Ross Benes – Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold

Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold – Ross Benes – 9780700630455 – hardcover – University Press of Kansas – 256 pages – $29.95 – January 26, 2021 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Ross Benes is a journalist and author who now lives in New York City. But he was born and raised in a tiny town in Nebraska. That experience shaped his early worldview, and of course also makes him suited to understand and explain the culture and politics of his home state to the rest of the world. As the book subtitle lays out, he’s after explaining how Nebraska, like so many other midwestern and southern states, has gone from having a diverse electorate to being viewed as almost monolithically conservative in its views and policies. While the book is focused on Nebraska, much of what he describes about the political culture of his home state broadly applies to much of the rest of our contentious country.

Nebraska may be quite similar to many other midwestern states, but as Benes explains, Nebraska has a long history of populism and quite a commitment to direct democracy and even nonpartisanship. This makes it even more curious to try to understand what has happened there over the past twenty five or more years.

Nebraska is, except for its urban and college town oases, as purely “Trump country” as it could be. As a native-born Nebraska who has broadened his horizons by living in (heavens protect us) the heart of liberal America and working for (even worse) the so-called “liberal media,” Benes may be an ideal interlocutor between these two wildly divergent Americas.

Rural Rebellion gives Benes the opportunity to document Nebraska, past and present, exploring its political history and current explores landscape through the lens of his own personal, family, and small town experiences. There is no question that he deeply cares for his home town and home state, despite the flaws he is determined to call out. In the course of writing this book, he interviewed family, friends, and fellow citizens as well as US senators, representatives, governors, state representatives in the uniquely Nebraskan unicameral governing body, and other political figures, all toward showing Americans not only how we got here, but what we might imagine doing by way of antidote. Benes remains clear-eyed about the difficulty of any sort of success in “healing” the rifts in our body politic and culture. He wishes for a form of discourse that may literally be impossible in a world where some 30% of the overall population, and a much higher percentage of the Nebraska population, simply does not recognize the same reality as many other Americans. Fox News certainly deserves some of the credit, but as Benes points out, small town churches and their powerful anti-abortion, anti-“sin” worldview, and the lack of cultural diversity in rural communities are deeply rooted and provide much to explain how it is we got where we are today.

Benes has one foot rooted firmly in the state he grew up in, the other foot is planted in a completely different environment. Because he has experienced both nodes of our dissonant culture, he can see the full spectrum of our anguish. I am not sure anyone can resolve the differences though. And I do not believe that the “both sides” approach of traditional journalism really works anymore.

While it is certainly true that people in the Fox News dominated, evangelically oriented. semi-rural heartland are all too often viewed as stick figures by many who live in the more diverse and tolerant urban coasts, it is Fox and the church leaders who create imaginary portraits of the people with whom they disagree in outlook and belief, and the right wing now stokes a belief system that see fellow citizens as less than human to a degree that is impossible to excuse. This is not a situation where “both sides” are equally responsible.

In Rural Rebellion, Benes recounts real-life stories that help explain rural Americans’ attitudes about abortion, immigration, and the so-called big government they forget supports their agricultural successes. He also tells his own stories about how his views changed over time away from home, and crucially locates some of the reasons in the ways that what he was taught were impossible. While his argument – that Americans would be less hostile to one another if they just knew each other a little better – makes sense in theory, there are too many powerful forces at work that have a vested interest in keeping Americans at each others’ throats. We want to believe in the essential goodness of our fellow citizens, but there are those that are working diligently to prevent that from happening. No matter where you may fall in the spectrum of belief system, Rural Rebellion is quite useful and a valuable contribution to our socio-political discourse.

Ross Benes is the author of The Sex Effect (2017) and Sex Weird-o-Pedia (2019). He has written for Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Lincoln Journal Star, Nation, Omaha World-Herald, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, and others. In addition, he is an analyst at eMarketer. A native of Brainard, Nebraska (population 420), he now lives in New York City but still roots for the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

We had a terrific conversation about this book. I hope you enjoy it as well.

You can find the book for sale here at Bookshop.org.

“Rural Rebellion is informative whether or not you agree with the author’s political views. . . . Benes does a good job connecting past and present, and he asks many of the questions that historians are likely to ask when they look back on the early twenty-first century.” —Nebraska History

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Bill Barich: Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America

978-0802717542 – Walker & Co. – Hardcover – $26.00 (e-book version also available)

Bill Barich is a fine writer, comfortable with words, a natural storyteller who is self-aware and a careful observer of character as well as landscape.  He’s got a great narrative voice that makes his books very easy to read and deeply engrossing.

In the summer of 2008, Barich, who has lived in Dublin, Ireland for some time, decided to take a journey across America, essentially following in the footsteps of the great John Steinbeck, who made the cross-country journey (ostensibly to rediscover America, but more likely a stab at rediscovering his own literary voice, which resulted in Travels with Charley in 1962).

Of course Barich and Steinbeck differ in significant ways.  And the early 1960’s were a very different time than 2008 for America.  Barich’s trip came at the time of our massive economic collapse, and the rising presidential campaign of Barack Obama, both of which become thematic backdrops for his story.  Steinbeck traveled in pick up truck with a home made camper out back, and with his dog, Charley, whereas Barich drove a rented Ford Focus (almost 6000 miles!) and stayed in motels.  But Steinbeck is the ever present model for the later traveler, whose outlook is certainly as different as the country he explores.

In fact, Barich’s story is engrossing from beginning to end.  He starts the trip in Maryland, and stays on US 50 west to the Golden State, with stops and sidetrips along the way that are always interesting, even though often sad and sometimes even depressing.  He is, after all, reporting on America as he finds it, which includes features and political themes that are not always what we might have wished or hoped for.  It’s an honest portrait, and a story well told.  I’ve done my share of cross-country traveling, and very much enjoyed this book and my conversation with Barich about it.  There’s a good deal of back story and detail in this conversation we had some fun with and which I hope listeners will enjoy.

Bill Barich is the author of seven books, including Laughing in the Hills, which was named one of the hundred best sports books of all time. Other works include a novel, Carson Valley, and another work of nonfiction, A Fine Place to Daydream: Racehorses, Romance, and the Irish and recently, A Pint of Plain which describes the decline of the traditional Irish pub. A Guggenheim Fellow, and literary laureate of the San Francisco Public Library, Barich now lives and works in Dublin.

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Nick Schou: Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World

978-0312551834 – St. Martin’s Press – Hardcover – $24.99

Nick Schou writes for the excellent OC Weekly (one of the several Village Voice papers) based in Orange County, California, home of Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, UC Irvine, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Little Saigon, and of course seemingly endless tracts of California suburbia.  But Orange County in the 1960’s was also the birthplace of some of the most amazing scenes of hippiedom, and the little known “Brotherhood of Eternal Love.”

In this book, Schou tells their story from beginning to end, and it is a pretty incredible saga, including what was probably the largest LSD manufacturing and distribution operation of all time, a world wide hashish and marijuana smuggling cartel, incredible tales involving Timothy Leary, and much, much more.

Known as “Hippie Mafia,” the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960’s as a small band of surfers (and in many cases petty criminals) in Southern California. After they discovered LSD, they took to Timothy Leary’s mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process. In Orange Sunshine, Schou journeys deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with many of the group’s surviving members, former hangers on and supporters, and interstingly, the law enforcement establishment who pursued them and by doing so helped to launch what has now become an institutionalized government war on drugs.

Schou tells a compelling story of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, and a time when America moved from the golden era of peace and free love into the much darker time that soon followed, marked by hard drugs, international crime and paranoia.

Talking to Nick Schou gave me a chance to explore with him some of the background to the book, and to talk about the large amount of research he did to put it together, and the challenges he faced in getting some of the participants to even tell him what they did in those days.  We also talked about some of the more startling elements of the story of the Brotherhood, their involvement with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, Orange County then and now, and much more.

This is a fascinating story, one that helps us understand some of the complex issues that began in the sixties and are still with us today.  This kind of grassroots history is important to document as it can give us all a chance to better comprehend the always diverse and sometimes simply amazing culture in which we live.

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