“She Ain’t Gonna Last Very Long, Is She?”
Photo: Old Kentucky State Capitol, by Brent Moore via Flickr When I was twenty-three and fresh out of college — your typical apple-cheeked, idealistic idiot — I got my first job, working for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I’d spent the months following graduation interning at a political foundation in Berlin. It had been my first time living away from Kentucky, and I learned a lot — including that, apparently, I sounded like Elly Mae Clampett’s left tit. You’d be surprised at the stupid faces people make when they feel no need to impress you.It was not Germans, but other Americans in Berlin who introduced me to that face: the shrinking back, the infinitesimal rearing of a single nostril.
These reactions irked me. Kentuckians are notoriously fond of their home state; I was, and am, no different. It’s often said there is a magnet inside each of us, tugging us back home. There’s much to recommend the place: a natural and congenial warmth, a rich history, and, in the people, a specifically-contoured wit. It is also lavishly beautiful, almost offensively so — the greenest place on earth. Yet people in Germany felt entitled to publicly excoriate the state: it was blanket-statement backwards, conservative, wanting. When many politically-informed people thought of Kentucky, they thought of our Senator, Mitch McConnell, and more than one person assumed that my politics swung to the right — surely, I had an NRA membership card tucked into my wallet! Face-to-face encounters were arrogantly, self-consciously civil; after I’d speak, an uncomfortable silence, some shifting and clearing of throat, a roll or two of eyes from the most brazen. A well-connected superior once scanned me after I’d taken part in a group introduction, then followed it up with the most pointed, public “Hmmm” I’d ever heard.
My personal philosophy was, and is, that every place deserves the dignity of being marbled, of containing a complex blending of values and viewpoints and experiences. And that’s exactly what my home state was, and is, despite
