Attention Wal Mart Voters!

[reprehensor]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0349/perlstein.php

Rock River Valley, Illinois—Piety is easy to find on the highways of Red America. Stop at a cemetery and you may find that the marker towering over all the rest reads, "In Memory of the Unborn Children." Down at the lower frequencies, the ones occupied in more urbane locales by the edgy college stations and NPR affiliates, your radio lectures at you: The music you'll hear during your visit is safe for the whole family. . . . Family friendly 91.5, WCIC, celebrating 20 years of music and ministry. Neighborliness is unavoidable, a saving grace: Pull into a motel and the lady asks for your cell phone number because there was a rash of folks forgetting their cameras this summer and she wants to be able to call you if you leave something behind yourself.

-----------------
But just like in a novel by Sinclair Lewis, if piety is easy to find, then so is hypocrisy. Enter the sultry stink of a dingy roadhouse not far from where Abraham Lincoln once debated Stephen Douglas, and a terse young man winding himself up with coffee for a hard-partying Saturday night volunteers his version of the scene: a couple of towns down, the best gentleman's club; the next town over (you won't see a sign), a gambling den. A couple of hours later, when you tell the woman behind the counter at the convenience store where you've been, you elicit a grimace: "Oh, did you see two girls getting it on?" (They do so nightly, apparently, around 11 o'clock, on the pool table, for tips.)

Though even in this, Oglesby, Illinois's local den of iniquity, Republicans aren't hard to find, either. "I thought Bush would be a good man for the job at the time, and thought he'd be a good president," says the terse young man, whose nickname is Stony. "So I voted for him."

Stony is the kind of guy liberals love to worry about, the kind they fret they can't win over by next year's election. He works the midnight shift as a "picker" at a nearby grocery warehouse—the very job Tom Wolfe depicts as the soul of thankless blue-collar humiliation in his latest novel. Stony talks proudly about his union and, quietly, mentions his fears that his workplace "could have a shutdown any day. You never know."
-----------------------------------

The caricature of W as a Wal Mart greeter is outstanding!!!
-reprehensor.

[madrchsod]

1. it`s always nice when

someone from the east coast drives thru the midwest and discovers there are people out here. they must think everyone lives on the eastcoast or west.but it was a good article and pretty accurite. my wife works with two guys who aren`t voting for bush this time. and to top it all off i know all the people involved in the dixon story, they grew up with my son and were on the soccer teams i coached. yes that`s "my home town"