me I'm wrong). I know people with exactly the opposite tendency--and we're probably a lot happier with our self-segregation from each other.
The red/blue dichotomy doesn't map exactly onto rural-suburban/urban or conservative/liberal. I don't know exactly what it is, and it's clearly not as dramatic as all that, but I don't think it's content-free.
Just because it isn't the same culture as Manhattan doesn't mean there isn't any.
Trust me, 4H and country is culture. Eating grasshoppers and praying to the moon would be culture too (I doubt an extent one). Culture != liberal place. Culture != wealthy. Culture != anything specific in Manhattan.
Trust me, America is rich with different peoples and cultures, even in 'flyover country'.
If you go to Chickashae Oklahoma, they have some sort of rattlesnake eating thing. If you go to .. oh nevermind, if you don't care about it, that's your business.
Elitism on the left has won many an election for the right.
I personally was more intrigued by the candidate who said he would not work in Washington state (and only that state), despite having no listed connections to the state on his CV.
First, let's forget San Antonio. People work in San Antonio and commute 1 1/2 hours from Austin, where they choose to live. No one does it in reverse: not one soul! On every dimension of culture (sports don't count), San Antonio isn't on the map.
Second, for the arts, Houston and Dallas-Forth Worth are clearly better than Austin (indeed, both are extraordinarily good), but Austin, largely due to the University's collections, is surprisingly good.
Third, Sophocles is correct that for all kinds of popular music (from country to jazz), Austin is best, indeed, better than most of the cities on the two coasts (this is what my friends who follow this stuff tell me). But it's preposterous to say that San Antonio is above Austin for other kinds of music; again, the University makes a huge difference, in terms of the musical offerings the city attracts. Houston and Dallas-Forth Worth have better and deeper offerings.
For cuisine, only Houston is better than Austin. San Antonio isn't on the map.
All of the preceding are objective facts, soon to be confirmed in a definitive ranking. Sophocles should stick to play-writing!
(Most of those characteristic assignments are based on my general sense, rather than hard data, but I have lived in 4 of the above-named metro areas and frequently visited all except SF and Seattle)
Now, there are some places in the red states that have those things. Austin, certainly, is nice. (Houston has its own problems, like truly horrid horrid air pollution.) New Orleans has a lot of that stuff but also insane poverty and crime and an imploded economy. St. Louis I believe has an imploded economy too, though I could be wrong. Indianapolis is nice, but it's an hour from Chicago, which is unquestionably nicer. I've never been to Nashville, but I'm given to understand there are some amazing ribs there. Atlanta is very nice, if a bit quiet.
But the point is that a lot of the things that many people think of when they talk about "quality of life" exist in the blue states. This doesn't mean the people in the "blue states" are somehow better than the people in the "red states." It means that the blue states generally have bigger tax bases, lots of universities, parks, hippie kids who play music, etc. etc. etc. Is it so unreasonable to use blue-ness as a proxy for those things?
Haha, yeah, if someone said that the people in Brooklen (or what have you) lack values, they would also be wrong, obviously they just have different values. But frankly, your analogy leaves a lot to be desired. I don't really know what American values means, but it could be said that some parts of the country have more traditional values than others. It just couldn't be said that some parts have values and others none.
Just like Goober could say that Oklahoma has less cosmopolitan culture than Manhattan, but he couldn't (correctly) say that one has culture and the other none.
If I take one specific type of culture or value, I surely can evaluate which places have more or less. If I take the vague notion of value or culture, something that people can hardly exist without, it makes no sense to go around saying one place lacks it. (Those who say that really mean they don't have their culture or value).
This is off topic. The main point is that this applicant has a problem with political tolerance. People who have that problem are bigots.
It just doesn't ring true.
And I do think this is a proxy for money and affluence, if for no other reason than "culture" develops where there is both money and idleness. There is a reason that wealthy port cities develop this way and more rural, farming-based economies tend to be moe "provincial". Hopefully increasing electronic interconnectedness will make a lot of these ideas somewhat obsolete. Give me broadband and a nice view and I can adapt.
Recent times have led people to only use the term bigot to describe people who discriminate based on race or sex or orientation (etc) but really, bigot speaks to that slightly facist desire many extremists have (on either side) to hate people who disagree about politics.
As far as this being a fabrication, it's not like there aren't people who have this problem, is it? Read free republic or Democratic underground for a taste of people who cannot stand, and do not try to understand their political opposites. It's a huge problem in this country! Why does it sound fabricated to Anon1ms? Because it can't imagine any democrat thinking this? Open your eyes, it's a problem on both sides in our country. You're the one making the accusation without evidence.
Here, I get a bigger house, more cheaply, less crime, etc. If you pick a college town, like a big Midwest state-school town, you'll get enough bohmeia for amusement, if that's what you like.
Also, I find that the things I like about this town are the things that involve daily life, e.g., big yard for the kids. And the things I like about the Big Blue cities are, in large measure, doable in weeklong stints, e.g., shows.
And on that latter point, I can't count the times I've had this identical exchange with NYC pals, esp. in the big-firm law grind:
NYC pal: But we have cultural points like [MOMA, Broadway, whatever he/she likes]. You don't.
me: And the last time you went to any of those places was . . .?
NYC pal: Um, I get there about once a year.
me: Is that when your Midwest/Southern sibling/parent visits?
NYC pal: Yeah, how did you guess?
In the end, I like that we all can find a place that suits us. I don't begrudge anyone their preference, and I'm glad that enough people stay in other places to keep my town a little cheaper and less congested (though that's changing . . . sigh.)
More important -- I can live anywhere on the planet with Net access, and still live in the Volokh world. How cool is that? :-)
Meredith, I didn't mean to imply there isn't any. There's not as much, and it's not as good, for my money (and that's why my money gets spent in New York). Certainly country music in TX/TN is worth consideration. And I forgot New Orleans---I forget if that's "red" or "blue" these days.
More centrally, is it really elitism to say that the big uninhabited states that vote Republican simply don't have as much, or as good, culture as New England? Or that whatever its peculiar charms, Texas simply doesn't really rival New York City? We have MoMA and the Met; NYC just has more culture than Houston.
Igglephan---
Feh. Everyone knows Manhattan is the new Brooklyn.
Goldsmith---
And, Boston is the center of academic culture? That's humorous though, if true, a little frightening.
Feh. Harvard. MIT. The New York metro area, if defined as including Princeton as well as Columbia, is a rival. But come on; is there any mystery that the administration, in praising John Roberts, notes his Cambridge pedigree? If you don't like Massachusetts, you're entitled to that opinion. But pretending that the epicenter of American higher education is really in Texas is one of those "lady doth protest too much" moments.
Like Quahog, RI?
Precisely, giggity giggity.
As for Brooklyn, I have one argument against its greatness: Williamsburg. It's like a petri dish containing scrapings of every college town boho main drag in the country, sans classes and books and the comfort in knowing they'll rotate out every 4 years. Visit sometime. Get knocked over by an unwashed 32 year old man in tight jeans with an ironic moustache whose graduate degree in advanced liberal arts included a final paper on Foucault and his influence on East Coast Punk. Look bewildered when he doesn't help you up. Pine for Duluth.
Heh, I wonder what it will be like if this fellow gets a job* and has to deal with a student who asks him in class about this restriction?
* I take it as a given that eventually this person’s identity will be revealed and if he gets a teaching job his students WILL look him up on the internet.
How about a nice family town, where you can get a nice big house, on an acre of land, with plenty of space for the kids and dog to play, rolling hills, green pastures, summer-time rain....that's what folks need!
First, let's forget San Antonio. People work in San Antonio and commute 1 1/2 hours from Austin, where they choose to live. No one does it in reverse: not one soul! On every dimension of culture (sports don't count), San Antonio isn't on the map.
Second, for the arts, Houston and Dallas-Forth Worth are clearly better than Austin (indeed, both are extraordinarily good), but Austin, largely due to the University's collections, is surprisingly good.
Third, Sophocles is correct that for all kinds of popular music (from country to jazz), Austin is best, indeed, better than most of the cities on the two coasts (this is what my friends who follow this stuff tell me). But it's preposterous to say that San Antonio is above Austin for other kinds of music; again, the University makes a huge difference, in terms of the musical offerings the city attracts. Houston and Dallas-Forth Worth have better and deeper offerings.
For cuisine, only Houston is better than Austin. San Antonio isn't on the map.
All of the preceding are objective facts, soon to be confirmed in a definitive ranking. Sophocles should stick to play-writing!
Dallas-Fort Worth has some nice cuisine vis a vis Austin.
San Antonio has an interesting Tejano music scene.
But, all in all, Texas is a great state.
Feh, again. The East Side of Providence, RI, perhaps. And I think our football team may have been better than Yale's in... one or two of the last ten years, maybe? Brook-burg, indeed, is largely obnoxious, although still home to a wonderful Orthodox community. And the homeless street cat I adopted a year ago. (Whom I named Palsgraf. Natch.)
As for culture, I have deer in my back yard and public hunting land less than 30 minutes from home (just south of Charlottesville). Fishing closer. Doesn't get any better than that.
I think the guy who didn't want WA state was probably reacting to I-200 (the anti-racial-preferences iniative from some years ago). In the immediate aftermath of that, a bunch of people refused to come to WA to do their lectures, concerts, whatever. CA did something similar but I take it Boalt is more appealing than UW.
Have you noticed Brian Leiter's law school blog, where he refers to the same story and attributes it to an unnamed "colleague elsewhere"? How petty not to give you or Glenn Reynolds the credit.
I'll agree that _if_ Leiter is deliberately obscuring his source rather than give credit to Reynolds, that would be rather petty. But there's no evidence that that is in fact taking place, is there?
JNV lists his source as Instapundit, and Instapundit lists _his_ source as (gasp!) "a colleague at another school." Which is exactly how Leiter lists it.
Perhaps Leiter can clarify, but just based on the record, it looks like the most likely chain of events is that the same unnamed colleague e-mailed both Reynolds and Leiter, who happen to be two widely read bloggers.
TJIT
So, if you want to be a law professor, you need to be flexible. Don't limit your job search by geography unless you must. Keep an open mind and you might like a place you hadn't considered before.
Enjoy what you enjoy, but don't tear down my home in doing so. Otherwise, I'll have to start telling you how rude, how self-absorbed, how "whatever" all those coastal people are. I'll explain how coastals prefer "culture" while flyovers prefer "people."
I'm speaking from personal experience now. My identity is obscured because I truly don't want these remarks held against me somewhere by some vengeful rural-ite, but I lived in flyover territory for several years as a young intelligent educated person, for terribly misguidedly idealistic reasons, and I want to paint a little picture of the experience. The following is all true.
The town had ten thousand people. It was the largest town for about a 45 min/1 hour drive, at the end of which was a "city" in the sense of "city" that includes Billings, Roanoke, Salt Lake, Omaha, etc.
The town's economy was based in agriculture and things secondary to agriculture, like factory food processing.
The town had a community college as its sole representative of higher education (which I realize makes it worse that what the idiot with the blue state application could have expected, but this is about elitism here.)
There were there bookstores: two "Christian" stores and one very small general-interest bookstore on the order of B Dalton in civilization. The secular bookstore went out of business during my tenure there from lack of custom.
There were, in addition to "diners," several Mexican restaurants (decent, thanks to migrant farmworkers), a couple of truly abominable Chinese cat-traps, and one surprisingly good Thai place. The Thai place too went out of business during my tenure there.
There was a "super" wal-Mart sitting right at the edge of a sales tax border. That may well have been responsible for most of the non-agricultural employment in that town by the time I fled.
There was no museum of any kind. I met not a single artist in my time there.
Crop dusters routinely sprayed poison upwind from my apartment.
My next-door neighbors on one side were an alcoholic couple whose relationship was, I strongly suspect, frequently abusive. Unfortunately, I never had enough to go on to intervene.
There was not a single healthy tree within a mile of my apartment, save surrounding a farmer's house or two. The entire town was encased in concrete with no thought whatsoever given to greenery, architecture, or anything else that might contribute to anything resembling beauty or simple joy.
The town government was completely unresponsive to the needs of the people. At one point, it randomly decided to tinker with the water-billing schedule and cause a huge chunk of the poor to just lose service.
There were, however, several head shops. The major pastimes of the town were, in rough order of priority:
Booze
Sex
Weed
As those were, quite literally the only things in town to do. As I don't indulge in the last, rarely indulge in the first, and could find no acceptable partner for the second in that hellhole, things were a mite boring.
Do you get the picture yet?? Should I go on??? Rural life is hell!
I enjoyed reading that. But I must make a disappointing concession: Here in Manhattan, our list of pastimes is strikingly similar to that you encounted and so lamented. Sorry!
I think another factor is how married/partnered people with families experience things as opposed to swingin' young singles. For a single person, a rural life in a place with no opportunities to meet others might not be a good choice. But for the settled who might like a quiet life with family, it's perfect. New York gets to be every bit as provincial, unpleasant and boring as anywhere else.
Unsurprisingly, those with the luxury to choose their geography (not most of us) segregate based on how they want to live. Why these ways of living correlate with politics I'm not sure.
Oh, you have to live here for a while to understand places like Williamsburg. See, there's always a hip place, and the rest of us just quarantine it, and wait until the infestation blights some other area. Repeat. When you get a population like ours, it is something to regret, but not fight. Just write it off, and after the yuppies have chased the hipsters off, just move the barriers, and wait for the yuppies to move to the burbs. (Hint: modulo other cyclic issues, buy property just before the hipsters are chased out. I don't think this applies in Williamsburg this time, due to the general nuttiness.)
When I have this kind of discussion face-to-face, the oh-the-northeast-has-so-much-better-culture-etc people are invariably the ones who don't ever go to museums and know even less about opera, and can't tell the difference between Mahler and Monteverdi. So, to those people, just shut up already. I'm quite happy in my medium-sized "flyover" city, paying reasonable (i.e., non-Met prices)for great opera tickets on Sunday afternoon, then I can get home in seven minutes, lounge by the swimming pool, and cook on an outdoor grill. It's hard to live that way in the supposed culture-meccas.
But seriously, don't kvetch to me about how Manhattan has much better museums if the last time you went was on a GD field trip!
If a white guy says he hates all black people, he's a bigot. He's discriminating against them in a benign way, though probably his preferences could lead to more substantial problems.
Anyway, if the guy can't stand living around people he doesn't agree with, he probably is not very well cultured at all.
Manhattan can be a bubble. Further, I never stated my personal preference. I have lived in Washignton DC and I have lived in a small town in Kansas. I preferred DC, but Kansas had very interesting stuff going on.
Goober, you say, for your money, one culture is better than another. Perhaps you perfer one to another, and no one really cares about that, but obviously you can't credibly claim one is better.
Is Paris's culture better than Tegucigalpa's culture? You would say yes if you applied the standard you hold. In reality, you are just being insular...afraid of the unfamiliar. Go to a pie making contest, a demolition derby, or a good old witch burnin'. It's good to have a home culture that you relate most to. yours in Manhattan (or something like that) and that's fine. Manhattan is a wonderful place, though it has some real problems, and one, to my view, is that it is disney-fied and has lost a lot of its culture. I still appreciate it. It's stupid to say that's the best one, because everybody feels that way, to some extent, about their own culture.
I agree with you to a great extent. Having lived in several of the "great" cities (San Francisco, Vancouver, etc.) and currently livng in Europe, I realize that Vienna (Austria not Virginia) would crush any of them head-to-head. However, I lived in Bloomington, Indiana (extremely red state) for four years and I would take a teaching job at its law school at the drop of a hat. Shakespeare in the park in the summer, broadway shows in the winter, Gutenburg Bible at the museum, etc. If I really missed seeing people dumb enough to be obsessed with the big city in the blue state, I could drive to Chicago and warn my children of the dangers of placing moronic constraints on one's life planning.
In fact, based on my own experience, I think it may be best to live in a somewhat blue area of a red state.
I must say I fail to see how this can be regarded as a disadvantage.
I was born and raised in the Seattle suburbs, and lived in the city proper for 3 years after college. The only artists I met were the ones they brought to my high school to give talks, classes, etc. Don't particularly miss them.
This past summer I worked at a fancy DC law firm. I met not a single gunsmith--or, indeed, a single wild turkey hunter--my entire time there. This does not lead me to regard DC as a wasteland unfit for human habitation.
Nothing more need be said about it.
Here's the more important point. Of the (minority) of folks that put geographic restrictions on there applications, the vast majority say something like, "only the east coast" or "only the west coast" or "only the east coast, west coast, or Chicago." Is that really so different from saying, "only blue states plus 1 or 2 red ones"? Should we folks in flyover country get upset about that? Life's too short.
Again, I'm a hiring committee chair, so I will add this: Excellent folks of all political stripes should apply to Toledo: a blue city in a red state--we have everything!
I live in New York City Goober, and MoMA is not proof positive of culture above and beyond any other locale in the country.
If I were to take a collection of art work done by second graders and replace the existing MoMA collections with them, no one would know that any change had taken place.
I've been to a good many museums, including the modern art museum in Madrid. Turns out that one of our party got sick--not surprising--and I had an excuse to leave early to escort her to a garden where she could recover her equilibrium. Fresh air, the blue sky of Castile, a fountain, plants, no "the masturbator" or eviscerated horses.
With the exception of modern art museums whose purpose seems to be to promote nausea, I don't see the point. A museum exhibition is to the subject matter as a book jacket is to the book. What's the point?
Spent about fifty bucks early this year to go to the local symphony. By accident, my wife and I had seats letting us look up Pepe Romero's right nostril as he strummed away at Aranjuez, then the New World Symphony had extra brass, or so it seemed. Then twenty minutes to our pleasant small town.
Although, by the efforts of the UAW, we are in a blue state, it remains fly-over country. Among other things, we have more riflemen, 750,000, in the woods during deer season than there were on the Eastern Front.
As a grateful resident of fly-over country, let me restate our motto:
Keep flying. Our airport's broken.
What, you let your second graders work with human feces?
Is that really so different from saying, "only blue states plus 1 or 2 red ones"?
Sure. By putting it in explicitly political terms, you show that your adgenda is politics, not geography. Why not take the request at face value? If you want to live on the coast, why not say "the coast"? Why use a weird proxy of dubious value (Minnesota and Wisconsin are blue, but somehow not "flyover," states?) I could say "I prefer neighbors who share my belief God" or I could say "I prefer to live next to Republicans." Are these statements not obviously different?
Read to the bottom of the article and you'll see that MoMA owns some of this guy's canned excrement. And I'd bet they own an Ofili or two.
Who's classy?
Nick
Now, sure, there's got to be TONS of deans at law schools who will read "blue states only" and believe, like some commenters, it has absolutely NOTHING to do with politics, only means urban, or coastal, or "cultural," or whatever. But still.
Guy (or gal) will probably even get some calls from impressed law school hiring people at Cleveland State and Mizzou trying to talk the person INTO their school. It's a stroke of genius.
My only other thought of how this limitation might be relevant to a job search involves state funding for public schools and/or domestic partner benefit rules. As a gross generalization, it's probably true that state legislatures controlled by Republicans (which may often reflect the red/blue split) are more frequently skeptical on both those issues. Of course that's likely to primarily if not exclusively matter to public law schools, and it's just speculation on my part.
Beyond that, I'll just that I strongly doubt this is going to have any effect on the person's job chances, because my (limited) experience in this sort of thing is that traditional qualifications are what counts in hiring, not the occasional quirk.
This is a typical expression of left-wing intolerance by the type of person who believes political opponents are not merely mistaken or misguided but awful people. As for why the person is willing to live in Virginia and Florida, it seems safe to assume that the former is acceptable for its proximity to D.C., and the latter is acceptable because the person is still in that stage of reality-denial of believing that Bush stole the election and Florida is really a blue state.
racial quotasaffirmative action to achieve "diversity" in color only, but yet doesn't want political diversity in the university.As for the not-very-swift person who put out the FAR, well, just consider the alternative positions. Dan Savage has expressed the feelings of a lot of us urban liberals, after all. Some choice excerpts:
In the immortal words of Glenn Reynolds: "Indeed." The next time you get all into a tizzy about someone -- gasp -- expressing a preference for living in places where the policies and the lifestyles will be to their liking, read the Savage Sage and get some perspective.
Went to the link. When can we start!!!!!
What this person doesn't really get is about red stater's is:
WE DON'T CARE
Go ahead. Look after your own house. It's what we have wanted all along. And if the consequence of that is fewer arrogant big city snobs...... so be it.
Reminds me of the old joke.
Lady from Texas is at a dinner party in NYC. She sees a woman with hors douvres and asks "Excuse me, do y'all know where the hors douvres are at?"
Appalled, the NY sociallite reprimands the lady. "I don't know about where you're from, but here, we never end a sentance with a preposition."
The lady from Texas immdeiately apologizes. "You're right, I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'Do you know where the hors douvres are at, bitch?'"
Of course, Spokane is a red city in a blue state. Washington is blue because of the Seattle metropolitan area. Oregon is a blue state as well, but even Lane County, the home of the University of Oregon, passed the anti-gay marriage measure last November. Blue state/red state is an inadequate measure of whether someone will find politically like-minded in his neighborhood or workplace.
Although I'll admit I would enjoy the spectacle of blue-staters attemting to field an army.
Blue-staters would have one significant advantage over the red-staters in attempting to field an army, one that would certainly obviate all the population problems: we have all the technology. Apart from the fact that all the scientists want to live somewhere where they might not get burned at the stake (and where there's a nice well-tax-funded government to give them research grants), the inerrancy of the bible could pose some problems in weapons production. Go ahead, just try to make a modern gun with a barrel based on pi=3 like the bible says. Good luck...
We HAVE to argue about wars at a national level, but there's no reason the Feds need to be in my bedroom, either to check on the location of my genitals or to see if my guns have trigger locks.
I'll leave the ignorance and bigotry of the rest of your comment untouched except to comment that I could make a modern gun with 19th-century tools without once using pi for anything.
Now admittedly, we do have to argue about wars at a national level, but you don't seem to hesistate much about recruiting your troops from OUR locales, rather than exclusively your own.
And that doesn't even mean that things like the national supply of clean water, national biodiversity, etc. are local issues, alas.
The US Armed Forces are not "my troops," and urban blue areas are not "your locales."
Do you happen to know where I have lived over the course of my life? What my education is? What my position on stem cells, Intellegent Design in the classroom, or logging in national forests might be? By what right to you lay claim to the "blue" parts of the country and purport to exclude me, even if only rhetorically?
Such language makes it difficult to understand what, exactly, you are talking about. I do not object to urban liberals choosing military service, although few of them do. Do you object to their making that free choice, and if so, why? I support less Federal involvement in my bedroom, which happens to contain handguns. Mr. Savage and Texican seem to agree with me. Do you? I doubt whether the municipal water supply of Los Angeles or the status of a hill in West Virginia is properly the concern of residents of Miami, although I certainly concede that rivers, lakes, wildlife, and air are properly national concerns in at least some cases. Am I "outside of the mainstream" yet?
Do you happen to know where I have lived over the course of my life? What my education is? What my position on stem cells, Intellegent Design in the classroom, or logging in national forests might be? By what right to you lay claim to the "blue" parts of the country and purport to exclude me, even if only rhetorically?
In a .. ahem .. national political discourse people are, I'm afraid, chained to their allies. If you join an alliance with Pat Robertson to put Bush into office, and if your politicians attempt to ram the rightist position in all "culture wars" issues down the rest of our throats, as seems to be the case, I'm entitled to lay claim to the opposition.
If I'm mistaken: if you really didn't contribute with your vote or your money or your support to the installation of George W. Bush, or if you really wouldn't choose to live in Texas, rather than Massachusetts, if given those two choices, then I apologize but wonder why you appear to disagree with me. If I'm not mistaken, however, then you can be held to account for those politicians and those allies whom you support. A vote for Bush is, I'm afraid, a vote for intelligent design, strip mining, clear cutting, stem cell research bans, wars of whimsy, pi=3, etc. etc. If that's a problem to you, clean up your own damn party. Until then, the U.S. Armed Forces, whom Bush is using as his personal G.I. Joe dolls, are indeed "your troops," and the urban blue areas, whom Bush is dilligently ignoring when he's not busy screwing, are indeed "my locales."
I actually quite like most intelligent libertarian-types, on an individual basis. Sadly, y'all have the corporate plutocrats on one side (whom you seem to support) and the bible-thumpers on the other (whom you at least make common cause with). When you put that baby in such nasty, sticky bathwater, expect to get it thrown out.
Oh, and I don't object to the "free choice" to join the military (such a free choice for poor kids coming out of the public school system who can't get a job or a college education) at all, but I don't think it should carry a death sentence without good reason. Sadly, your president seems to disagree. Nor do I object to your bedroom containing handguns, though I do object if you put others at risk with those handguns, and it's rather difficult not to. I also think your parceling out of water supplies etc. is rather, shall we say, short-sighted and simplistic? For one thing, Los Angeles gets most of its water from huge swathes the surrounding region. The power generated in West Virginia by blowing up hills is used in Miami and many other places and the people of Miami have an ethical obligation to see that it's done non-exploitatively, etc..
About that article you posted by Dan Savage (I happen to live in the same city he lives in)
Right on, man! That article rocks!! I've felt that way for quite some time! Thanks for posting it.