UNITED STATES, INDEED

There is perhaps no more faddish political fiction in currency than the supposed divide between red states and blue states. It doesn't seem to matter that the much-hyped divide is highly dubious; see, for example, this map printed in the Boston Globe, which portrays each state as a slightly different hue of purple, according to its voting percentages in the last presidential election. Even before last November's close election, Alan Wolfe wrote a cover story forWilson Quarterly that cast doubt on the red-blue divide, reprising his 1998 book One Nation, After All. Meanwhile, Stanford's Morris Fiorina has gained attention for a book he co-wrote entitled Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.

In the leadoff piece for the Atlantic Monthly's annual "State of the Union" package (which, like the entire online Atlantic now, requires subscription), Jonathan Rauch tries to remind readers what these scholars are saying, no matter what the nattering pundits keep repeating. "By no means," Rauch says, "does partisan parity necessarily imply a deeply divided citizenry." In fact, most Americans occupy a "conflicted middle."

Rauch reports what Fiorina found: "Majorities in both red and blue states concurred—albeit by different margins—that Bill Clinton was doing a good job as president, that nonetheless they did not wish he could run again, that women's roles should be equal to men's, that the environment should take precedence over jobs, that English should be made the official language, that blacks should not receive preferences in hiring, and so on. This hardly suggests a culture war."

Rauch concludes that one of the most convincing arguments for American ambivalence is Gallup's finding that the majority of single people say they'd be open to marrying someone of different political views. Rauch asks, "Just how deep can our political disagreements be, I wonder, if most of us are willing to wake up next to them every morning?" The problem, Rauch concludes, is that politicians themselves have become more extreme, leaving America's centrist majority with fewer centrist candidates to choose from.

• A series of red-blue maps analyzed by P.J. O'Rourke makes the Atlantic issue worth its newsstand price, if you don't subscribe. O'Rourke looks at the kaleidoscopes of color that appear when you map America by percentage of the population that is divorced, residents born in-state, mobile home ownership, international travel, and other categories that defy simplistic models. Article**

• The deepest divide in America, says the Washington Post's Hannah Rosin in the Atlantic, is not between the religious and non-religious, but between "traditionalist and modern—or orthodox and progressive, or rejectionist and accommodationist, or some other pair of labels that academics have yet to dream up." Article**

• The media's compulsive need to see everything in black and white, or blue and red, is no more evident than in their puzzling insistence on a conflict between Mel Gibson and Michael Moore. This insistence is growing stronger as the Oscars approach. Since Gibson's nominated film is about Christ, and Moore's film criticizes President Bush, surely these are two figureheads of opposing cultural groups. But the filmmakers themselves, to their credit, don't follow this hackneyed logic. Moore, a Catholic, saw The Passion twice and gave it high marks. Gibson told the Associated Press he "liked" Farenheit 911, and added, "I feel a kind of strange kinship with Michael. I mean, they're trying to pit us against each other in the press, but this is all just a hologram, you know. They've really got nothing to do with one another. They were used as some kind of divisive left-right thing."

Related:
Maps that are more purple than red or blue, from the University of Michigan
Earlier:
One nation, not so divisible (2nd item)
The Atlantic's SOTU packages from '04 and '03

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

• MECCA, Saudi Arabia*—Rare in most of the Muslim world, the willingness to debate and raise seemingly taboo questions is standard here in the birthplace of Islam and the site of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage beginning Wednesday that attracts about 1.5 million Muslims from all corners of the world for five days of meditation, prayer and, often, vigorous debate. In workshops and meeting rooms, at schools and mosques in the city, the freewheeling discussion of theology, history and politics lives on. And if this intellectual melee was any indicator, the debate is quite civilized —no raised voices, no threats, no personal attacks. … It is a city where spirit, not ritual, rules the day. Typically, in conservative Islamic societies like Saudi Arabia, men and women are strictly separated during prayers, and they are here. But with the enormous crowds that gather for meditation around the Kaaba—the small temple in the center of the Grand Mosque that Muslims believe was built by the prophet Abraham and consider the defining symbol of Islam—men and women are jammed in side by side.
• At Criminal Court in Lower Manhattan,* for at least an hour and 15 minutes every afternoon—from 1 until 2:15—the courtrooms in this grimy yet imposing gray building at 100 Centre Street close for business and their inhabitants stream out to eat. In New York's stratified legal world, one might think that you are where you eat, but in the packed blocks around the city's civic center, lunch, at least, proves to be the great leveler. Take, for example, Forlini's, the Italian restaurant on Baxter Street whose clientele is a who's who of the court world. The restaurant's homey interior and reassuring pasta dishes appeal to police and court officers as well as to powerful members of the legal establishment. The Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, is a frequent diner, as are judges and the occasional mobster. … Staff members have also achieved renown: A former busboy, Michael Imperioli, plays Christopher Moltisanti in "The Sopranos." … The restaurant opened in 1956. It was a looser time: A betting ring was run from the bar, said Mr. Morgenthau, a contention that one of Forlini's three owners, Derek Forlini, did not dispute.
• WEEKLY DIGEST
  Perhaps ABC's Desperate Housewives shouldn't be taken too seriously; it's a self-satirical soap opera that wallows in its own melodramatic excess. But as Carla Barnhill's essay in the current issue of Books&Culture indirectly suggests, the program's core issues speak to a central social issue—the mental and spiritual health of stay-at-home wives. Roberto Rivera thinks so too, in an essay for BreakPoint (reprinted here at ByFaith Online). Rivera swerves way off track when he tries to equate the show's promiscuity with homosexuality; if you look at the divorce rate, heterosexuals don't exactly have an exemplary record when it comes to commitment. Rivera's historical analysis is a little more useful, although I'm not convinced by the point (affirmed by some feminists last century) that the only reason housewives are desperate is because they have no salary and thus no validity in a market economy. (Howling babies are howling babies, whatever the economic system.) And I have yet to believe a working man who says to women, as Rivera does, that they should just love staying at home. Barnhill's piece in B&C is much more credible and useful. But there's something missing from both Rivera's and Barnhill's pieces, and that's half the population. Men and their family roles are conspicuously missing from much the current hand-wringing over the plight of working mothers, as I observed last Father's Day in an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun. The church tends to perpetuate the problem, as did the theologically dubious sermon a friend heard that said it is a sin for a wife to be the breadwinner—as mine is. As a house-husband, I am desperate to stop being ignored by feminists and religious conservatives alike.
• Merck has been sued more than five hundred times since announcing last fall that Vioxx could cause strokes and heart attacks, and juries are going to make the company pay dearly in damages awards. It doesn't help that Merck had published warnings that Vioxx could increase the risk of heart disease. Juries jump on companies who knew the potential harmful effects of products that prove to be deadly. One Harvard law professor, says James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, found that juries "are inclined to award heftier punitive damages against a company that had performed a risk analysis before selling a product than a company that didn't bother to." So in a jury's eyes, "a firm is better off being ignorant than informed." This is strange, Surowiecki says. And he adds, "In everyday life, of course, we're always making trade-offs between safety and things like cost or convenience. There's not a car on the road that couldn't be made safer, if you didn't care about looks, mileage, cost, and so on." Surowiecki concludes that "there's something wrong with a system that discourages the careful weighing of costs against benefits—we want companies to learn as much as they can about the downsides of their products." But he doesn't let Merck off the hook for marketing Vioxx to people who didn't need it. Column
• Six people died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Not the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the bombing of February 26, 1993. The number seems small next to the staggering casualty rate of the second attack eight years later, but there's nothing negligible about it to the survivors and the families of the victims, said the New York Times . Two of those families sued the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operated the underground parking garage where the bomb went off. While it may seem misguided to sue the government for damage done by terrorists, the negligence suits—which were given new life recently by a panel of judges after being buried for years in red tape—charge that the Port Authority's own security reports repeatedly stated that opening the parking garage to the public was a security risk. One of the reports mentioned the danger of a bomb in a vehicle. A lawsuit won't ease the memories of the garage's parking attendant that snowy February morning, who somehow escaped from the rubble. "I shouldn't even be here," he tells the Times. Article*
• The subtitle to Ian Frazier's recent reminscing essay in the New Yorker (which is unavailable online) was "How the Midwest made me." But I was disappointed to find that the essay was more about what and when than how the Midwest made him. A newspaper clip from Frazier's home town of Hudson, Ohio, reaches him in New York, and says that the town's iconic water tower will be torn down. This sets off a series of anecdotes and personal narrative. But what I was waiting for was Frazier's thoughts on what is sometimes called "Midwestern character." People from the Midwest are often stereotyped as meek, rustic, and stern. We are praised for our friendliness and authenticity, but criticized for our grim and solemn steadiness. I wanted to see what Frazier said about whether there is anything to these generalizations, how these traits stuck with him in New York City, and which ones he was pressured to un-learn. How was the Midwest not just a location of Frazier's formative years but also an atmosphere whose ethos influenced him? This is also what I wanted to get at in my Book of the Week review of Richard Mouw's Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. A key feature of the book is Mouw's comments on the stereotypical Calvinist character (which both Mouw and I associate with our roots in the Netherlands and West Michigan)—a strict, joyless persona that derives from a view of a strict, joyless God. To me, you can't talk about growing up in the Midwest without talking about that.
• A friend referred me recently to a poignant essay by Whet Moser called "Death and the Med Student," in an independent Web zine called The Saturnine Detractor. The essay is a profile of Kyle Nash, an associate professor of medical ethics at the University of Chicago and so-called "clinical thanatologist." In other words, she studies how death is dealt with in a clinical setting. Nash has a doctorate in ministry and a B.A. in history, but she's always been drawn to the mysteries surrounding death, and part of her job is to impress upon students its personal and spiritual dimensions. At the University of Chicago, she's promoted a less instrumental and more personal involvement with cadavers in educational settings. For example, she has advocated that students be the ones who perform the wrapping of the body in gauzy rags of formalin. Her story is well told here and hard to forget, including Moser's description of the pungent smell of formalin. To me it raised the question of what is worse for students—their initial (and considerable, Moser says) squeamishness about working with cadavers, or the point where they grow so comfortable that they interact with cadavers casually? Essay

Earlier:
The hardest job in the army: Mortuary Affairs (5th item)

Miscellaneous:What Iraqi bloggers are saying,* from the New York Times - Forgotten Latin America, and a foreign policy roundup,* from the Times - The death penalty in Japan,* from the Washington Post—Rublyevka, where wealthy Russians live, from Smithsonian - Apple's 'Life is Random' slogan*—Buddhist or nihilist? from the New York Times - Is lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices a good idea?* from the Times - P.J. O'Rourke on the pork Congress crammed into its jobs bill,** from the Atlantic—What Iraq taught the military about its chain of command, from the New Yorker - Revisiting 'just war,' and the laughter of philosophers, from First Things—Christian publishing in Spain, from Banner of Truth online - Hubble's race against time, from The Week - How homing pigeons get around,* from the New York Times - Tim Howard, American soccer star in England and Tourette's sufferer, from 60 Minutes—Which Harry Potter character will get whacked?** from the Atlantic - How to survive a nail gun shot to the skull,* from the Chicago Tribune - Were the Salem witches poisoned? from the Chicago Reader

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.