Flyover Nation: You Can't Run a Country You've Never Been To - Hardcover

Loesch, Dana

 
9780399563881: Flyover Nation: You Can't Run a Country You've Never Been To
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0399563881 ISBN 13: 9780399563881
Verlag: Sentinel, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Dana Loesch believes in Christianity, patriotism, traditional marriage, and the right to bear arms, among other “quaint”  ideas. For the elites in DC, Los Angeles, New York, and Silicon Valley, that makes her as bizarre as a three-headed dog.
 
Loesch is alarmed that America is fracturing into two countries—not North and South, but Coastal and Flyover. Worse, the people in charge don’t understand the first thing about how most of the country thinks and lives. Consider a few examples . . .
 
•  In Flyover America, people believe criminals should be punished. Coastal America focuses on “rehabilitation.”
 
•  Flyovers think the Declaration of Independence was crystal clear: “All men are created equal.” For Coastals, Black Lives Matter—but anyone who adds that all lives matter must be a racist.
 
•  Coastals think they understand firearms because they watched a TV movie about Columbine. Fly- overs get a deer rifle for their thirteenth birthday.
 
•  Coastals talk about blue-collar workers in the abstract. Flyovers have a relative who works the night shift in a granola bar factory, where the big perk is taking home a bag full of granola bars every Friday.
 
•  Coastals think every problem—from hurt feelings to the cost of birth control—requires government intervention and huge federal spending. Flyovers know that money isn’t magic fairy dust, and many problems can be solved only by individual character and hard work.
 
It would all be funny—if Coastals weren’t winning on most of today’s big issues.
 
As Loesch writes, “Most of these pinkies-out, cocktail- drinking-appletini fans selfishly entertain grandiose plans of economic equality without realizing the negative impact their plans would have on the very people they pride themselves on helping. That’s the true class warfare.”
 
Loesch shines the light of truth on everything from feminism to gun violence to abortion. She reveals the damage done by elitists who flat-out don’t get the lives and values of people in the heart of the country. And she asks commonsense questions such as: How can you be angry at Walmart if you’ve never shopped in one? How can you hate the police if you’ve never needed help from a cop? How can you attack Christians if you don’t have a single friend who goes to church?
 
In other words, how can you run a country you’ve never been to? And how much could our politics improve if Coastals would actually listen to their fellow Americans? This book is a rallying cry for anyone who wants our leaders to understand and respect the culture that made America exceptional in the first place.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DANA LOESCH hosts The Dana Show: The Conservative Alternative, an award-winning, nationally syndicated daily radio show heard on stations across the country, as well as Dana on The Blaze television network. Her first book, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America, was a national bestseller and won raves from fans such as Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity. Loesch is a former newspaper columnist and was an editor under Andrew Breitbart at BigJournalism.com. She cofounded the Tea Party movement in her home- town of St. Louis and speaks regularly to audiences around the country. She lives in Texas with her husband and two children.

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Chapter 1

You Can't Unfriend Family

When I was a kid a giant poster of New York City hung in my room. It was a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge at night, the city lit up like the Fourth of July behind it and in the bottom right corner a dimly lit riverfront street I didn't know. The poster took up half the width of my bedroom wall at my home in southern Missouri. To me it represented everything my rural community south of St. Louis did not: excitement, adventure, opportunity, sophistication. Everything I knew about New York came from The Baby-Sitters Club: Stacey's Mistake (No.18). I wanted to picnic in Central Park. I wanted to see the museums and eat lox and bagels. But when I visited Manhattan for the first time, my childhood dream was shattered, because no matter how large my poster was, it couldn't convey the size of the city. I felt like the buildings were long fingers clasping over me, and I couldn't see the wide-open sky. It was pointless to drive a car anywhere, and the first time I tried to relax in Central Park two homeless people fought in front of me and everywhere smelled like urine and pretzels. The childhood Dana took down that Brooklyn Bridge poster from her mind's bedroom wall.

I never realized my attachment to that wide-open Flyover sky until I had to do without it. As much as I wanted to love and fall in love with NYC, I couldn't. My very first visit to the city left me overwhelmed. I was in town to appear on Wendy Williams's television show. The staff was wonderful and gracious; they put me up at the W in midtown, and some band booked on Jimmy Fallon's late-night show played me to sleep in Times Square. There were so many people and so many things and advertisements and cars and noise that I went to Sbarro, got a slice of pizza, and holed up in my room for the rest of the day watching the city parade past, many stories up, through the glass. I got more adventurous with every visit, although my views of the city were mainly limited to what I could see through the tinted windows of a studio-hired car en route to this or that network. I've been to NYC more times than I can count at this point, but every time I go I take a big breath as the bridge dumps me out of Queens and into Manhattan. I also can't sleep without a white-noise machine that plays crickets and frogs.

My childhood was fraught with upheaval, a tempestuous childhood of domestic violence that resulted in a struggling single-parent household in Flyover. My mother worked in the city because the jobs were in the city, not in the rolling hills and green pastures of the rural farmland where she and the rest of my family originated and still live. I was angry at her for having us live so far from everyone we knew. I hated my elementary school and the kids who didn't like me: I was small for my age, reed thin, and unremarkable in every way. From my mother's feminist, leftist perspective, in rural America you were either a wife, a waitress, or a bank teller at the small branch in town-or you got lucky and scored a job as a makeup artist for the local mortician, as my mother's best friend did after high school. The city offered more opportunities for employment (for her) and education (for me). Every weekend we'd make the two-and-a-half hour journey back to "the country," as we simply called it, the nouveau city mice visiting the country mice. Every weekend my spirit was restored in a tiny one-room church, playing in the creek with my cousins, catching fireflies at dusk, and sleeping at the foot of my grandparents' woodstove as the sound of crickets lulled me to sleep; in the winter it was the sound of complete silence from the woods buried in snow. Nothing was ever so wonderful as being in the Ozarks. My cousins were cared for after school by my aunts, older cousins, and Grandmother. They grew up spending every day, not just weekends and summers, playing in the creek, picking corn, naming Grandpa's goats, chasing Grandma's pheasants when she wasn't looking. Their caregivers consisted of familiar places, familiar locations.

Everyone in the family knew where each grandkid was at any given point in the day. My cousins had one another at school during the day. If you messed with one, you messed with all. They attended one another's basketball and volleyball games; they cheered wildly whenever a cousin made a basket or scored a point. They rooted for one another at the town's annual beauty pageant and gathered at Grandma and Grandpa's beforehand to dress that year's appointed female cousin in the best gown and makeup the Ozarks had to offer. They attended church together and sat next to one another, filling up half the pews in the sanctuary. If you didn't have a father figure in your life there was Grandpa, a bevy of uncles, and older cousins there to fill the role. Everyone always had a partner at recess, company at dinner, a shoulder on which to cry, a hand to hold, a ride from school. They were separated from me by hours of asphalt and rolling hills.

In the city, no one knew who I was or to whom I belonged. An endless string of teenage girls babysat me after school. I felt no particular attachment to any of them. One time one of them forgot to make me lunch and instead made out with her boyfriend on my mom's bed. I turned up the television so Heathcliff would drown out their noises and then ran outside and down the steps to the sidewalk in front of our house, where I sat on the bottom step and embraced my knees. There was no one to whom I could run. I had no tribe. The neighbors on our left were a poor family whose daughter smoked pot and whose bedroom consisted of a mattress and rainbow curtains; her parents fought at night and I could hear her mother's every scream. The neighbors to our right were a family who seemed to find themselves in our hovelly hood due to hard times, and they kept to themselves. My mother did the best she could for me. I hid the transgressions of babysitters so that she wouldn't worry while she slaved away at one of the three jobs she worked so we could avoid taking government handouts.

No one knew me at school. I didn't fit in with the preps, the burnouts, the jocks; I didn't even fit in with the weirdos, which made me the weirdest weirdo of all. I ate lunch alone and pretended that people at my school who remotely looked like me were family members. I sat on the bus alone and no one noticed me. Literally. One day I forgot to get off at my stop and was too small for the driver to see. My mom and the school found me a couple of hours later, crying in my seat in the dark bus shed. It's amazing how you can feel lonelier in a city than in the country. In the city you're isolated by all of the nameless faces and the noise of their conversations. Everyone around you does what you do, so no one stands apart.

During recess I swung. It was a solo activity. I would swing higher and higher until I could look down the hill at the long drive that led up to my elementary school. I'd imagine my mom's green Oldsmobile coming up that windy drive to collect me early from school and take me away back down south to our family. Every Friday that's what she did: She picked me up after school and we'd escape. We'd eat sandwiches, or if I was lucky, I'd eat a McDonald's Happy Meal in the car. There wasn't time to stop and eat anywhere; Mom wanted to be on the road and...

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Verlag
Sentinel
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399563881
ISBN 13 
9780399563881
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
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Verantwortliche Person
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