It’s extraordinary to me, that when you look at the maps, you see red states everywhere, with a handful of blue states on the west coast and in the northeast, and this means it’s a tie. In other words, the Democrats dominate in the few very large uban areas, and everywhere else it’s a Republican world. This is not a good sign. If this election were decided on geography (which it slightly is, thanks to the electoral college), it would be a landslide for the Republicans. We are looking at a deep divide between Americans who live in large cities, and everyone else.
I see this as a divide between those who live primarily in the virtual world and those who live primarily in the real world. Even without electronics and dsl, to live in a city is to live in a virtual world of man-created, geometric reality, with occasional glimpses of blue sky and potted plants. Andy Warhol said that TV is better than reality. That’s begining to look like a prophesy. I am a virtual world dweller, living out among real world dwellers, and I thiink that they have a firmer grasp on reality than those of us who interprete what’s what via pixels. For those of us in the virtual world, Iraq and the war on terrorism is a video game, and abstract appeals to a rational universe are compelling, but to the denizens of the real world, it is much more concrete. People are trying to kill us. For real. We should kill them first. For real. Real world dwellers don’t care about abstract dreams of enlightened consciousness bringing about a new world of peace-loving vegetarians. Real world dwellers have guns, and they have them for a reason, i.e., meat and defense.
These are the people who are fighting for all of us in Iraq, and who will fight for us wherever it is necessary. They are despised and patronized by the urban democratic virtual reality dwelling sophisticates, me included, but without them, we’re dead. And in this video game, you don’t get more plays.