IT'S NOT RED STATES VS. BLUE STATES

As my friend, conservative Canadian substacker Damien Penny frequently says when he comments on things south of the border, “It’s not the Red States vs. the Blue States - it’s rural vs. urban.” He’s right. And most of us are missing that “forest” while staring at the “trees.”

One nice thing that has come from recent events here is that I am back in touch with my former wife, Karen, whose support has been very helpful over the final days. Sunday night/Monday morning, lying there not being able to sleep after answering the phone at 0115, I had the sudden realization that yes, it’s true, if I hadn’t known Jurate and she hadn’t been in my life, you wouldn’t know me; but if Karen hadn’t been in my life to do what she did, I’d never have met Jurate. Karen was the first to point out that I hated what I was doing, and ask why I didn’t pursue what I did like - writing? Which I did in the aftermath of our separation and divorce. What Jurate did was ask me why I was doing what I was doing when it was only for money; why didn’t I write the stuff I really liked? At that time, I was working at Hope Street Productions, and doing a pretty good job of violating Billy Wilder’s admonition to me, “If you don’t care about what you’re doing, why should anyone else?” So, what Jurate did was push me back onto the original path Karen had pointed to. As I said to Karen yesterday, “You two are the most significant people who have been in my life.”

And saying that yesterday to her is a roundabout way of getting to what I am actually here to write about. Karen now lives in a rural community up in the Sierra Nevada “gold country” above Yosemite. I haven’t seen any photos, but I am sure it’s a beautiful place, because “beautiful place” is the most common description of that region of the Golden State.

But what’s important is, that phone conversation was nearly impossible. I had to keep asking her to repeat herself, because the connection was so bad. She pointed out that phone reception up there is pretty bad because they don’t have many cell towers. She also mentioned that her internet service is “a bit better than dial-up,” and that’s with one of those “high speed internet” satellite services.

And right there in microcosm, you have the reason for the red/blue split in this country.

It’s not red states vs blue states; it’s rural vs. urban.

The reason that phone service and internet is so bad where Karen lives - in California! - is that “it doesn’t make economic sense” to the internet and phone providers to make the substantial investment necessary to install cell towers and run fiberoptic cable around an area. There are not enough users who will benefit from it to pay for the investment. So the investment does’t get made, and a nice political liberal (moreso than me!) has a tone of resentment in her voice when she says that it always amazes her to go visit her sons and their families in Oregon, “and all my devices are suddenly really fast.” The sons live in Portland. I even heard similar from an Oregon resident - Jurate’s older sister, who lives in Newport - when she was down here during Jurate’s departure, that her phone works a lot better in Los Angeles.

And because the rural areas lack the technological support system to bring companies that depend on good phone service and high speed internet, those companies don’t locate in those places, and thus there are no jobs to replace those that were lost to globalization and NAFTA back in the 90s.

And because of that, people who need economic opportunity and feel (rightly!) that they have been ignored for reasons they don’t understand, will vote for some scumbag like Trump who says he’ll bring back jobs. Never mind that he didn’t; the Conservative Entertainment Complex will explain to them that it’s all the fault of the lib’ruls who hate President Trump who kept him from achieving all the wonderful things he wanted to do for the people who believe in him.

And in the meantime, there still isn’t good phone service or internet service in those places, and even people who know better get pissed-off about the situation.

There’s a lot of talk about people moving out of the cities to places - mostly in “red America” - where the cost of living is less. Here in California, a lot of people who got “priced out” of the Bay Area ended up living in the central valley in the area between Tracy-Modesto-Fresno. They may not be able to afford to live back in the Bay Area, but that’s where their jobs are. And how do they get there? They drive. They drive the single worst road I know of in the state: two-lane country back road from Tracy in to San Jose, that hasn’t been upgraded since it was first built in the 1920s. According to friends who are now stuck in this hell, what used to be about a 30-minute drive 40 years ago is two hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic, both ways, Monday through Friday. I am certain I don’t have to explain to readers here about how pissed-off a person can get with that shit to look forward to every day. If that road was merely widened to four lanes - forget making a major highway - it would transform the lives of many, many people. But buying the necessary pieces of property on either side of that road is damn expensive.

There’s another road like that in south Orange County. People “priced out” of places like Aliso Viejo and up moving to inland places like Lake Elsinore or Hemet. But their jobs stay back on the coast. And the only way to get back and forth is another two-lane country road not upgraded in a century, that I recall when I went to visit a friend in Hemet 25 years ago was getting to be a pain in the ass to drive; I can only imagine what it’s like now.

So, people get pissed off because their phone reception and internet is piss-poor, and they get frustrated trying to use infrastructure that hasn’t been upgraded in the lifetime of anyone, and it’s not hard to see how someone gets to the point of saying “the system doesn’t work.” It doesn’t! And then they go looking for reasons why, and ways to solve the problem, and guess what?

Most urban Democrats, from voters to office holders, aren’t aware of the problem (like I wasn’t until yesterday, when it affected me personally). So the politicians don’t say anything about solving that past platitudes, since it’s not happening in their district, and the people who do talk about it are doing so only to get people more pissed off in order to promote their political goal of wrecking the country.

Do you see the problem here?

This is not new. My mother grew up in a farmhouse in central Colorado that had a wood stove and was lit at night by kerosene lanterns. And everyone around them and in all the rest of rural America, lived the same way - the 1920s version of poor phone sevice and no high speed internet.

When FDR brought the New Deal, he didn’t just worry about what needed to be done in the cities where people had voted for him. One of the major accomplishments of the New Deal was the REA, the Rural Electrification Administration, in which the government paid to stretch electrical lines beyond the city limits and light up Rural America. One of the other accomplishments was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and other programs in the Pacific Northwest, that created hydropower and provided the infrastructure for the growth of industry into what we now call the Red States. Prosperity was brought to those places. Rural America left the 19th Century and joined the 20th.

This is why it was good news when the bi-partisan infrastructure act - named the Inflation Reduction Act to get past Joe Manchin - put a lot of its resources into modernizing rural America. ATT/Verizon/Etc. won’t build cell towers and put in fiberoptic cable? Now local government can through the IRA. Biden has been touting that companies are investing in factories to build batteries and solar panels in Red States, and amazingly the response of many “Blue Americans” has been “Why is he doing that for those people?” He’s doing it for the same reason the first programs of the New Deal included the REA and TVA! It’s not going to happen overnight, but bringing the 21st Century infrastructure to places it hasn’t been seen before is going to do more to solve the red/blue divide in this country than almost anything else I can think of. Bring Rural America into the benefits of the 21st Century, develop the infrastructure so people don’t (rightly!) feel they have been left behind and forgotten, create the opportunity for good jobs in the places where they live, and there will be more political change in this country than has happened since the New Deal.

It took a phone call for me to see this. Maybe more Democrats need to pick up their phones and call their relatives back there and talk to them about why the phone service is so bad and how it’s going to change.

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