How the political rhetoric reads in rural America

Now that the information fetish is all about, with every air wave trying to cram its media-mad political lies, and oh yes, promises through, perhaps we could look through one last-minute message in the bottle from this rural quarter, which is now, safely far from the current campaign.
I’m not calling it an election, yet. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Depending on what happens between now and when (and if) they actually give the votes a proper count, I’d say at this point that many people are predicting Barack Obama will win, based on the polls.
The whole nation is more or less a 50-50 split between the urban coastal zones of the free-flowing, electrified, amped-up monoculture of the cities and the hunkered-down dream towns amid the moms and pops and Plumber Joes of rural and suburban America.
But it’s really not a fair game.
Under such conditions, it appears to be safe to say that he who rules the boundary-bending technology, and the grass roots networking, forces unleashed for many months in ports now both cyber and dirt-real, will manage to change society.
This will be done by filling every port of information across the land via internet, TV and so on, creating a marvel of saturation not seen before, transcending even those same 50-50 boundaries of metropolis and yes, the fabled “Green Acres” of rural America, making the mindset sufficiently the same to do at least one final desperate progressive thing right.
That we still have shreds of the country left is, yes, I suppose, just another cause for celebration. Almost. Though nothing has been harder than trying to see some pattern that might follow after these elections, a drifting kind of wrecked ship is all I can conjure up to this point. A wounded cruiser with its guns still blazing into the fog of war, wastefully firing on an enemy as invisible as the word, “terrorism.”
But after eight years of Bush, while living in that same rural America of “Green Acres” fame, as far away from it all as the Shire, I can only unfortunately count the collateral damage in terms of personal calamities. In fact, I think, based on this input, it’s safe to say the extended wavelengths of pain have been getting wider within the years, then months, then final days, then hours, since George Bush's rule.
The wavelengths of pain have been extending outward, ever since. Same for the general death count, per capita, globally.
And the election? That somebody, anybody, nobody even, would want to man the throne for a critically wounded empire capable of finding a second wind, is reason enough to celebrate.
But there’s not much more caution in the winds, either way.
The the late-campaign anger and resentment of teaming millions who lost an emotionally charged election working as the main sword of the John McCain campaign, with Sarah Palin out there whipping up the primal instincts of the worst, those prone to believe in dirty, unsophisticated cheap shots, one can only shudder at the antipathies being wrought in rural America should Obama win, again. One shudders at what the outcome will be ... after the election.
No doubt, Palin stirred it up four years ago for a unique new cultural junction speaking from somewhere out in the Searchlight deserts of Nevada to the post-mod cobalt red distortions of the late-American KKK, just now retreating from its bridge to nowhere, Occupied into the dustbins of history, all hummed up to the surface after many years of practice on World of Warcraft. One might imagine the ugly bits, the eddies of angst, that are now set spinning from the sidelines of the fringe, from the sawed-off mountain folk types out in the crowd. From pissed off people calling for blood.
If you remember the Clinton years, there’s nothing like a Democratic presidency to stir up the home-grown reactionaries and yes, terrorists, the Timothy McVeigh types, those Monty Pylons and other sub-patriotic posses forming in the hinterlands of the West.
There’s a seething misanthropy out in the boonies, indeed, and they just may be waiting to erupt.
That Obama made some references, much ado made of it during the Democratic primaries, about rural residents, in their anger over how poorly the overgrown cities are managing things, especially from Washington D.C., only to turn to religion and guns, might make more sense than we know right now.
Is it better to have a global reformer like Obama in office?
Let’s just hope the idealist, the great communicator in this scenario, points people toward liberty’s light within these shores, not just abroad, because the divisions of rural America, that xenophobic place where the wider world is ever more bizarre, and threatening, can hardly bear to withstand the disappointment.
Since that’s how these things really get started … in the provinces and out lands of the dispossessed. You know, when expectations, once raised, are dashed for one final time, where the dissenters voted for “change” but only get more “chains,” and “revolution” is the name of that thing.