What's the Matter With Kansas?

I learned early on that reading the opinion pages of the newspaper was just spitting into the wind. You get so fed up to the point that you have to do something about it, and then you end up making it worse. Much of “What's the Matter with Kansas” was a play-by-play rehashing of the news stories that have helped make Kansas the laughing stock of the nation. While I find Frank's concept of “cultural backlash” interesting, it still doesn't answer the question of “why do rural people continue to elect politicians who don't act in their best interest.” Contrary to popular opinion, Kansans aren't so stupid as to have the wool continuously pulled over our eyes as this book alludes. I believe the answer to that question is much more complicated than “cultural backlash” alone. While I find the rural-urban dichotomy and the rampant fundamentalism in the heartland fascinating, after I finished this book all I felt like I had done was spit into the wind.

*Disclaimer: I'm one of the many college-educated Kansans who left the state in pursuit of a job, and I am not a fundamentalist in any way, shape, or form.

I read this book because it hopes to answer a question that is stereotypical of liberal thinking: why are the poor or middle class conservatives actually helping Big Business continue to destroy the poor or middle class? And the answer is easy: because enforcing morality upon this country is more important than anything else to the religious right.

The other reason I read it is because I went to college in Lawrence, KS, which is a bastion of liberalism in a dark red sea (well, I guess there's Wyandotte county too). I was taken in by the liberal educators and left Lawrence a staunch liberal myself (having actually arrived a conservative in the economic sense).

The beginning of the book talks about Kansas as a fighter for workers' rights since it's inception, talks about the history of Bleeding Kansas. The city of Wichita is a good example, and the actions of Boeing are appalling. And of course, Wichita being a generally conservative city has actually voted to keep lawmakers in office who write laws that protect and encourage actions like those of Boeing.

There's a chapter on the agricultural business in Kansas that reinforces my reasons to be a vegetarian. The author writes of his own history, his own viewpoint changing from conservative to liberal at some point in his life. And the book has a lot of discussion about how the moderate and extreme conservatives work off each other to prosper.

And there's criticism of the left - not criticism of the philosophies, but criticism in the left's inability to stop the joining of a capitalistic economic views with conservative Christian views. They are intertwined as a party when what do they really have to do with each other?

It's a funny book, and I'll be reading more of the author's work. If you're liberal, you'll probably like it, if not, then you probably won't. I'm not going to read any Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly until I feel I haven't given enough 1 star reviews lately either.