Counting Changes

It nauseated me to read the new numbers from the United States Census Bureau, whom I worked for temporarily this year for their decennial count, and find that the political and economic power continues to shift largely to the most barbaric regions of the country, all of which - of course - are in the Sun Belt. Hispanic immigration has been cited as a main reason for growing populations in the Southern and Southwestern states, but that's hardly the whole story. The other big reason is that many other Americans are abandoning the Northeast and Midwest for warmer climates and lower taxes.

Texas was the big winner in the House redistricting sweepstakes, gaining four seats in the House of Representatives, which will give them 38 electoral votes in the next three presidential elections. That's way too much clout for a state whose wealthiest residents tend to be nouveau-riche oil barons who collect cowboy art and brass eagle sculptures and think they're a really classy bunch. Imagine if you will the outcome of the 2012 presidential elections decided by people who support making English the state's official language because they actually thought Jesus spoke English. How about a people so dumb, one town banned Christmas signs bearing Santa Claus's name because "Santa" is an anagram of "Satan?" Or a state so intellectually bankrupt their colleges are better known for their football teams than their literature departments ("Texas A&M is a good football school")?

I have zero faith in Northeastern and Midwestern transplants changing the Sun Belt with their own cultural backgrounds. As we expect immigrants to assimilate to American ways, people in the South and the Southwest would expect migrants from other parts of the country to assimilate to their own ways.

Americans only understand things in terms of numbers more than anything else, as James Howard Kunstler wrote; Americans, lacking any sense of quality, quantify everything. Kunstler added that faster-growing places are seen as places that are more desirable; they must be, it is reasoned, if everyone is moving to them. By that criterion, then, Arizona - which jumped from twentieth to sixteenth among the fifty states in population - is seen as a wonderful place. Ditto Georgia, which is now ninth in population, displacing New Jersey from that position. (New Jersey has just been knocked out of the top ten, now being eleventh in population.) Of course, both Arizona and Georgia, largely inhospitable states that spend more than half of the year in oppressive heat, wouldn't be such dynamic places without a steady supply of cheap oil to power the air conditioning and the cars necessary to make large-scale human habitation in the Phoenix or Atlanta metropolitan areas possible. Arizona has the added dependency of dams on the Colorado River for hydroelectricity and drinking water, considering how much of the state is a freakin' desert. All of which is subsidized by the taxpayers. The cost of living in Arizona and Georgia may be lower, but so are the chances of finding any cultured, intelligent life in either state. The South remains the same cultural and intellectual Sahara that H.L. Mencken described in the twenties; the Southwest, a literal desert, offers as its two most successful citadels of civilization Phoenix and Las Vegas.

And yes, I'm appalled that Nevada, whose biggest industries are gambling and legalized prostitution, gets another House seat. Upside: Nevada will still have only three seats.

The United States is becoming a nation of spoiled brats who, if dissatisfied with the places they live in, give up on their communities and move elsewhere. When things start to get too uncomfortable and unmanageable for them, they just pack up and go This started with the western migration in the nineteenth century, of course; Ohio was settled by New Englanders who got tired of their homeland and went to look for something new. Then Midwesterners started settling in Colorado and Oregon for the same reason. Postwar suburbanization allowed white ethnic urban families who had lived in neighborhoods for two or three generations to get a nice little Cape Cod or ranch outside the city; they cited "good schools" and "a safe place for kids to ride their bikes" as their reasons, but they really didn't want to live in the city because "the neighborhood had changed" - i.e., blacks and Puerto Ricans were moving in. Then they started moving farther out from the old suburb. Much farther out. Corporate job transfers and a changing economy encouraged the flinging of once tightly-knit families all over the map. When my parents got married, my aunts, uncles and grandparents on both sides all lived in Essex County, New Jersey (my father's family had moved there from the greater Philadelphia area). Most of them live nowhere near Essex (where I still live); many of them live in states like Washington, Florida, and Virginia. And, sadly, Georgia, where my Uncle Johnny lives; he represents the state in the U.S. Senate. (Okay, Johnny Isakson is not my uncle, though I do have an uncle named Johnny who does live outside Atlanta. I just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.)

I know I'm painting the Sun Belt with a broad brush. I don't care. Because the truth is that, when people who live in Tennessee and head home to Pennsylvania and some homemade pumpkin pie for the holidays brag to their relatives about how they can get a starter castle outside Memphis for the price of a split-level outside Philadelphia, and with lower property taxes to boot, I find it sick that the American dream has been reduced to getting more abundance for less money. Indeed, the sickest thing about the current American migration to the Sun Belt is that Americans continue to try and build a perfect, comfortable, modern habitat in which to make a lot of money and enjoy the good life - and, as Paul Fussell wrote, live in a world untroubled by thought. You'll be hearing more parsings and dissections of the census figures out this week, like ethnic and racial breakdowns, generational demography, and the like, but what you won't hear is how the migration to the Sun Belt and the pursuit of a perfect world of pleasure this migration implies continue to rot America from within.

And I don't think I'll be moving to Houston any time soon.