Snakes

“I love driving along these roads, this is good country for bird-watching,” says Thomas Frank. Driving through Montgomery County, Kansas, he’s looking for the Radical Cemetery. “The blacktop just ended,” he says, as his car bumps a little. A moment later, off a dirt road, he finds what he’s looking for. “It’s hard to believe now,” he continues, now walking through the graveyard, the grass neatly trimmed, though parched yellow. “But in the 19th century, Kansas was kind of a magnet for radicals.”

Frank is making his way across Kansas for the documentary What’s the Matter with Kansas?, inspired by his 2004 book. In the book, he makes the case that “Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” that is, conservative populism has overshadowed its liberal forebears, to the point that, in this case, Kansas’ supporters of women’s suffrage and members of a socialist colony in Dickson County are all but forgotten now.  “And then, of course, you had populism, which just exploded across the state,” Franklin adds, looking out over the cemetery. “This is where we bury the radicals. This is my Kansas.” 

Lamenting his loss, Frank here seeks to understand how conservatism laid claim to working class souls and votes in the Midwest. The film makes its case methodically, using Frank’s interviews with various Kansans to suggest a cross-section of political views, as well as snippets of historical context.

Brittany Barden, an earnest, home-schooled teenager, embodies the collapse of religion and politics that Frank worries about. “We were meant to be a Christian nation,” she asserts. “That’s what the founding fathers wrote into the Constitution and it’s served us well for the last 200 years, but unfortunately we’re getting so far away from that foundation.” The film illustrates Brittany’s conservative bona fides with a trip she takes with her mother and brother to Ken Hamm’s Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Here they see animatronic humans alongside dinosaurs, a display of luridly lit headlines linking the Columbine shootings and gay marriage and a movie detailing the process of the creation. Brittany nods soberly as she listens to a research scientist with a PhD in astrophysics who underscores the “connection between school violence and evolution.” He bases all his thinking about the world, he says, on his reading of the Bible. “If you give up the Bible, you’ve really given up the possibility of knowing anything.”

Brittany is pursuing such certainty at Patrick Henry College, a Christian school in Virginia where she’ll be a freshman in the fall. She spends her summer campaigning for Phill Kline, the state Attorney General running for reelection in 2006. His platform includes an emphatic opposition to abortion, and his supporters refer more than once to George Tiller.

This focus on abortion is hardly incidental: as Karl Rove and other “architects” of the conservative movement saw early on, “social issues” helped to mobilize voters. As pro-life activist Mark Gietzen describes it, Kansas became a “bulls-eye for the pro-abortion industry,” by way of a complex history. The state was one of the first to legalize abortion (in 1969, before Roe v Wade), and then Wichita became a flashpoint for the 1991 “Summer of Mercy”. News footage of protests and arrests alludes to the rise of Operation Rescue as one touchstone for a new kind of populism.

Joe Winston and Laura Cohen’s documentary shows how the movement targeted Dan Glickman, Fourth District Congressman for 18 years, for being pro-choice in 1994. He recalls being unprepared for the onslaught, wondering where a seemingly sudden opposition came from. “It turned out,” he says, “They came from a lot of the churches in the area, people who had never been involved in politics before.” He was surprised, he recalls, that he lost most dramatically in blue-collar neighborhoods, previously dependably Democratic.

But Ex-Boeing employee Dale Swenson complicates Glickman’s version of events, specifically noting the Congressman’s support of NAFTA. “I thought,” Swenson says, “‘Well, there’s nothing left for me to vote for if [the Democrats are] going to keep targeting the working class.’” And Swenson’s understanding of the class divide is less focused on voting demographics:  “A generation ago, the blue collar and the white collar workers lived right next door to each other,” he says. “They lived in the same neighborhoods and drove the same cars. And now it’s not like that.”

Swenson’s observation is brief, but connected to other interviews, with 74-year-old artist M.T. Liggett (introduced as he bends over a sheet of metal while announcing, “First of all, I think George Bush is an asshole”) and Donn Teske, president of the Kansas Farmers Union. Both men bemoan Kansas’ hard shift to the right. Liggett’s provocative metal sculptures fill wide-angle frames and flap in the wind, denouncing right-wing media tricks and efforts to legislate “morality.” He rejects the demonization of gay marriage and Roe v Wade. “If I grow a breast and a vagina,” he declares, “I could get in on the argument, but me being a male, I don’t think I can do it.” 

Teske, for his part, explains that he “resigned from the Republican party” when it seemed increasingly intolerant and frankly, un-Christian. Now, in 2008, he says, “I never encountered such arrogance as this administration.” As he rejects what he calls a “society of aristocrats with a peasant population, that my ancestors left Germany to get away from,” the camera watches him drive off in his truck, a cloud of dust swirling behind him. The image speaks to his frustrations emerging from the lack of nuance or complication in current political discussions, as well as a lack of community born of the “arrogance” he sees. The film spends a few minutes with Velia Mendoza, an ESL instructor who has also worked at a meatpacking plant. The industry is the state’s biggest employer, exploiting undocumented and frequently illiterate immigrants who “don’t believe they have rights.”

As trenchant as Teske and Mendoza’s observations may be, they are not the focus of What’s the Matter with Kansas?. For the “matter” here is those people who vote against their apparent best interests as they’re distracted by appeals to their fears, concerning abortion, homosexuality, and guns. These fears are fired up by Terry Fox, pastor at the church where Angel sings. When he’s forced to step down by “a group” he identifies as resisting his exhortations to vote in elections based on such fears, he’s philosophical, in his way: “Just when you think the snake isn’t there anymore, the snake’ll come out of the hole and bite you.”

The film includes something of an amen to that sentiment, in Fox’s next chapter. He brings his flock along with him to a new venue, Wild West World, a theme park whose sketchy owner, Thomas Etheredge, ends up declaring bankruptcy. Brittany’s father Rob is one of the donors whose money is lost. “Whenever you give money to God,” he says, “You can’t have any strings attached. This is God’s plan, not ours.”