Yesterday, The Other Charlotte called attention to Washington Post reporter David Finkel’s series on Bush-voting Red America vs. Gore/Kerry Blue America (click here for TOC’s thoughts). It was the Reds’ turn yesterday, and for his typical Red American, Finkel picked Britton Stein of Sugar Land, Texas, who–eeewww!–drives a pickeup, collects guns, swills Bud, clicks to Drudge daily on the Internet, and, horror of horrors, goes to church every Sunday and believes that stuff! Quel redneck creep!
Today it’s the Blues’ turn, and whom do we get from Finkel but Mr. and Mrs. Liberal Perfect People! Tom and Maryanne Harrison live with their two adult offspring in racially, sexual-orentationally mixed San Francisco, not mostly white, all-suburban Sugar Land like the narrow-minded Stein family. The Harrisons love the homeless. They love the government. They love paying taxes (a good thing, too–because San Francisco has some of the highest taxes in the nation). They are ever so tolerant. They go to church like the Steins, but they just shake their heads at their Catholic priest when he preaches against same-sex marriage. Finkel writes:
“Their neighborhood is filled with restaurants that are cafes, and stores that are boutiques, and their neighbors include straight people, gay people, rich people, homeless people, married people, single people, and the House minority leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D), who says of this place: ‘I think it is more American than most places in the country.'”
As for Tom Harrison, Finkel writes: “He…thinks that ‘politicians tend to be good people’ and that government isn’t too big, and even though a third of his paycheck goes to taxes, he pays them gladly and would willingly pay more because of what he sees around him every day.”
The two Harrison children, Matthew and Heather, are just as broad-minded and caring as their parents. Here’s Heather, age 29, planning her upcoming nuptials:
“Heather checks a wedding list of 200 people ranging from a just-married gay couple to the most non-Blue person they know, an old family friend who can seem so sour about gays and immigrants that they imagine when he goes to a restaurant, the maitre d’ announces, ‘Bitterman, party of one.’…
“When she and her fiance went house-hunting over the bridge in 83.9 percent white Walnut Creek, she couldn’t wait to get back to San Francisco. ‘I don’t like just white people,’ she says.”
The Harrisons’ tolerance abruptly ends, however, when the topic turns to President George W. Bush and the kind of people who voted for him. To Tom Harrison, writes Finkel, Bush is “‘frightening,’ ‘a total imbecile’ and ‘monkey boy.'” And here’s Tom Harrison on folks like the Steins:
“‘They’re eating well,’ Harrison continues. ‘They’ve got a roof over their heads. They’re feeding their kids. They’ve got everything. There are no luckier people. How can they complain? About anything?’ And yet they do, he says, griping about taxes, about the size of government and about politicians as though every last one of them were a one-dimensional cartoon.”
Imagine–complaining about politicians and the size of your tax bill! What are we nice Blue People going to do about those unspeakable Reds?