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Jewish World Review Jan 31, 2005/ 21 Shevat, 5765

Bill Steigerwald

Bill Steigerwald
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Looking in vain for our Great Divide


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Until President Bush lays his annual State of the Union address on all of us next week and gets half of the country hopping mad, we must make do with Atlantic Monthly's assessment of how our great republic is faring politically, economically and culturally.

For starters, Atlantic's editors say in the introduction to their third annual "State of the Union" package, we should all disabuse ourselves of the stereotype that there is a neat red/blue-ideological/geographical bipolarization dividing the land.

It's a simplistic, media-mongered falsehood, America's best general-interest magazine says, which we would all know from personal experience if only we stopped watching Fox News once in a while, listening to NPR occasionally or left our native area codes more often.

Atlantic's writers generally agree that in areas such as basic values, social tolerance and public policy, we are less divided than ever. For example, hundreds of narrow religious denominations are coalescing into larger modernist/liberal and traditional/conservative blocs.

Another sensible all-American thought from Atlantic's package debunks the socio-politically correct myth that we'd be a better country if only we could all learn to get along: A fractious country that foments political contentiousness is a not necessarily a weaker country but a stronger one.

One of the best articles is Jonathan Rauch's "Bipolar Disorder," in which he recounts how he went searching for America's Great Divide and didn't find it.

He says what he did find, however, was that, while it's true American politics is split nearly 50-50 between D's and R's, the American public is not so polarized.

In fact, he contends what he finds most remarkable — and encouraging — about the American landscape is not the shrill politics and "not the culture war, but the culture peace."

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P.J. O'Rourke's funnier but just as debunking piece, "Continental Divides," comes with 10 shaded U.S. maps showing where we Americans are most wealthy, divorced, charitable, criminal and well-traveled, etc.

O'Rourke, merging all the maps into one, concludes that many things we think are true — that poverty breeds crime, that urbanites specialize in divorce and that the Farm Belt is hurting, for example — are not.

It's true there is an idyllic patch of America where crime is really low, charity is extra high, marriages are really sound and everyone is as well off as his neighbor, O'Rourke says.

This "Righteous Region" — North and South Dakota and northern Nebraska — isn't diverse or divisive. It's also a place, he says, where Americans in the rest of the country have "all agreed that they wouldn't want to live."


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JWR contributor Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Comment by clicking here.

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© 2005, Bill Steigerwald