Red State Blues by Martha Bayne

Author:Martha Bayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2018-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

MIDWESTERN BUBBLES

THE OTHER “FORGOTTEN PEOPLE”: FEELING BLUE IN MISSOURI

SARAH KENDZIOR

In January 2016, shortly before the inauguration of Donald Trump, I was invited to a conference for people in the media and tech industries to discuss the future of news. Like every conference of this nature to which I’ve been invited, it was held in a city I could never afford to visit on my own, much less live—Palo Alto, California, where the average home sells for three million dollars. That would be two million, eight hundred and seventy thousand more than what the average home sells for where I live, in St. Louis, Missouri: a struggling, blue city in a once purple, suddenly bright red state.

I arrived at the conference anxious to share my concerns about the future of media under Trump: the role Russian propaganda had played in the election, the mainstreaming of white supremacists by the national press, the gutting of local papers that had steered so many to conspiracy sites as an alternative.

These concerns, while shared by some attendees, were mostly dismissed, since the prevailing belief in blue, wealthy, tech-savvy California was that somehow democracy would work itself out. Once in office, Trump would surely be checked and balanced, they told me; freedom of the press could not seriously be challenged, as it was a constitutional right. What they were really struggling with, they said, was how to better understand “the red state people”—those poor, exploited Midwesterners who had bought into Trump’s fantasy and shocked the nation by propelling his win. Those poor, exploited Midwesterners who had somehow—according to the coastal publishers and tech gurus in attendance—all suddenly become white, male, conservative manual laborers.

It is a terrible thing to be in pain and ignored—as a place, as an individual. It is perhaps worse to finally be recognized, but only as a symbol—to be given a mask and told that it’s your face.

This is what it has been like to be both a member of the national media and a citizen of the Midwest since Trump’s win, as the coastal media views our long-ignored region through a narrow journalistic kaleidoscope, twisting and turning on the same images again and again until the view is utterly distorted. It is true that the national media—so disproportionately represented by the coasts that one out of every five journalists now lives in New York, Los Angeles or Washington DC—had long ignored the white, male, conservative manual laborers of the Midwest. But now, apparently, their plan was to ignore everyone else who lived there too: black, brown, Muslim and Jewish citizens; workers who toiled not in a field or plant but in a Walmart or a university; intellectuals and immigrants; and anyone else who was appalled at the election of Donald Trump. We lived in Trumpland now, we were told, and our blue city was an inconvenient island.

In some sense, this dynamic is not new. For decades, as national media consolidated on the coasts and regional papers died out, the Midwest got used to being ignored.

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