Red State Blues Read online

  Atlanta was no different. On my way up, the township supervisor, Mike Wurtsmith, emailed to say he had to work the late shift at a nearby golf course. We’d tentatively planned to meet up that evening as soon as I arrived for an interview. But he’d been called in to the golf course, where he managed the bar.

  “I’ll meet you at my house,” he wrote. He wouldn’t be home until late.

  As a reporter I’m always anxious about subjects bowing out of interviews. The more people put you off, the harder you try to nail them down to a time. I wasn’t going to miss this one, but had about four hours to kill before meeting up with Wurtsmith, so I went to the only logical place to while away the time in small town America: the bar.

  The older I got, the more I understood and embraced the blue-collar identity of my home state. I grew up hunting, fishing, and wearing flannel, after all. I’d also survived two Detroit stick-ups as a kid and partied in the city’s abandoned buildings as a teenager. Our white guy rock stars—Bob Seger, Kid Rock, Jack White—are always described in magazine profiles as “gritty.” Our white guy writers—Jim Harrison, Elmore Leonard, Philip Levine—get similar treatment.

  Middle American white guys are taught to take pride in our slightly ruffian, uncivilized nature. In a way, Michigan—along with the rest of the nation’s vast middle—is the Huck Finn of America, with the Aunt Sallys of the coasts perennially telling us to smooth down our cowlick, sit still at the dinner table, and speak in complete sentences with proper diction.

  No one is going to tell us what to do. No one is going to decide who our president is.

  In this way, a Trump vote was nothing more than a simple exercise in rugged American individualism.

  I bellied up to the bar and ordered a beer and cheeseburger. I’d come up to Atlanta without too much of a plan beyond connecting with the mayor. I’m of the “let it happen” school of journalism. I’ve always ascribed to the notion that a journalist needs to be a mash-up of historian, sociologist, poet, and barroom hustler.

  So, I drank a beer. Then another. Then started hustling.

  I struck up a conversation with a fellow who had wandered in not long after me and sat a few stools down the bar. He looked close to retirement age and was wearing a sleeveless shirt. I learned his name was Gary Michalak and he was a former postal employee who had just returned from the larger town of Gaylord west of Atlanta where he’d bought several firearms, including a handgun that shoots shotgun shells.

  He was an amiable guy who was all in on Trump. But despite being an outspoken critic of the “liberal media” that I represented, he gleefully agreed to take me out into the parking lot to show me his new guns.

  Like a scene in a Tarantino movie he opened the trunk of his black Cadillac and proceeded to show off his new firearms, including the small, large-barreled hand cannon that shoots shotgun shells. The pictures I snapped of him with the guns and the Caddy made him look like a criminal or the dictator of a small country.

  But he was just a retired postal worker. An American.

  The township supervisor’s house turned out to be a cabin on the lake amid other vacation cottages. After more communication, he talked me into coming over before he got home.

  “The door’s unlocked. Just make yourself at home,” he texted as the summer sun was sinking in the sky.

  When I got the message, I was at a campground on a nearby inland lake, ready to pitch a tent and call it a night. The back and forth texts, emails, and calls had gotten confusing. He was going to have to work until eight, then nine, then ten.

  “Just go to the house and I’ll meet you there when I can,” was the summation of his texts.

  So I did.

  There is nothing more unnerving than walking into a stranger’s private space when they aren’t there. I made sure I was at the right cabin, confirmed by a wooden nameplate next to the door, and hesitantly went in. It was a homey affair. The first thing I noticed was a picture of my host shaking hands with Joe Biden.

  I’d assumed he was going to be one of these “Don’t Tread On Me” type of Tea Party Conservatives who got so hot under the collar when Obama was elected. But when Wurtsmith got home, I quickly realized he wasn’t. His passion was community health, something he’d worked at for decades, making sure the people in his rural part of Michigan had access to doctors. That passion is what brought him to Washington, D.C. He later tells me he was locking hands with the Democratic Vice President at a health care conference.

  We talked politics deep into the night on his back patio overlooking a small lake rimmed with pontoon boats. Wurtsmith, a tall man with piercing blue eyes and a crisp voice and haircut, still considers himself a conservative. When I came out and asked him if he was planning on voting Trump in the election, he hesitated.

  “I just don’t know if I can,” he said.

  The total population of Montmorency County is 9,259. Of that, 1,046 people voted Trump in the primary—11.28 percent—giving it the highest percentage in the state. Most of those folks are older, middle class white people who never went to college, according to the U.S. Census data. Thirty percent of the population is over the age of 65. The county is 97 percent white and only 10 percent of the population older than 25 have a college degree. The median household income in 2014 was $36,448.

  The general election results were no surprise: 70 percent for Trump, 26 percent for Clinton. The actual number of voters may seem like peanuts, but taken in aggregate all across America, these are the places that gave the election to Trump.

  The town of Atlanta is at the crossroads of two state highways. Certain Northern Michigan vacation towns appeal to different classes of people. The wealthy flock to the west side of the state, in mansions and condos along Lake Michigan near the Leelanau Peninsula, where the novelist and screenwriter Jim Harrison lived for many years and where the chef Mario Batali has a house. Those towns feature bakeries with scones, wine bars, and high-end clothing shops.

  Then there are towns like Atlanta, which have a more working class vibe. The big thing to do in the winter is to get in jacked-up trucks and go driving on the icy back roads. There are plenty of deer hunting camps out in the woods. The strip of storefronts in town include a gas station—called the Freedom Market—a hardware store and a gun shop. There are also three different taverns.

  Wurtsmith gave me a tour the next morning, taking me into a diner, gun shop, the local newspaper office, and the Iraq War vets’ new auto garage, which had just opened up. The common theme of the interviews was that the good people of Atlanta watched a lot of Fox News, were very worried about gun rights and, like Jim in the pick-up, had a palatable disgust of Hillary Clinton.

  Here’s a sampling of the quotes:

  “He doesn’t stop and think for a minute,” said Susan Reed, the manager of a diner in town. “He’s honest.”

  “We lost jobs something terrible when the Democrats took over,” said John Renshaw, a retiree from Flint’s Buick City. “I think [Trump] can bring business back and put people back to work.”

  “I think Trump has a wonderful family, he has wonderful children,” said Brenda Birchmeier, a school bus driver. “I can’t see him being against women where he has helped women all his life.”

  “I feel like Hillary wants to take our guns away,” said Sarah Reed, a college student. “It’s weird to me that people don’t care about gun rights.”

  We heard quotes and sound-bites like this all throughout the election at Trump rallies. The media wrote them down and filmed it, but we weren’t listening close enough. The fear and rage of white people all over Michigan is what turned the state red for the first time in decades—and what tipped the election.

  All anger does is beget more anger and now, in the Trump era, we are in a national frenzy of rage.

  THE BURGERS AT MILLER’S (OR, DEARBORN’S CHANGED)

  TARA ROSE

  It was the winter of 2004, at a bar and grill in Dexter, Michigan. I was quietly chewing my salad, purposely avoiding conve
rsation with my boyfriend so I could continue eavesdropping on the discussion at the table behind me. The group included a man, his wife, and their woman friend, all middle-aged. They were chatting about my hometown thirty miles away.

  “We used to love going to Miller’s,” said the wife as her husband and friend groaned with great longing. “Their burgers are amazing.”

  “Oh, the best!” the friend agreed.

  They paused. I knew what was coming next, just as soon as they were thinking it.

  “But you know,” the husband said, “Dearborn’s changed.”

  His wife sighed in agreement. “It used to be a real nice area.”

  “Those people are awful,” I said to my boyfriend. I could tell from his wide-eyed glance that, even if he’d been eavesdropping along with me, he wouldn’t have deciphered a code that had been obvious to me for decades.

  When white ex-residents of my hometown sigh and say, “Dearborn’s changed,” what they’re really saying is that it was a lovely place before the Arabs “took over.” White Dearborn’s pride is embodied by the towering figures of the past—world famous entrepreneur Henry Ford and longtime mayor Orville Hubbard. During his 36-year tenure as mayor, Hubbard delivered an impressive array of city services, but that wasn’t the only reason he was beloved by some. Hubbard died in late 1982, a few months after I began kindergarten at a public school built with Ford money. From that point forward, I got used to hearing elderly white neighbors lament the lost days of Orville’s administration, “when things were different.” It was always understood, without anyone needing to say so explicitly, that the olden days were better because people of color weren’t tolerated.

  Orville Hubbard did his best to ensure black people stayed out of Dearborn. During his decades in office, he successfully fought against public housing, warning residents that the town would become “a black slum” if it welcomed a subsidized population. He spoke openly and often about his segregationist views, even bragging about the ways in which he’d mobilize police and firefighter sirens to harass African-American residents who had the gall to break the color barrier. His legacy of anti-black racism lived on throughout my childhood, adolescence, and all the way until I finally left town at age 20. During the 1980s and ‘90s, few black families moved into my east Dearborn neighborhood, and those that did usually didn’t stay long. But during those years, I watched the Arab community grow and prosper in the east end. And the whole time that was happening—many years before 9/11 and the widespread anti-Muslim hysteria that followed—I saw a lot of white people lose their minds over the weirdest things.

  “Those Arabs smell bad.”

  “Look at how many of them live in a house together. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents all under one roof. Every one of those kids has a million cousins, and they’ll get all of ‘em to gang up on you if you cross them.”

  “Watch out for the boys. Don’t let your daughter date one. They treat women like property. No woman in her right mind would dress like that in the summer. They’re brainwashed.”

  “They know English. They’re just being sneaky. Like how they sneak around the tax codes, and sell their gas stations from one family member to the next. It’s so they never pay taxes.”

  Throughout my elementary and junior high school years, I got so used to hearing white people bitterly regurgitate these claims that I didn’t even consider whether or not they were true. Back then, before I was aware that these stereotypes didn’t hold water, I could never figure why most of these things would even make a person mad. I mean, the “treating females like garbage” part was upsetting, but I knew too many white girls from abusive families to see that as something specific to the Arab community. As for the other claims, who cares about big families living in little houses, speaking a different language, and possibly gaming the tax system?

  But in junior high—when academics mean nothing and school becomes a nonstop, social-climbing death match—I noticed that even the dorkiest white kids could always cash in on whiteness. Toward the end of eighth grade, I remember walking home from school with a few of my fellow nerdy white girl classmates. We were talking about our mutual friend Jackie, who was the only black girl in our grade. Jackie got picked on a lot, and we all agreed that some of the kids in our class were just being racist. And then one of these white girls, said, “I’m not racist. I like black people. I just hate Ay-rabs.”

  By this point, I’d heard so many different people, kids and adults alike, make this statement so many times it had become hackneyed. In 1991, this was what passed for a progressive mindset among white Dearbornites. You could shun the obvious racism of your parents and grandparents, yet still see yourself as superior to the “Ay-rabs.” But we all knew the “A-word” was derogatory, so I called them out on it. My observation had little impact and was shrugged off quickly. Seeing themselves as superior to Arabs wasn’t the point of the discussion. It was just an afterthought.

  In high school, I met and began dating Sam, who was the only Arab in my hipster friend group. At our largely Arab-American high school, hipsters—a.k.a. “alternative” kids—were not considered cool. But he was quite the tastemaker among us weirdos with his blue hair, flannel shirts, Doc Martens and anti-establishment column in the school newspaper. The thing our alternative pals didn’t always understand was that Sam came from a long line of hardcore leftist, anti-racist activists, and he wasn’t interested in being deemed worthy by our white standards.

  I can still see the withering expression on his face when one of the guys in our after-school theater group said, “I hate Ay-rabs, except Sam. He’s not one of them. He’s one of us.”

  “Hey, don’t say that,” said Sam.

  “Say what?”

  “Ay-rab.”

  “Oh. Sorry, man.”

  Sam later told me in private how much that guy pissed him off, how he could somehow see Sam as “not one of them.” Indeed, when it came to the alternative crowd bagging on the rest of the student body, it wasn’t always easy to tell where a healthy hatred of the popular kids ended and anti-Arab racism began. Because at my high school, Arab-American culture had become the standard for what was considered cool. While those in my social group (and at the whiter high schools across town) were embracing grunge rock, most of the student body enjoyed Middle Eastern pop and freestyle dance music. Secular girls wore their hair big, while religious girls wore hijabs. Boys favored slicked back manes, black leather jackets, and heavy cologne. Many of the white kids mimicked the secular Arab trends because that’s what was fashionable. For my mostly white alternative crowd, resenting the dominant culture meant resenting the things Arabs celebrated.

  But I was used to being an outsider with weird taste and didn’t mind being different. By junior year, I figured out that most classmates who teased me were just messing around, and some of their jokes were pretty hysterical. If I could maintain a sense of humor about myself, I’d be fine. So I learned to relax. High school still felt endless and boring as hell, but at least I no longer suspected the more “normal” kids were out to get me. It also helped that I was spared the usual conventions of high school misery. I was one of the weird weed-smoking, sex-having kids in a school where there was very little social pressure to do these things. If I’d been trying to fit in with a more conservative crowd, I might have been less happy.

  Even if most of the other students thought I was weird, I always knew I benefited from the unfair advantage of the teachers’ favor. In the early 1990s, the white portion of the student body at my high school was dipping below 50%, but every single one of my teachers was Caucasian. Many of them liked me because I was studious. Some clearly preferred white students to Arabs. I knew that to them I was more “normal”—from the way I dressed, to the Catholic church I attended, to the simple fact that I spoke only that one language they knew.

  Right when I was making my peace with life, I began working at the Henry Ford Centennial Library, a midcentury marble fortress located on a long strip
of Ford-developed land dividing Dearborn’s east and west ends. The full-time library staff consisted mainly of middle class white ladies from the west side of town, most of whom fit a certain type: stuffy, staid, fearful, racist, and very big fans of Miller’s.

  I’d never heard of Miller’s until I heard the librarians rave about their famous burgers. The way they fetishized it always irked me. “You’ve never been to Miller’s?” they’d gasp, as if it were odd that I didn’t hang out at a bar five miles from my house in a neighborhood I rarely visited. It’s like they thought I’d missed this key rite of passage as a Dearborn person who hadn’t been initiated in the cult. I automatically associated Miller’s burgers with racist whites because the same people who couldn’t believe I’d never eaten there also couldn’t believe I actually lived in east Dearborn.

  “Aren’t you scared? It’s so close to Detroit. I don’t let my kids go there. This is as far east as I’ll go. It wasn’t always this way, but it’s really changed. The people have changed. The men are very rude. You see these women and girls come in here, wearing scarves on their heads. I feel so sorry for them. I can’t believe there are men who still treat women that way.”

  On one occasion when I heard a librarian named Connie make that last claim about young Muslim women, I thought of Maha, a girl I’d known since kindergarten who came to school wearing a hijab one day in fifth grade. I remembered Maha calmly explained to us other girls that she had a dream in which Allah told her she was ready.

  “Um, I think a lot of these girls decide to wear the scarf on their own. It isn’t always like someone told them what to do,” I said.