Given the political subtext of the essay, 'Small-Town America: The Heartland,' one might guess that I am attempting to link Michael Moore, the hate-America celebrity favorite of the 'loony Left' in American politics, to John Kerry, the presidential candidate of the Democrat Party. While that might be (for some) quite a stretch -- that is, a vote for Kerry is a vote with Michael Moore's 'America' -- it is true that that segment of the American populace is a part of the Democrat 'rainbow coalition' of blacks, media and academic liberals, certain ethnic minorities and white women (the latter, primarily responsible for putting the Clintons in office twice during the 1990s).

       But that is not the objective here. The John in this essay is John Sinclair, an early-Boomer generation counter-culture revolutionary who made his name at the University of Michigan in his young adulthood for leading the music and drug culture there during the mid-to-late 1960s.

      It just so happens that John Sinclair, Michael Moore, and I all graduated from Davison High School in Davison, Michigan -- in different years. And this is a microcosm of the deep cultural divide across America today. This story is an example of how that divide has not only a geographic dimension but a 'generational' dimension as well. And it runs through each and every 'Red' vs. 'Blue' county, city and town in the presidential election map of 2000. It not only divides cities, counties and towns as groups on the map, but it reveals the same divisions within each county and town. It even divides families. Here is a story of such a divide.
    I graduated from Davison High School in 1949. Then it was a very small town of less than 2,000 inhabitants, surrounded by medium-to-small farms. A majority of the students were farm kids. The farmers, most of German ancestry, were primarily Republicans with a strong work ethic and a pragmatic, no-nonsense, common sense view of the world. Many of the small-acreage farmers worked in the factories in Flint, MI as well. My father, who was a tool and die designer for General Motors, was several times a 'reluctant'  candidate for Township Supervisor on the Democrat ticket because they could get no one to run against the always landslide-victorious rural Republicans.

       Davison has, over time, been influenced and overrun by the Democrat leanings of Genesee County in which it resides as the blue-collar middle class factory workers migrated to the suburbs from Flint, the home of General Motors' Buick and Chevrolet factories. And the small farms have slowly but steadily withered and fallen to housing developments. Consequently, Davison has become a 'borderline' 'Red' map city in a 'Blue' map county in a 'Blue' map state.

       John Sinclair graduated from high school ten years after I did. I did not know him at all but my parents socialized with his parents -- active school PTA members, golf and bridge games together, as well as square dancing with other couples on weekend nights. Sinclair's father was a factory engineer whose interests were quite traditional and common-sense 'mechanical,' so he and my father hit it off quite well.

       Sinclair's mother, Elsie, however was 'something else.' She was a Davison High School English teacher who, though personally 'likeable,' held and taught the most radical ideas of the time -- Kerouac 'beat-generation' stuff. She took every opportunity to publicly espouse to all who would listen and encourage her students to partake in the activism that would eventually infect the Boomer generation of which her son, John, was in the early vanguard. Elsie Sinclair was, indeed, an 'off the wall' pre-counter-culture rebel.

       According to The Detroit Free Press [1], "[John] Sinclair isn't merely a footnote to the 1960s. He's a cultural touchstone. He co-founded the seminal Detroit Artists Workshop in 1964...managed the legendary Detroit rock band MC5, and started the White Panther Party." I became familiar with the counter-culture nature of Sinclair when he lived in and managed a 'hippy' communal house in Ann Arbor, MI. It was he who was responsible for marijuana being distributed down to the elementary school level where my young children were attending school as I worked toward my PhD at the University of Michigan. He was the bane of our existence, and that of school administrators who were finding the drug in student lockers in nearly every school in the city, from high school through elementary school.

       The Detroit Free Press devotes three full pages to the celebration of the aging 'hippy.' "Today, Detroit's legendary counterculture icon prepares to move on -- again. Sinclair has been passing through Detroit since June, preparing for his Nov. 20 move across the Atlantic to the city of hedonistic bliss, Amsterdam [the drug capital of Europe]. When he moved to New Orleans 12 years ago -- after being fired from his 'dream job' as editor of Detroit's city Arts Quarterly -- he came back to Detroit so often that some of his friends didn't know that he had moved south."

       The newspaper continues. "In Amsterdam, he expects to lead the bohemian life of a poet and honorary participant in the annual Cannabis Cup event during the third week in November. The finer details -- like how he will make a living and where he will stay -- are not quite settled. But that's hardly an issue in a life guided by twin hippie precepts: 'go with the flow' and 'Get by with a little help from your friends.'"

       The article continues to reveal Sinclair's slim hopes. "There's a sketchy patron who owns a coffeehouse. And Sinclair hopes -- he refers to it as a dream -- that after many years of economic uncertainty, he's found an angel financier who'll cover his room and board while he devotes himself to writing his brand of blues-inspired poetry."

       "Sinclair is considered one of the country's finest blues and jazz scholars, traveling around the country to perform his poetry, like a Baptist preacher hot on the path to beat the devil...Over the past decade, he's made regular pilgrimages to the Mississippi back roads where the sound of the blues was born, and traveled by Amtrak around the country 20 weeks a year performing poetry in bars, backrooms, and festivals, from Seattle to Oxford, Miss., to the Kerouac Festival in Lowell, Mass. He has lived out of suitcases, stayed at friends' houses or roadside motels, and sometimes made enough money working a gig to get him through the week, and on to the next town."

       The Free Press gives a hint of Sinclair's beginnings. "Sinclair grew up in Davison, a rural, conservative town 10  miles east of Flint, where his father worked… at Buick and his mother taught English to another irrepressible resident, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore." Indeed, the seeds of a counter-culture revolutionary who attempted to spread the drug culture to young people in his coming-of-age years were sown by a woman who was a radical revolutionary inspiration to not only her son but to another who would come to hate America and attempt to disunite us during a worldwide war against Islamic terrorism.

       And now we learn that the 'son' no longer has a home in America but must move to Amsterdam, the drug capital of Europe, in order to find some semblance of acceptance. Says Sinclair, "Now [I've] realized that America isn't going to change so [I am] focusing on my own art." But a lot of things about society have changed since the 1960s. A lot. And John was at the center of it all. 'He was at the vanguard of the hippies, rock 'n' roll as a political force, and stood up and made a difference,' says M.L. Liebler, poet and creative writing teacher at Wayne State University. 'Who else has been a bigger spark to the local arts scene over the years?'"

       "For Sinclair, life is a series of transitions. Some connected. Some not. And living on the road is more important than where it leads. As many of his contemporaries are retiring on 401(k)s and pensions, Sinclair stands at yet another crossroad: What does an aging hippie do now that he's old enough to be a grandfather? The answer: Head east."

       "For Sinclair, Amsterdam is more than a place. It's a state of mind for an aging hippie who never thought he'd make it this far." And, of course, John Sinclair could never come back to Davison, Michigan. They would never have him back. A man without a home. A man whose life was devoted to a counter-culture revolution that has devolved into a hate-America campaign epitomized by Sinclair's mother's other protegé -- Michael Moore.

       Michael Moore was born [2] in 1954 in Davison, MI. "The son and nephew of GM factory workers [Moore never ever worked in a factory, himself, as most of the rest of us early Davisonians did at some time in our lives], Moore was educated by nuns and Jesuits, and at 14 briefly attended a seminary and had thoughts of becoming a priest...After disagreeing with a policy at his high school, he ran for the Davison [Township] school board -- and won, making him, at 18, one of the youngest elected officials in the nation. Moore later dropped out of the University of Michigan at Flint and set up a crisis-intervention center." From there on he held nondescript jobs on radical newspapers for short periods of time. He authored Moore's Weekly, a newsletter that critiqued the media and was partly financed by Ralph Nader.

       Moore's debut film, 1989's Roger & Me, was bought by Warner Brothers for $3M. It earned nearly $7M at the box office and "introduced audiences to an improbable movie star: a shaggy, cagey doofus with a killer instinct for political and comic agitation." My wife and I saw the movie in a theatre with less than ten in the audience. We were less than impressed by the substance than the comical audacity of this scrubby, chubby guy marching through doors and secretaries to attempt to see the Chairman of General Motors.

       Moore did not catch on with the liberal Left until his acceptance speech at the 2003 Oscars for an award-winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine.  He brashly told his stunned audience, "I've invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us. They are here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time when we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it is the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts. We are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush . Shame on you. And any time that you have the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up."

       From there, Moore took his film, Fahranheit 9/11, to the Cannes Film Festival and won first prize, the coveted Palm d'Or. His celebrity then skyrocketed as he spoke to audiences abroad who gave him standing ovations.  He has become a folk hero in Germany. According to the Wall Street Journal [3], "Moore is popular across Europe in the wake of the anti-Americanism sparked by the unpopular war in Iraq...Many younger Germans, who make up the bulk of Mr. Moore's readership, have distanced themselves from responsibility for the Nazi era sins. [His book], Stupid White Men has sold more than 1.2 million copies in Germany, compared with 135,000 in France (about 1M  copies in print in the U.S.)."

       Moore is achieving near equality to the status of Jane Fonda, known to Vietnam War veterans as Hanoi Jane for giving aid and comfort to America's enemy during the Vietnam War. Fonda recently said that [4] "Americans are 'ignorant' and inferior to Canadians [she told an audience in Vancouver, British Columbia]…Americans are ill-equipped to deal with the backlash of anti-American sentiment caused by the war in Iraq...She cited Michael Moore's film 'Bowling for Columbine' as testimony to Canadian pacifism and American violence. 'It's hard to imagine a happy ending to the U.S.-led war in Iraq,' [mere hours before cheering Iraqis and U.S. Marines toppled a statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad]. 'What is it going to mean for [America's] stability, for terrorism, for the economy, I can't imagine. I think the entire world is going to be united against us.'" There you have it. Hanoi Jane joins hands with Baghdad Michael Moore.

       As detailed in the lead essay in this issue, many on the 'right' and the 'left' have criticized Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 9/11 on the basis of its polemic and contradictory nature. For the 'looney Left,' evidently the details such as factual accuracy and outright contradiction by the facts is not as important as the hate-thePresident, hate-America message. As long as the message fits the agenda, there is little need for accuracy in the details.

       Most of the 'believers' will not take the time to check the facts. As an example, a critic [5] of Michael Moore's veracity has checked the details of his recent article in the Los Angeles Times. In that article, Moore provides examples of his patriotism and love for America as a child, waving the flag, reciting the pledge of allegiance over and over, and singing the national anthem. Then he said that "Back in high school, things changed. Nine boys from my school came back from Vietnam in boxes. Draped over each coffin was the American flag. I knew that they also had made a sacrifice But their sacrifice wasn't for their country: They were sent to die by men who lied to them."

       The critic took Moore's 'nine boys from my school' and Googled around to find (from reliable U.S. Government data bases reachable on the Internet) that the 'boys' were actually men much older than he -- six of them. And, given their ages, not one of them could possibly have attended high school with Moore (1969-1972). Two were killed in 1967, one in 1968, two in 1969 and one in 1970. The critic gives the names of the dead along with links to the U.S. Government data base giving their general/personal history (e.g. age), military history and casualty circumstances. "The point here is that Michael Moore throws statements out there that one can check if one takes the time but "Why bother? Because it has the ring of a Mooreism -- an assertion thrown out with the assurance that no one will question it. Sounds right. And if it's not exactly right on the micro level, it's true on the macro level -- hey, 50 thousand boys died for Nixon's war, and you're quibbling about whether they came from Davison or Flint or wherever?" It's all good enough for the 'looney Left.' And the 'looney Left' will be voting for the anti-War candidate in the November election.

       The above critic addresses another Michael Moore quote, "These so-called patriots hold the flag tightly in their grip and, in a threatening pose, demand that no one ask questions. Those who speak out find themselves shunned at work, harassed at school, booed off Oscar stages. The flag has become a muzzle, a piece of cloth stuffed into the mouths of those who dare ask questions."  Wouldn't it be interesting to know whether or not Moore's  focus on the Columbine high school massacre and his express hatred for America resulted from physical harassment he may have endured while a long-haired, chubby boy in high school in the 1960s and early 1970s -- at the height of the counter-culture revolution in our colleges and universities? Just as the psychiatrists told us that the Columbine tragedy resulted from the harassment of the two killers by 'bullies' at school. There is some unsubstantiated evidence on the Internet that such may be the case for Moore.

       So, what is it that drives Michael Moore, the anarchist from Davison, MI whose Fahrenheit 9/11 is acclaimed by Time Magazine as The Passion of the liberal Left. In political if not economic power, he is touted to be as big as the guys he used to track down. His books and films have made him a target. He is the subject of a book-length blast from the right, Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man and another to be published, Michael Moore Hates America.

       Just like his predecessor radical activist from Davison, MI, John Sinclair, Michael Moore can never go home. While John Sinclair escapes to Amsterdam, Europe's drug capital, Michael Moore has no home except New York City or some such leftist hangout. He shares the same fate as other radical counter-culture revolutionaries as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, Dianne Oughton, Kathy Boudoin, Katherine Ann Power, and Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Ann Soliah), all members of the Weather Underground during the 1960s and 70s. Some have found homes in academic circles in 'Blue' state liberal enclaves in the U.S. Others have been convicted of crimes committed during the counter-culture revolution. All have been described as America's 'Enemies Within' in the May/June 2002 issue of this journal. They are the indigenous 'fifth column' which poses a great danger to America.

       But what of Davison, MI, the small town from which Michael, John, and I came? Davison, and thousands of small towns like it across the land,  is still a stronghold of traditional, patriotic America. For example, the first few graduates inducted into the Davison High School 'Hall of Fame' in November 2000, were Admiral Thomas C. Hart, USN, who was Commander of the Asiatic Fleet at the outbreak of World War II and former Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy. ADM Hart represented the 1920s. The second inductee represented the 1940s and 50s. His speech at the induction ceremony is at pp. 5 of this issue. It received a standing ovation due to its description of the 'Soul of Small Town America.' The third recipient was Ken Morrow, who was a member of the U.S. hockey team (all amateurs) which won the 1980 Olympic Gold Medal, beating the 'professional' Soviet team in a 'miracle' victory. Morrow later helped the New York Islanders to their winning four Stanley Cups. He was voted as one of that storied organization's top 20 all-time players. Morrow graduated from Davison High School in 1974.

       It is of note that neither John Sinclair nor Michael Moore have even been considered for the Davison High School Hall of fame. They are pariahs who have shamed their home town and its patriotic citizens. They will never be welcomed home there.
    In contrast, I still often go back to Davison, MI. It is my 'home.' It is where I am 'from.' It is where I and my family, having left the area shortly after graduating from college and living the Navy life all over the world, return. No matter from whence I came -- from deployments in the Mediterranean or Southeast Asia -- as soon as we turned off the highway onto old Montague Road, a pleasant calm and sense of pleasurable pride engulfed me. I had come HOME. No matter what problems may have arisen while away, their weight was immediately lifted from my shoulders as I traveled down the gravel road to my boyhood home.

       And Davison, MI is still essentially as it was when I grew up there. Parents take their children, of all ages, to the Friday night football games. The wives generally sit, visiting in the stands together while their husbands, many of whom played football in their youth, 'walk the fence' -- up and down the sidelines. Enjoying the remembrances of their days on the field. Meanwhile their children, some in elementary and grade school, run around in small groups together. They are safe there. Their parents do not have to worry about their safety. I have seen crowds of about 4,000 people attend these games. You just don't see that in the 'Blue' counties across the nation. In the environs of the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., they must hold their games in the afternoon for fear of roving gang activity. They must lock their school doors during school hours. Not so in Davison, Michigan.

       John Sinclair left Davison and could never return for what he became. Michael Moore left Davison and can never return because of his hatred for America. I return to Davison often, proud of my roots.

      Such is the difference between 'Red' and 'Blue' America.¨
________________________________________________
Footnotes:
(1)  Provenzano, Frank, "The beat moves on, John Sinclair, Detroit counterculture hero, says a long good-bye before he heads to Amsterdam," The Detroit Free Press, 26 October 2004.
(2)  Corliss, Richard, "Michael Moore's War," TIME Magazine, pp. 60-66, 12 July 2004.
(3)  Goldsmith, Charles and Schoenfeld, Almut, "Now Drawing German Crowds: Michael Moore," The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2003.
(4)  McCaslin, Bruce, "Baghdad Jane?", The Washington Times, Inside Politics, 11 April 2003.
(5)  On the Internet: www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0704/070804.html


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