What's Not the Matter With Kansas

by Jack Cashill

I had heard about Thomas Frank's new book--What's The Matter With Kansas--and about the Harper's cover story that launched it, but I chose not to read either, at least not at first.

I have never lived in Kansas, and I have had little involvement or interest in the intra-party Kansas politics at the book's core. Not surprisingly, Frank did not bother to interview me when he was in town. I hardly expected him to.

It was only when I learned just who Frank considers the embodiment of what is wrong with Kansas, the person in whom "all the contradictions come together," then I read the book. I know this person quite well.

What's the matter with Kansas, as Frank sees it, is that "deregulated capitalism" has "crushed" local business, driven agriculture to a "state of near collapse," and in general transformed what was once a "worker's paradise" into a land of "sterility and decay."

Wow! Hadn't noticed.

What has facilitated this altogether subtle apocalypse is the tragic synergy between the state's moderate Republicans (the Mods) and the "cranks, conspiracists and calamity howlers" that comprise its conservative base (the Cons). In Frank's retelling, the Mods have exploited the swelling Republican fervor of the Cons to cut taxes, slash regulations, and lay waste to what was once the "garden of the world."

In sheer quantity, the Cons take most of the abuse--after all, who in the book world would green-light a hit on Kansas moderates--but Frank reserves his quality contempt for the Mods.

There is something personal going on here. As Frank laments, he grew up in Mission Hills, apparently in the South Central section thereof. A young MH thug pulled a knife on him when he was ten, quite possibly after a mumbly-peg game gone bad. If anything, the Mission Hill dads were more dangerous than the kids, they being routinely dispatched to the big house for fraud, forgery, tax evasion and embezzlement.

"Growing up here teaches the indelible lesson," writes Frank with a straight face, "that wealth has some secret bond with crime--also with drug use, bullying, lying, adultery, and thundering, world-class megalomania."

Aptly enough, Frank reveals that the area's most visible Mod, Sun publisher Steve Rose, dwells deep within this well manicured Gomorrah, in an "Italian palazzo" no less.

So much for the Mods. As intriguing as they sound, they have little entertainment value. Frank, in fact, spends almost no time on them or with them. He does not even bother to interview Rose.

For his new chums in Chicago, where he lives, and New York, where he publishes, Frank serves up the kind of comic relief that "progressives" (they prefer that to "liberals") have been tee-heeing about for well nigh a century--yes that whole caboodle of sorry, simple minded, Stepan Fetchit conservatives.

Frank's Cons are an angry and resentful lot. They hate the affluent, intellectuals, and--in Frank's most slimy, most libelous moment--Jews. [To preserve this illusion Frank fails to even mention Rich Nadler and John Uhlmann, both Jewish and perhaps the two most influential Cons in Johnson County].

These sadly deluded Cons waste their considerable energy pursuing any number of "barking idiocies" like anti-Darwinism and the right to life. Leading the Cons are a rogue's gallery of "Christers"--politicians who advance their sleazy ambitions by "mouthing some easily memorized God-talk." In still another burst of dog imagery, Frank identifies U.S. Senator Sam Brownback and Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline as the most notorious of the pious frauds that "bark and howl and rebuke the world for its sins."

Let's face it, had Frank opined thusly about Jews no one would have published it. Had he said the same about Muslim leaders, some mullah would have slapped a fatwa on his head quicker than you can say Salman Rushdie.

As the central question of the book, Frank explores the ways in which the plutocratic Mods have managed to trick the plebeian Cons into advancing an agenda that allegedly subverts the Cons' material interests--and in Frank's world there is no other kind of interest worth talking about.

Greasing the skids are certain "sleight of hand" artists, none more cunning than the one to whom I alluded earlier, the man who embodies the Kansas collapse, the man whose inclusion in this book inspired me to read it in the first place.

As you may have guessed, that man is me. To cut to the chase, I am what's the matter with Kansas, no small trick for a Missourian. Frank profiles my perfidy in a five page spread and makes five other references to me as well.

I felt both slimed and flattered simultaneously.As I learned, my involvement in social issues is something of a ruse.

It cloaks my "drooling admiration for the very rich," on display monthly in Ingram's, and confuses the easily confused Cons. Such boosterism diverts their wrath away from the fat cats despoiling their state and towards the liberal intellectuals like Frank who are trying to save it

As in my case, most of what Frank writes about the Cons--and the Mods for that matter--is readily contradicted by the obvious. In reality, Kansas cons are prosperous, productive, and content with their lives. If some live more modestly than their Mod colleagues, it is because they tend to have more children and the mom tends to stay at home, often as the teacher. Social pathologies among them--crime, divorce, substance abuse--are negligible.

In my experience, the Cons are more intellectual than the Mods or Frank's liberal friends. They have defined themselves by a set of beliefs in limited constitutional government--an act of will that requires some serious inquiry into civics and history, two subjects in which the left has no apparent interest. In the evolution debate, the Cons were also the only lay people who did any reading in science.

If the Cons cooperate with the Mods on economic issues, it is because both groups believe in economic freedom, the Cons more consistently. The Mods are not so much moderate as pragmatic, being more flexible in their uses of government. What binds the two, what makes them both Republican, is their understanding that free markets always serve the long-term interest of their families and their country. There is no exception to this rule. No nation without free markets is either prosperous or free.

Frank doesn't get it. Truth be told, I have never before read a book that gets so much so willfully and seriously wrong in so unseemly a fashion. Indeed, this may be the most dishonest bit of ethnography since Margaret Mead transformed the chaste inhabitants of Samoa into raging libertines in order to advance her own sexual agenda.

The sad thing is that few beyond Kansas will sniff out Frank's con. To read the praise on the book cover, his fellow progressives think Frank the ultimate guru on grass roots conservatism. This shouldn't surprise.

For nearly a century now, progress-ives have been using literary fraud to advance their cultural mission. In their book, Sanger's a saint, Kinsey's a genius, Erlich's a prophet, Michael Moore's a journalist, and Mumia is innocent.

Thomas Frank deserves a special place in this unholy pantheon. To look at the most blessed and bountiful chunk of real estate in the history of God's green earth and to see only "sterility and decay" is not social science. It's a cry for help.

Jack Cashill is Ingram’s Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 25 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com.The views expressed in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram’s Magazine.