Coastal and Flyover America

Robert Beers

As we circled Chicago O’Hare the pilot of the United 747 finally told us exactly what no one onboard wanted to hear. The Midwest snowstorm was unabated and we were diverting to the nearest available airport which turned out to be Omaha.

Outside of the eponymous insurance country that proudly brought you Wild Kingdom I knew nothing about Nebraska’s largest city or Nebraska for that matter or the surrounding states. The only thing that came to mind was corn.

In was 1987 and this turned out to be a record snow fall and I ended up stranded in Omaha for three days.

The airline had a couple hundred of its passengers in various hotels in Omaha. As I remember only a handful of fellow passengers were in this hotel where I was staying. Instead the clientele were largely those attending a pan-Nebraska & Oklahoma sewage management festival.

There was no room service and so you had to dine in the restaurant which had the intimate atmosphere of a large abandoned barn. You could not eat alone. There were very long picnic tables with benches and as the hours of ‘dining’ were very limited it was an up-close and personal experience with your fellow hotel guests.

While up to that point I had not led a sheltered life, I was still woefully unprepared for a roomful of men in plaid. Plaid sport coats, plaid trousers, plaid ties and plaid shirts with the key fashion element being — even if the ensemble pretended to be a suit — that the plaids never matched.

The women in general sported what in Europe is called ‘full Austrian’, i.e. no hair color in the room was even remotely close to the natural hair color of a living human being. Like a film camera my eyes scanned the room panning past bright orange, pale orange and burnt orange hair along with strange maroon tinged reds, electric blues with gold blonde lowlights.

Another group of women appeared to be going to an Andy Griffith Show costume ball as there were Aunt Bee luck-a-likes and dead ringers for Clara the phone operator aplenty often with Gomer-esque husbands in tow.

More so than the Guatemalan jungle or the backstreets of Berlin, this was to me very foreign territory.

As I faced a pork chop the size of a catcher’s mitt, a large brick of a baked potato and a Frisbee-sized country biscuit, we got down to business. Namely the issue of the moment was the impending Sooners v. Cornhuskers basketball match. Now I knew these were the nicknames for the Nebraska and Oklahoma University sports teams, but more to the point what is a Sooner? No Google in those days to tell me they were those folks who grabbed ‘unassigned lands’ in Oklahoma before the vast prairie was open for settlement. I guess the Fighting Illegal Land Grabbers would not easily fit on the front of a hooded sweatshirt.

Cornhuskers, of course, being those people who remove the leaves and hairy bits from an ear of corn as opposed to buying, like normal people, the genetically modified corn in a grocery store which is grown in plastic containers, protected from harmful oxygen by cellophane wrap and also comes without that annoying plant hair.

After the big game has been dissected down to the competence of the last reserve player on the bench, they moved on to, what else, the need for a $15 bill.

A gentleman sitting opposite me is wearing a visor he said he had picked up at the Oklahoma State Fair which had a battery on the back and on the front a series of lights flashed endlessly saying: Oklahoma is OK. This fellow went through a long dissertation on: ‘You know when you got no change and you’re at the gas station and the pump comes up $11.25 and you got a ten and a twenty and you have to give the guy that 20 and get all that change. Doesn’t that just really, really bug you?.

I’m thinking if only it wasn’t 30 below zero outside and the roads weren’t like ice skating rinks, I should have walked that half a mile to the McDonald’s.

The coup-de-strangulate-myself was when one of the Aunt Bees suggested that Ronald Reagan’s picture should be on the front and the back of the new $15 bill.

Eventually as the conversation moved on to metaphysical and existential nuances of various episodes of Dynasty I took my cue, excused myself and said: “Have a nice trip home….. (lowered voice) to Jupiter.”

Back in my Bates Motel room I am feeling a bit guilty. They are probably   very good people, led productive existences in their minds, and never actually removed anyone’s tongues with pliers as I was fantasizing about ten minutes earlier. They were discussing interesting topics like currency reform, the artistic accomplishments of major artists like Joan Collins and the norms and practices of American intercollegiate athletics. None the less, they are inexorably a bottomless mystery to me, no kinship, nationality or otherwise, whatsoever.

That experience and many others, but that one was searing, solidified my image of two separate Americas. Before the red state – blue state divide was spoken of, before the term cultural wars entered the lexicon, even before Reagan, I had a feeling that America was becoming two separate and uneasy with each other societies. The coastal America versus most of the rest between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Even the British, and most I know have been to the US repeatedly, speak of the East and West coasts and the parts you flyover.

Flyover America and the Coasts of America have been growing apart for years but with a measure of civility. Now I wonder and worry.

And while they are not limited to any state or region  the far right in America has elements that by almost all forms of monitoring are more active and frightening than ever; the fight for the health care legislation saw that bubbling up and over.

Congressman John Lewis a leader and hero of the civil rights movement  was called the ‘N word’ by hecklers the day before the vote. Rep. Barney Frank got homophobic slurs shouted at him. Bart Stupak, the anti-abortion Democrat Congressman who changed his vote to ‘yes’ had ‘baby killer’ shouted at him and a number of members of Congress are now being protected by authorities after receiving death threats.

Rep. John Lewis

Perhaps most chilling is the story of a man at a Tea Party event in Columbus, Ohio who was mocked, jeered and disgraced as he sat quietly on the grass with a sign which said he had Parkinson’s Disease.

“If you are looking for a handout, you are in the wrong part of town,“ one lowlife snarled. Others threw a few dollar bills at him saying, “Start a pot.”

A number of American reporters indicate that the anger and  wrath in the US is higher than it has been in decades both during the health care debate and even more after the vote. And Max Hastings, a British historian who has spent a great deal of time in the US, wrote in The Daily Mail on Tuesday “I have never seen America split by such frightening passions.”

The passage of the health care bill was a triumph where America could soon no longer be the only developed nation in the world where health care for all does not exist.

But what the debate on that bill showed, the rancour and the hatred spewing from elements of the American far right, fueled by the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Becks of this world  you could feel even five times zones away.

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