Bush love

There are the people who can’t stop loving Bush, and then there are the people who can’t stop gawking at the people who can’t stop loving Bush. Yesterday’s New York Times had a front-page story about Provo, Utah, the town where I went to college, a thoroughly Mormon place and, not surprisingly, one of the few places in the country where a majority of voters still gives George W. favorable ratings in surveys.

It is an odd thing, to be sure, that such places exist. I personally find it odd that anyone at all could still think Bush is doing a good job after reading a single newspaper — but I admit I’m writing this in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that’s probably the political inverse of Provo, and I go weeks at a time without conversing with anyone who supports the current administration.

It’s odder still, and worth considering, that the three states in the Union where Bush’s approval rating is higher than 50% are Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, all western states and, probably not coincidentally, the three states with the highest proportion of Mormons in their populations. Compare that to what you might think is the uniformly conservative South. (Although the article notes that certain enclaves in the South also still give Bush high marks, I suspect there’s a racial component that statewide statistics there hide.)

But here’s precisely what goes unsaid, or at least severely understated, in the article: that there’s something about Mormonism that leads itself to this almost unquestioning approval of Bush. The coyness about Mormonism gives the article a somewhat voyeuristic quality: We’ll look at these wacky people but not actually give away that we’re looking by talking about what makes them so strange.

Take Delia Randall, whose photo sits atop the online version and whose quote is the first in the article. Reporter Timothy Egan identifies her as “a 22-year-old mother from Provo.” And that’s enough. Nearly anyone reading the Times will see what’s strange here: An attractive, middle-class young woman, at 22, is a mother. And either the whole Mormons-marrying-early thing is understood by that reader, or they think “What kind of rednecks are these Provoans, anyway?” In either case, Delia is marked as safely other, and the otherness can take the place of an actual explanation for her views about Bush.
Delia

Now I absolutely agree that Mormonism is a strange culture, but the article’s innuendo prevents useful analysis. Look at 18-year-old Jared Olsen, a BYU student quoted as praising Bush because “[h]e’s strong, and he doesn’t waver.” This is a creepy thing to hear from any American, virtually indistinguishable from a Latin American rightist’s approval for a caudillo. And it’s a sentiment worth analyzing: Is it Mormonism’s theological and cultural emphasis on authority and obedience that has fostered this proto-fascism, or is it a feature of the religious Right in general, or are still other factors at work? As it is, though, the statement is offered as just another wacky, Bush-loving Utah sentiment. Never mind that the young man is identified as actually being from Albany, where he presumably came by his political ideas before moving to Provo for college.

The article fits into a genre of journalism that appears in coastal, big-city papers, the look-at-the-flyover-zone pieces that provide endless fun and smug self-gratification for those of us who read them, many of us refugess from these frightful places ourselves. The Wasington Post had an article a couple of months ago about a rural Utah county that’s even more one-sidedly pro-Bush. Even easier, and more common, are the reports from places within driving distance of the major cities: These also turn out to be backwaters of strange people and retrograde opinions.

I suppose it’s a good thing that the Times, for example, turns away from New York real estate stories from time to time and considers life in the rest of the country. But this kind of journalism rarely accomplishes real analysis. By gawking at the wacky right-wingers we who disagree with them fail to take them seriously. And I suspect that’s a dangerous luxury these days, no matter how low Bush’s approval ratings go.

6 responses to “Bush love”

  1. Lane says:

    “By gawking at the wacky right-wingers we who disagree with them fail to take them seriously.”

    Yup.

    And maybe their opinions will melt away as the “Blue State Sun” continues to rise shedding liberal light and love on all of us.

    Or more likely, as peak oil kicks in and the United States begins the process of disintigration in to a set of smaller nations, The Great Basin will return to the fundamentalist theocracy it once was. But this time with semi-automatic weapons!

    “There’s going to be blood flowing in the streets of Salt Lake City . . .” – Ted Bundy

  2. Scott Godfrey says:

    The Times is certainly guilty of the kind of winky voyeurism of otherness that you point out. I picked up on that as I read the article myself. I don’t know if I agree with your analysis, however, that as a result, some will take (can we say) ignorant Bush supporters less seriously. I myself was greatly disturbed by the dogmatic way in which Delia Randall answered the question about why she supports Bush. I don’t have the article in front of me, but I think her answer was something like, “I understand his heart and feel that he’s a good person.” This kind of political “reasoning” scares the crap out of me primarily because it can’t be argued against.

    So why does the Times feel this article is “newsworthy” enough to take up such valuable real estate? (After all, political strongholds, even in the face of massive derision, aren’t uncommon). I think the message is for liberals to take these people more seriously than they might otherwise. Granted the article was glib as hell, but the Times is faced with a dilemma when publishing these kinds of stories: on the one hand they don’t want to offend their Republican readers, of which there are plenty. On the other, they want to get the message out to liberals. The uncomfortable tone of the article was perhaps a result of trying too hard to walk a centrist line; the path of least resistance is often the path of most resistance. I don’t know…

    Anyway, I really enjoyed your post.

  3. my response was a little different than either scott’s or dave’s: it struck me that egan was using this persistent support as a way to deflect attention from the fact that his paper and many other media outposts–not to mention all but the most Left politicians in the opposition party–toed whatever line Bush wanted them to for so long. “Look! These freaks are still lining up to give Bush their mindless support!” seems to be a way to avoid taking responsibility for their own mindless line-toeing.

    The scariest comment in the article for me was the person who said she (or he? i can’t recall) supported Bush because he was “God fearing.” Obviously, whatever god he fears doesn’t give a shit about the needless loss of innocent life in a bloodthirsty run for the money.

  4. Gary says:

    Unfortunately, the influence of the Mormon in Church within the world of politics is much stronger than I used to think. Two weeks ago in sacrement meetings throughout the U.S., the following statement was read

    ” We are informed that the United States Senate will on June 6, 2006, vote on an amendment to the federal Constitution designed to protect the traditional institution of marriage. We, as the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, have repeatedly set forth our position that the marriage of a man and a woman is the only acceptable marriage relationship. In 1995 we issued a Proclamation to the World on this matter, and have repeatedly reaffirmed that position. In that proclamation we said: “We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.”
    We urge our members to express themselves on this urgent matter to their elected representatives in the Senate.”

    What is even more unfortunate, is the Church leaving the previous non-political stand.

    President George Albert Smith observed that “There is nothing in the world more deleterious or harmful to the human family than hatred, prejudice, suspicion, and the attitude that some people have toward their fellows, of unkindness.” 16 In matters of politics, he warned, “Whenever your politics cause you to speak unkindly of your brethren, know this, that you are upon dangerous ground.” Speaking of the great mission of the latter-day kingdom, he counseled: “This is not a militant church to which we belong. This is a church that holds out peace to the world. It is not our duty to go into the world and find fault with others, neither to criticize men because they do not understand. But it is our privilege, in kindness and love, to go among them and divide with them the truth that the Lord has revealed in this latter day.”

    In 1903, President Joseph F. Smith said, “the Church (as such) does not engage in politics; it’s members belong to the political parties at their own pleasure”.

    And in the October conference in 1951, the First Presidency said: “A threat to our unity derives from unseemly personal antagonisms developed in partisan political controversy. The Church, while reserving the right to advocate principles of good government underlying equity, justice, and liberty, the political integrity of officials, and the active participation of its members, and the fulfillment of their obligations in civic affairs, exercises no constraint on the freedom of individuals to make their own choices and affiliations … any man who makes representation to the contrary does so without authority and justification in fact.” (President Stephen L Richards, Conference Report, October 1951, pp. 114–15.)

    Now these statements (above) we reaffirm as setting forth the position of the Church today concerning civil government and politics. (Spencer Kimball, 1974)

    It appears to me that rather that to promote unity, the church has decidedly chosen to exercise constraint on the freedom of individuals to make their own choices and affiliations

    Unfortunate…

  5. Dave says:

    Scott — You’re right, the article was genuinely disturbing, and it may remind people who live in places like Park Slope to take hard-core cultural conservatives seriously. I guess I’m more concerned that it cuts off analysis — these are people in Provo, not Albany, or not a few stops down the N/R line in Bay Ridge.

    I like your observation about the weaknesses perhaps coming from trying to take too centrist a tone. I wouldn’t be surprised if a reluctance to take on a moderately substantial religious body prevented some serious engagement with the question of why it’s the Mormons, of all people, who are so freakishly devoted to this failed president. But maybe the Times just isn’t the forum for that kind of thing anyway.

    Bryan — that’s a really interesting thought. “These are the freaks who support Bush — not my newsroom colleagues! Really, I swear!”

    And yes, I find it laughable that anyone thinks of Bush as genuinely religious or God-fearing. It’s a testament to the power of his propaganda machine, and to the Religious Right’s desire to believe in a Strong and Righteous Man, that anyone buys this snake oil.

    Lane — Long live the Great Basin Dystopia!

  6. JaneAnne says:

    What’s even juicier, Gary, is that the church is now taking the opposite position with regard to states’ rights that it took in the ERA era. There are lots of nice GA quotes from back then now coming back to haunt them, thanks to the power of the search engine on lds.org (and committed states’-rights wackos with lots of time on their hands). Hooray for the Internet!

    As for me, I took the letter’s call to “express [myself] on this urgent matter” to heart, and penned a lengthy e-mail to my senator, Gordon Smith, who no doubt heard the same letter in his own sacrament meeting. I told him he is far too smart to fall for this nakedly political ploy of the Republican right wing, and that he must certainly have the good sense not to vote in favor of such a stupid and time-wasting measure, etc. etc.