Post by RPankn on Apr 28, 2004 5:09:30 GMT -5
Lance May, left, and Britton Stein enjoy some ESPN and a few rounds of beers at Hooters in Stafford, which is just beyond the city limits of neat, groomed Sugar Land. "We see life as it is," May says of Red Americans. Stein calls Blue Americans "whiners." (Photos David Finkel -- The Washington Post)
For a Conservative, Life Is Sweet in Sugar Land, Tex.
By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 26, 2004; Page A01
Second of three articles
SUGAR LAND, Tex. -- This is the home of Britton Stein, who describes George W. Bush as "a man, a man's man, a manly man," and Al Gore as "a ranting and raving little whiny baby."
Forty-nine years old, Stein is a husband, a father, a landscaper and a Republican. He lives in a house that has six guns in the closets and 21 crosses in the main hallway. His wife cuts his hair with electric clippers. His three daughters aren't embarrassed when he kisses them on their cheeks. He loves his family, hamburgers and his dog. He believes in God, prays daily and goes to church weekly. He has a jumbo smoker in his back yard and a 40-foot tree he has climbed to hang Christmas lights. He has a pickup truck that he has filled with water for the Fourth of July parade, driving splashing kids around a community where Boy Scouts plant American flags in the yards. His truck is a Chevy. His beer is Bud Light. His savior is Jesus Christ. His neighbors include Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), the House majority leader, who says of Sugar Land, "I think it is America."
Pollsters and political consultants have a more specific definition of Sugar Land, as part of what they call Red America. The term is shorthand for the roughly half of the U.S. population that tends toward conservative values, the Republican Party, gun ownership, church as the preferred way to express faith, and moral absolutes.
"You find communities like this all over the place," DeLay says of Sugar Land. "This is what the future is about."
Stein has his own description of it:
"My life."
Sense of 'Utopia'
It's a life that Stein concurs is, in many ways, the very stereotype of Red, from the guns to the truck to the vote he will be casting in this fall's presidential election.
When a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press concluded that the American electorate is "further apart than ever in its political values," one of its emblems could be Stein, who says that it would take "a frontal lobotomy" for him to vote for Sen. John F. Kerry, that "I would need to have my brain cleansed of all reason and thought."
When Catholic University political professor John Kenneth White says that Kerry and Bush are navigating for votes in "parallel universes," the universe of Stein is the one in which the president is Republican, the U.S. senators are Republicans, the congressman is Republican, the county commissioner is Republican, the Inspector of Hides and Animals is Republican, the neighbors are Republicans, the friends are Republicans, and the mayor is a Republican named David Wallace, who says of Sugar Land: "When you drive around here, you get the sense that you're in Utopia."
Brick homes, clean streets, good schools, plentiful churches -- "it's the typical white-picket-fence, 2.1-children atmosphere," Wallace says of Sugar Land. No litter, landscaped boulevards, approved-plant lists, recommended-rose lists, strict zoning, a town square called "Town Square," logos everywhere, and the ever-present smell of just-mown grass in a voting precinct that went Bush 72 percent, Gore 25 percent -- this is the landscape of Stein, whose path here can be condensed to this:
In 1977, he bought a pair of hedge trimmers for $25. A month later, he went back to the same store and bought a second pair of trimmers, but now they were $30. That's when he angrily learned about inflation and began paying attention to politics. Then he learned about the notion of American weakness during the Iranian hostage crisis. Then he learned about responding to a politician's message when Ronald Reagan talked of America's greatness coming from its people rather than government. Then, about the time thousands of people were said to be in danger of losing their jobs because of an endangered species of owl, he decided there are two kinds of Americans, those who live in the world of "emotion and feel good," and those, like him, who live in "the real world." And now his version of the real world is a two-story house in a neighborhood of like-minded people, where he begins every day by turning on his computer.
Time for the news.
Some people get their information from the TV networks or the paper. Stein starts with the Drudge Report Web site, where he scans the headlines and clicks on one that says, "Rallying Cry For Dems: Vote Bush Out of Rove's Office." "This is the kind of stuff that pisses me off," he says. "They don't give Bush the respect he deserves. Not only because he's president, but because he's a helluva good man."
Next he goes to a Web site called WorldNetDaily.com. He clicks on an article that says, "Poll: Bush's Approval Sinking," but dismisses it as untrustworthy when he sees the poll was done by CBS. "Of course I have a suspicion of CBS," he says. "Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw -- they don't have any credibility with me."
Next he goes through a site called FreeRepublic.com, which calls itself "the premier conservative news forum," and then moves on to a site called sftt.org. "Soldiers for the Truth," he says, scrolling through another list of articles and watching a video of what the site says is a U.S. Apache helicopter targeting and obliterating three Iraqis. "Another guy moving right there," one voice on the video says, all business. "Good. Fire. Hit him," another voice says.
"It's amazing, the military, the men and women who are serving us," Stein says. "You think about the sacrifices, the idea of spending Christmas in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in West Africa, in these hellholes. In the civilian world, they get some injury, carpal tunnel syndrome, and they want to go sue their employers, and these guys . . . I'm so proud of them. I'm so glad they're on our side."
Next he goes to Military.com, where there's a photograph of an American soldier holding a wild-haired Saddam Hussein on the ground moments after his capture. "Look at the contrast," Stein says. "There's the American soldier coming to liberate the country, and there's the tyrant who ran the rape rooms and the children's prisons. That inspires me."
The rest of this rather long tribute to redneckism is here: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41964-2004Apr25.html
