Red State Blues

The two activities I'm engaged in right now are combining in a sort of Hegelian synthesis of professional anxiety in me. I'm listening to a podcast lecture by Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, while browsing through the English department website at the University of South Kanbrashoma, one of the majestic state research universities that rises out of the Republican prairie. Their search committee just today rang me to set up a job interview at MLA, and I'm looking at the very real possibility of moving from just-barely-blue Wisconsin (which carried Kerry only because Madison, the Berkeley of the North, had an 85% voter turnout) to one of those red bricks that make up the middle of the U.S. map.

It's not as though I'm in a stronghold of progressivism at the moment; W'04 bumper stickers and WWJD bracelets are the norm in my patch of dairyland. But the idea of moving to a more systematically backward area like Colokotassouri is scary for me. I fought my way out of the quagmire of idiocy in which I was raised with some difficulty, and I still associate the pain of that with growing up in Wichita. I want to move to a research university, but I do have a sense that the prairie's tentacles are stertching out for me, like the pit of the immortal Sarlac.