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Years ago I got in my car in my car and drove through small town America, the South, Midwest and south West. Having grown up in the cosmopolitan progressive San Francisco bay area, I felt I really needed to understand that part of the country. I met many kind and decent people. my overriding expression though is how much the ignorance, isolation, xenophobia and yes, deep rooted racism, contribute to what we know as small town America. So many of the people I met had never even left the county they were born in, let alone the state. Owning a passport and travel abroad were basically incomprehensible concepts. Very few could even point in the direction of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, they had no idea and never saw an ocean. Naming even one world leader was indeed a foreign concept, except they hated the "damn communists" because they wanted to "invade America". When discussing Jews, I'd be often asked about the horns. Armageddon, the Anti-Christ, Jews controlling the world, the communists in Washington who want to take away their guns, all that stuff was discussed and brought up often, and they were dead serious. I remember one guy in Oklahoma saying to me :"I'm not a racist, but I hate n****s who go to college because it makes 'em think they are better that us white folk".
Not everybody in small town America is like that, and you hope that in the 30 plus years that passed since that trip, things have improved. However, the euphoria with which an ignorant redneck crazy like Palin has been greeted in small town America makes me very pessimistic and extremely concerned about the future of this nation. We seem to be regressing toward the dark ages.
