From The New West Blog
From One Montanan to Tim Egan in The Times: Thank You
By Courtney Lowery, 7-16-08
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Thank you, Tim Egan, for putting into words, in The New York Times no less, what many in our fine state have been screaming across the Hudson for years.
My favorite part of your recent op/ed column, “They Get It” (about the now famous New Yorker cover this week and how the satire might play in “flyover country") was this:
The biggest misperception of people in Montana, he said, is that everyone is a rube just off the hay truck. That’s not to say there aren’t militia wackos hiding in the hills, trading toxic nonsense about Obama’s secret Muslim past.
But for every nut, there’s a New Yorker reader — and then some.
Thank you for this line too: Irony, it turns out, does cross the Hudson River.
Thank you for using the Montana caricature sparingly, ("Land Tawney, a fifth-generation Montanan with a gap-toothed smile, was wearing a plaid shirt and a camouflage cap atop his head.") We do, after all, understand that there must always be some playing to the national audience and when the character fits the caricature, you not only get a pass, but it would have actually been worse to ignore the garb altogether.
What I’m saying, mostly, is thank you for making me, a fourth-generation Montanan, not sound to the rest of the word like a total backwoods, pickup-driving, knee-jerk hick.
And most of all, thank you for telling readers that race, guns and politics are issues with just as much complexity here as there. And when presented without context or insight, one might think he or she could predict our reactions to such issues, but that would make him or her quite, quite wrong.
And that—not the mountains, prairies and agrarian landscapes pictured in glossy magazines—is perhaps the most beautiful thing about flyover country in the first place.
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Comments
Posewitz, Doherty et cetera of Sportsmen for Obama happen to be greens first, they just happen to have a rifle or two which government deigns to allow them.
Clinton really had no interest in environmental issues, yet he was certainly happy to clean out the head offices of "anti-industry" corporations...a reverse revolving door. Obama has almost no understanding of rural issues, as his "bitter" crock pretty much proves. He will of course "defer to the experts" in the environmental movement when it comes to filling patronage slots.
Bottom line, New Yorkers reading this claptrap have no first-hand knowledge of the subject matter, the players, and therefore are given a completely false impression of realities. Journalism and the American public are ill-served by "reporters" such as Egan.
Egan:
'More importantly: Why are there sportsmen for Obama? Or for that matter, nearly a dozen paid Obama staffers in Montana, a state that Democrats have won only twice in the last 50 years?'
Clearly, our state is evolving into a different animal; it just so happens we are on the leading edge of a wave that seems to be spreading throughout the mountain west and beyond. 3 electoral votes is nothing, but the 'frame' of 21st century politics is really what is up-for-grabs.