Lunatic Nation

Posted on April 16, 2004 in Citizenship Reading

Kansas native Thomas Frank writes about his home state in the latest issue of Harper’s. He’s perplexed, just like we all are, by the eagerness of “America’s Heartland” to destroy the community its ancestors struggled so hard to protect:

Under the state’s simple blue flag are gathered today the most flamboyant assortment of cranks, conspiracists, and calamity howlers the Republic has ever seen. The Kansas school board draws the guffaws of the world for purging references to macro-evolution from state science standards. Cities large and small across the state still hold out against water fluoridation, while one tiny hamlet takes the additional step of requiring handguns in every home. A prominent female politician expresses public doubts about the wisdom of women’s suffrage, while another pol proposes that the state sell off the Kansas Turnpike in order to solve its budget crisis. Impoverished inhabitants of the state’s most scenic area fight with fanatical determination to prevent a National Park from opening up in their neighborhood, while the Rails-to-Trails program, regarded everywhere else in the union as a harmless scheme for family fun, is revilved in Kansas as an infernal design on the rights of property owners. Operation Rescue selects Witchita as the stage for its great offensive against abortion, calling down 30,000 testifying fundamentalists on the city, witnessing and blocking traffic and chaining themselves to fences. A preacher from Topeka travels the nation advising Americans to love God’s holy hate, showing up wherever a gay person has been in the news to announce “God Hates Fags.”


If this is the place where America goes looking for its national soul, then this is where America finds that its soul, after stewing in the primal resentment of the backlash, has gone all sour and wrong. If Kansas is the concentrated essence of normality, then here is where we can see the deranged gradually become normal, where we look into that handsome, confident, reasssuring, all-American face — class president, quarterback, Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of industry — and realize that we are staring into the eyes of a lunatic.

Of course, Kansas is a metaphor for the entire nation, a country where people jump for the opportunity to seize the red winding sheet and eagerly spread the grain upon which the Four Horses of the Apocalypse will dine. I see it here, too, that working class rebellion that strives so hard to oppress itself, to deliver the goods of the worlds to the lowliest slime imaginable, and then blame the resulting economic holocaust on those of us who want to save their lives, restore their dignity.

The message of religion and politics seems to be deny yourself if you’re poor because it is all your fault. The cancers that eat your belly, the factories closing in your towns, the drugs in your neighborhoods whose profits ultimately fund the pet mastiffs of the Power Elite. They are all your fault. You must suffer at the hands of the wealthy who, in this mangled aChristian world, become the true servants of the Lord, demons of the Pit who must be revered and honored for their denial of godliness and the power of unselfish, compassionate love. “Thank you sir. May I please have another?” Over and over again, until the pelvis breaks, the poor creature cannot walk. And still it cries “I am blessed because I have not succumbed to the people at the door who are trying so hard to stop me from being tortured. They are my enemy. They stand between me and God.”