Bruce says he's the "last timber man in Harney County," then
spits onto the pavement of the hotel parking lot. He's spent the day, a
blistering eastern Oregon late July Saturday, salvaging timber from a swath of
land recently scorched by a wildfire, and his white T-shirt is streaked with
dirt and ash as he leans back against his stripped-down, rusted-out Jeep.
"Used to have the largest covered saw mill in the nation
just down the road, next to the smokestack that you passed when you drove in.
And this town didn't used to be the dead thing you see now," Bruce goes on.
We're in Burns, Oregon, a hamlet of 2,700 not far from the wildlife refuge the
Bundy
brothers
made famous by occupying earlier this year. A once thriving
community, it has gradually lost its economic base since the regional timber industry
was largely shuttered partly thanks to a series of
government rulings in the 1990s that prevented loggers from cutting down trees in
areas where endangered spotted owls lived.
"We never got to vote on it," Bruce says. "The government
just told us this is how it will be and stopped it. But it's supposed to be a
government by and for the people. And we're the people."
Bruce, who is 50ish and white, informs me he "doesn't like
Trump and can't stand Hillary," but if he were to pick, it'd be Donald Trump—as he is
a successful businessman, and what they need in Burns are jobs. However, he
won't be picking, because he doesn't vote. Doesn't see the point. He's voted
once, only once, though he can't remember who the candidate was or what exactly
he cared about so much it drove him to the polls, just that his guy lost and
none of the things he wanted ever happened.
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Bruce in Burns
This moment in this hot motel parking lot is halfway through
a two-and-a-half-month, 14,000-mile road trip through 32 states that I embarked on in my MINI Cooper, accompanied by my ten-pound dog Vinni. Like so many
Americans who have hit the road, I wanted to understand my country better. I
wanted to chat with people from all walks of life—from movie moguls and Senate
candidates to out-of-work coal miners and stay-at-home moms—about their lives
and politics in election-year America.
My mission was to find our commonalities, the vast swaths of
"purple" I knew were out there. I grew up in deep-red Kentucky but currently
live in the bluer-than-blue enclave of Brooklyn, so I knew that underneath all
the rhetoric, the fake Facebook news stories, and divisive campaigns, there had
to still be a thing called "America" that we all belonged to—something that we
were all in, together, even now.
But what you find doing this continental criss-crossing is
dozens of enclaves that can feel thousands of miles apart even when they
neighbor one another. Before Burns, I was in Portland, where casual
eavesdropping yields chatter about locally grown kale, startups, DIY artistic
endeavors, and rising housing costs. Then I drove east through the lush,
temperate national forest that houses Oregon's snow-capped Mount Hood and
discovered it suddenly ceases, like you're penetrating an invisible barrier. In
the blink of an eye, you are cruising past rolling dry tumbleweed-strewn hills
and plateaus, dotted with hints of the pastel and loping cattle. This is the
line dividing America's West Coast from the American West. And
in the West, people talk of decline, abandonment, lost ways of life, and
fleeing youth.
You can find these divisions from coast to coast. It boggles the mind that it took Donald Trump to
make those of us in capital-rich metropolises sit up and pay attention to the
nation's interior, the places in between. It's just so damn blatant when you're
out there. Or as Rachel, a DC native recently transplanted to the small town of
Rocky Mount, North Carolina, put it, "It's like the
Hunger Games. In certain wealthy cities, we're just obliviously
jetting off to brunch and yoga, and everyone else is..."
"In the
District 12s of the nation," I offer.
"Yup."
It's an awful
way to look at your country, but what about it is wrong? The lessons of the
2016 election are still being argued over, but the undeniable takeaway is that the
inhabitants of rural areas, left behind by globalization and struggling, rose
up, as the dispossessed inevitably do, and picked the path of rage. And
whatever the consequences of that rage, we will all bear them together as a
country.
These days, it can feel like there are two Americas divided
by some insurmountable wall looming past the cloud line. And I won't try to
talk down or understate the danger of Donald Trump, but after a coast-to-coast
and north-to-south drive, I have to disagree with the idea of the wall.
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A landscape in Utah
Of course, we have many differences between us. But why would anyone expect
everyone in this country to see things the exact same way they do? What you
understand much more viscerally by driving around this great big country is,
well, just that: This is a great big country, settled by different peoples who
came from different parts of the world at different times. These groups have
different heroes, different villains, different problems. Our politics will
always be messy; we'll never reach a 100 percent consensus.
Now, not all disagreements between us are civil; not everyone I
met on my travels was kind. Some enthusiastic Trump supporters told me, "Obama
should go back to where he came from" and other bigoted remarks—but these were
few and far between. The vast majority of conservative folks were choosing
between begrudgingly voting for Trump or not voting for president at all. And
some had come over to team Hillary Clinton. Even a woman I'll call Georgie,
from Mobile, Alabama, who said she had been an early and dedicated "Trumpette"
had lost all enthusiasm for the man—though she still planned to tick his box
come November. What had been the moment things turned? "I don't know," she told me. "He just kept talking."
There is undeniable hatred out there, undeniable ugliness that has
been stirred up by this election—we saw some of that at Trump's rallies, and
see some of it now in the frighteningly frequent reports of hate crimes and
harassment. But these atrocious acts are committed by a small, but very vocal,
minority, and do not represent the totality of the 47 percent of voters who
picked Trump.
So many of our disagreements, no matter how heated the discussions
over them are, come down to fissures in culture. And after all my hours in my
tiny car, all those miles watching American landscapes and homes glide by, I
wonder why, instead of bemoaning differences of opinion as signs of stupidity
or laziness, can't we just set those differences to the side and look at what
remains.
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A train in Utah
According to the latest data from the United States, just over 58 percent of eligible Americans
voted, meaning turnout
has not dropped relative to recent presidential elections. Still, over four in
ten of us declined to participate despite both parties proclaiming this the
most important election of all time. More people did not vote than voted for
either candidate.
I found evidence of this disillusionment with the system from
Mobile to Detroit, the same belief that nothing concrete or fundamental will
improve—or even really changed—regardless of who takes the top slot. But this
attitude shouldn't be mistaken for cynicism or laziness.
Especially in
Appalachia and the West, where the rugged frontiersmen and women of yore still
loom large in the cultural ethos, the divorce between essential civic duties and
voting runs deep and contributes heavily to the fact that when they do vote,
they often vote Republican. Most people I met in these regions didn't like
either candidate, sure, but they also held a common belief that they'd always
gotten by on their own, working together as a community, outside the fringes of
bureaucracy that they don't see as operating for their benefit anyway. Many would
rather be free to make their own mistakes, instead of living under the thumb of
some distant, powerful government that regulates everything from their water
usage to when they have to have their dog on a leash.
"It's death by a thousand
pricks," explained John, an undecided conservative-leaning high school
teacher in Greeneville, Tennessee, as we sat in a local coffee shop on a
picturesque Main Street dominated by church steeples. He then pointed at the large gray bag
resting—and occasionally shifting and wheezing—by my feet, which he knew
surreptitiously harbored little Vinni. "Take your dog. He's
fine in that bag, sure, and safe. And that's like living with all this
government or socialism.
But I'd rather be a dog roaming and running in a field, and
maybe I get kicked in the head by a donkey, but at least I'm free."
In many areas, especially the Deep South, local politics seemed
more immediate and important than the competition on the national stage between
two well-heeled New Yorkers. In Greensboro, Georgia, when I asked locals for their opinions of the election, they immediately started discussing the race for
county sheriff, not president. For many, the small-scale corruption and
nepotism they had seen in local politics had bolstered their lack of faith in
government—and an accompanying desire for less of it on every level.
Start looking for it and you'll find this oppositional attitude—a
bedrock American value—everywhere you look.
When I arrived in Pensacola, a Navy
town on Florida's Panhandle, the top news stories were Brexit and the Orlando
shooting, and the rain was coming down so hard I couldn't see anything but
water outside my window. The local radio station informed me that they played
"more hits than regulations allow," and inside a coffee shop where I took
shelter, a regular patron and the barista bemoaned that EPA regulations
precluded them from pumping the water out of their overflowing parking lot—something
to do with being so close to the ocean.
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Lucinda in Pensacola
This is where I met Lucinda, a recently retired woman with bright
red hair and an open smile that, in combination, reminded one of
The Facts of Life's Mrs. Garrett. She
invited me to her home, a shotgun affair with a pool, and served me homemade
egg salad and coffee cake while Vinni and her large black cat stared each other down and punctuated our cordial political chatter with discomfiting battle
cries.
Lucinda considered herself a feminist—or at least a pioneering
woman, as I don't think she loved that word. In her youth, she had been the
only female pilot working at a small aviation company in the south of the state,
and had then gone on to get a veterinary degree and help found Pensacola's first
wildlife refuge—often spending her nights wrastling errant gators who had
wondered too close to town into cages and shuffling them off to safety.
Despite her environmentalist leanings, despite her support of gay
rights—though she thinks gay marriage should be left up to the states—she backed hardcore conservative Ted Cruz during primary season, and when we
spoke, she thought the Texas senator would be on the ballot "one way or the
other," either as a Republican or an independent. And if he wasn't? Well, she really
wasn't sure who she'd vote for then, as she thought Trump was a "cartoon
character" and a "not a very good person," but that Hillary Clinton had
committed numerous—and severe—crimes that she had not been held accountable
for.
But I wanted to ask about her support of Cruz, who, like many
Republicans, opposes gay marriage and a lot of environmentalist policies. She
didn't think those issues were the most critical topic in 2016. What was?
Terrorism and getting the good-paying jobs that were once in Pensacola, but had
long since vanished, back. Why was she a Republican? "Oh, I don't know," she
said. "My parents were. It's just what you are."
Democrats, she said, aren't focused on the right things. "They're
just talking about social issues," she said. "But right now, our country is in
trouble. And I'm scared. We're in debt, and we aren't as strong as we used to
be. It's like Play-Doh, where it's growing soft in the center and slowly
dissolving over the edges."
It's not just conservatives who have lost faith in institutions. Due
to the perception, whether founded or not, that the Democratic Establishment
tilted the primary field in Clinton's favor, some of Bernie Sanders's most
ardent fans spent much of 2016 passionately protesting that Establishment. And
they aren't the only ones on the left who are full of anger and despair.
![]()
Brittany in Dallas
As I stood on a street corner in downtown Dallas on July 9, the
day after a
sniper attack on police, surrounded by still-flashing police lights, I struck up a
conversation with Brittany, a 26-year-old black woman wearing a shirt
emblazoned with the slogan, "I Refused. I Refused. I Refused.," and
Rosa
Parks's picture. She, like many people I met, wasn't much for voting,
though she too had done so once—and with great pride—for Barack Obama in 2008,
when she was just 18 and full of hope.
But here she and her family and friends were, eight years later, in
the same place they'd always been, and she no longer thought her vote would
make a difference. But she sure as hell thought Black Lives Matter and what was
happening on the streets of her city could. "I don't have any kids, so I'll do
whatever it takes," she told me. "If I get pulled over, and it's not justified,
I'm not getting out of the car. Even if I get shot. I know my rights. And my
generation, we're not willing to accept this, the way things are."
The different angers
fueling support of Trump or Sanders or even Black Lives Matter can blur and
overlap. In Wassau, Wisconsin, a town of 39,000 surrounded
by rolling green farms dotted with red barns and gleaming silos, I met Yee, a
22-year-old second-generation Hmong man with serious eyes and a self-proclaimed
love of history. He identified as a Democrat, but didn't believe in voting
based strictly on party, preferring to decide based on the individual candidate.
Like many in
America, the Hmong community in Wisconsin has been hit with a rash of suicides,
increasing drug use, and dwindling job prospects. Yee, an
Apprentice fan, initially thought the
Trump he'd seen on TV could prove just the leader America needs. Then the
anti-immigrant rhetoric started.
Yee's parents emigrated from Laos in the wake of the
Vietnam War. Like many Hmong who came here at the time, they were harassed,
discriminated against, baselessly accused of being Viet Cong. "I know with ISIS
and everything people are scared, but, belonging to a refugee family, I can't
bring myself to blame a whole race for what a small group has done," Yee
told me.
Though a fan of many of Trump's economic statements and
plans, Yee was an enthusiastic Sanders man. When I met him he was, like many Sanders
supporters after the primary, tentatively coming around to team Hillary. "Bernie
really
spoke to the people—especially to younger people, like myself, who have student
loans," he said. "What spoke to me most was when he said that the top one-tenth of a percent owns as much as the bottom 90
percent."
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The Maine coast
Despite a presidential election that fractured so much of our
politics, there's evidence that many Americans want the same things: safer
communities, jobs that can support families, a scaling back of the government's
war on drugs.
Key ballot measures passed on Election Day
beefed up gun control in Washington, California, and even libertarian-leaning
Nevada; provisions loosening marijuana laws passed in eight of the nine states
where they were on the ballot; and voters in Colorado, Maine, and Arizona
approved increases to the minimum wage.
Even on social issues like LGBTQ rights, there are signs that
Americans are more united than we typically think. Many conservatives I spoke
to on the redder side would prefer that our legal unions (and I say "our"
because I'm gay) be called civil, not
marriage, but still, they thought our relationships
deserved legal sanction and protection, which is not nothing.
As for this year's hot-button controversy over whether or not
trans people should be allowed to use restrooms that correspond with their
gender identity—sparked by the passage of
North Carolina's House Bill 2—most conservatives I met
told me they could give two shits which bathroom adults used. However, they
were more circumspect when it came to kids.
Many were being led to believe that in areas that had implemented
a pro-trans-rights bathroom policy, teenage boys could just demand access to
the girl's locker room. But once you explained the reality—that we are talking about
a relatively small group of students already living their daily lives as a gender
other than the one assigned to them at birth, and that it's the trans kids themselves
who are in fact the most likely to face violence or assault if forced to enter
a stall that does not correspond with their lived gender—most agreed there must
be some kind of solution we can find that is safe for all.
It seems to me that more than anything, what makes the divisions between
us so stark is that we hear different narratives, are making decisions and
assumptions based on entirely different sets of facts. Some people blame this
divide on websites that spread hoaxes through social media, others blame
partisan cable news—and there's certainly merits to both claims—but the
country's media has always been somewhat split along party and regional lines.
That is unlikely to change anytime soon.
But if there's a silver lining to the bitter, two-year fight for
the White House we've just witnessed, it's that we've seen how many of us are
fed up with a system we view as sclerotic and stacked against us. Most people I
met were sick of it—the divide, the rancor, the rhetoric of 2016—and very much
long to stop the discord, sit down and talk to the other side, and even buy
them a beer or make them egg salad sandwiches. (Thanks, Lucinda!)
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A beach in Oregon
"In general, people want to do
what's right for their families, their communities. And I wish you could help
people see that almost always the intent is good," said Sunny, a mother of two,
and staunch Democrat, who lives in Florida in a neighborhood that has both
Democrats and Republican. "Because if you could assume good intent, and then
start the conversation from there, rather than from..." she trails off. Yeah.
And not to sound Pollyanna-ish, but maybe we could try to start our post-election conversation from there? I
don't think we can wait for Congress—and Trump—to just wake up one morning, pop
a collective Xanax, and start listening to the other side again on their own. So
we're going to have to do it without help from the government.
The catch is, I don't have the first idea how we actually do that,
get to that tolerant place in the midst of this current shitstorm. I especially
don't know how to get there while dealing with the current very real and pervasive
threats to the rights and physical safety of so many minorities—including
myself, should I walk down the street holding the hand of the woman I love.
That's for people smarter and more informed than me to figure out.
But if you're a liberal or a conservative who wants to limit
Trump's power or tenure, it seems clear that focusing on our shared priorities,
not our differing perspectives, is the first step to building a coalition large
enough to ensure Trump is a one-term president.
Does that sound too rosy, as a reality TV demagogue stands poised
to muck up the fate of the planet? Maybe I'm being hopelessly American with my
relentless faith in the possibility for a better future. But then again, maybe being
that hopelessly American is the one thing that can save us from ourselves.
You can read more profiles
of the people Scott met while #SearchingForPurpleAmerica on
Instagram or Twitter.
Business as usual. Photos by Jackie Dives
"Nobody told me that once I 'passed,' I would still be searching for 'the ideal washroom,' mainly one that is loud enough so nobody can hear that I'm peeing in the stall."
"Before I transitioned, it was daunting. It's scary having all these men twice your size peering at you like an oddity."
"I just want to pee, wash 
"The best is having a complete stranger look over the cubicle just to see you have the right parts! Not to mention the times the door has been kicked in."
"Being told to use the handicapped washroom at my school made me feel like there was something wrong with me, that there needed to be something fixed, which there really wasn't."
"To this day despite passing 100 percent of the time I still prefer a gender neutral washroom."
"Growing up using the 'ladies room' I would repeatedly be asked 'are you in the right place?'"
"The hateful people of the world have certainly found a space to feel safe and be more visible than ever. Which means the rest of us need to come out and be equally as visible."
Search Party's brand of humor fits neatly into TBS's continued effort to promote strange, unconventional sitcoms: There's Jason Jones and Samantha Bee'sThe Detour, a chaotic family road trip comedy with elements of government conspiracy; Wrecked, a comedic take on Lost that still works despite its dated premise; and People of Earth, a Conan O'Brien–produced sitcom about alien abductees. In the oft-mentioned era of peak television, it's not just television shows that are tasked with distinguishing themselves from the fray—the networks themselves have to figure out how to be noticed, too.
'Orenda' author Joseph Boyden may have started this take-fest. Still via Youtube
...or was it Giller Prize winner Madeleine Thien? Photo via 
A UKIP leadership hustings, photo by Jake Lewis
UKIP leader Nigel Farage, photo by Michael Segalov
(All illustrations by 
