flickering pictures

Peter Hitchens, an excellent — if fiercely conservative — writer and columnist at Britain’s right-leaning Daily Mail, is covering America’s pre-election mood from Moscow, Idaho, which is incidentally named after a town in Pennsylvania, not Russia. Though I don’t agree with his politics, his latest editorial piece is a thing of beauty — as much for its outsider’s viewpoint as for its solid writing and fascinating portrayal of a divided middle America.

Moscow also happens to be the sleepy little town where Sarah Palin received her college education — a journalism degree from the University of Idaho — though the school’s Obama-leaning professors don’t seem proud of this.

Here’s an excerpt:

They tell me that about one person in 50 on the streets of Moscow, Idaho, is legally carrying a concealed pistol. A lot more have them in their cars. I rather approve of this, though I don’t think I’ll join in.

[…] As America approaches her most momentous presidential election for decades, I am in the True (but not specially Wild) West, the top left-hand corner of the United States, a hard-core Republican state that most visitors only fly over.

They think it’s dull. How wrong they are.

This extraordinary, divided little city, enfolded in low, fertile hills, is America in miniature - split down the middle, Left versus Right, Christian versus secular, gun-owner versus gun-hater, abortion advocate versus big-family home-schooling Bible-walloper, cyclist versus gas-guzzler, Obama versus McCain - and some interesting stations both in between and beyond.

[…] John Harrell, a computer expert who describes himself as a ‘Biblical Conservative’, thinks the Republican Party has betrayed and ignored the country’s Christian constitution and is inviting divine wrath by doing so.

I was reminded when talking to him that most of England’s fierce revolutionary Protestants emigrated to America centuries ago, which is why this sort of language seems strange to us, though Oliver Cromwell would have found it quite familiar.

Mr Harrell was militantly scornful of the Evangelical worshippers who continue to vote for McCain because of Sarah Palin, dismissing them as ‘Evanjellyfish’ and their churches as ‘Girly Man Churches’.

Image via Doug’s Blog.

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