Podunk Pundit

I’m hooked on the TV series, “Slow Horses” based on novels by Mick Herron. They concern MI6 workers who have bungled assignments and been banished to the purgatory of Slough House where they can do less harm. 

It’s presided over by Jackson Lamb, their crude, rude, slovenly, but crafty leader played by the chameleon Gary Oldman. His resume includes roles in which he convincingly plays everyone from Sid Vicious to Lee Harvey Oswald, Dracula, Beethoven, Sirius Black, George Smiley, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman.

Part of the pleasure of watching “Slow Horses” is plots which pit spooks trying to redeem themselves, higher ups who treat them with contempt, and criminals who are dangerous but often even less than competent than the slow horses. 

The cast features Jack Lowden as long-suffering River Cartwright. His father and grandfather were both spies before him and he should have had a stellar career before him but made such an egregeous error when attempting to stop a terrorist bombing that it landed him in Slough House. Unlike many of his fellow pariahs he is earnestly trying to redeem himself which means that in almost every episode he takes a beating, is nearly killed, or tortured.

The “Slough House” books that Slow Horses is based on are readable, but the TV version is far more fun since its combination of violence and incompetence means it falls into the often irresistible category of crime comedy. 

There’s a long history of combining suspense with tongue and cheek dialogue and action. Many Hitchcock movie fell into the category. So did several film noir classics including Bogart, as Sam Spade. It is a sub-genre of mystery, detective, and espionage that fills the shelves of book stores. 

Elmore Leonard’s criminals are often hilariously incompetent. They are familiar from tv and film adaptation that include “Get Shorty, “Justified,” “Jackie Brown,” and “Out of Sight.” Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder is a skilled thief whose heists are often ruined by the unexpected as telegraphed by their titles “What’s the Worst That Could Happen? “Why Me?” “Don’t Ask,” and “Drowned Hopes.” Carl Hiaasan’s capers are set in Florida and co-star the state’s weirdness, and the eccentrics who populate it. They are the joke

Such books are echoes of the California Noir tradition which began with the hard boiled detectives and criminal plots gone awry of Sam Spade, Lew Archer, and more recent heirs including Harry Bosch and the corrupt cops of James Elroy. The combination of resourceful gumshoes and tough guys pursuing incompetent criminals, suspense, and black humor figures in such films and tv shows as “The Big Lebowski,”  “A Fish Called Wanda.” “Fargo,” “Devil in a Blue Dress,” “The Grifters,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Chinatown,” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Obviously, people can’t get enough of criminals screwing up or cops failing to crack the case.” Suspense is exciting, mysteries that get solved are gratifying, but bungling cops and robbers are a hoot.

Our country is increasingly divided into antagonistic factions by political party, education, wealth, race, religion, and geography. Of course, we’ve been here before — a hundred and sixty-three years ago when one nation was divided in two by a Civil War, North and South. The armies dressed in Blue and Grey. Before it was over at least 620,000 were dead and almost as many wounded, victims of disease, or missing in action. 

In 1864 there were 20 Union states including all of New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the great Lakes states of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota as well as the Pacific states of California and Oregon. 

There were 11 Confederate slave states stretching from Virginia through the deep south to Texas. And four border states with slaves that chose not to succeed —Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. Only later did many western territories win statehood. 

At the time of the Civil War, the Union had both an economic and demographic advantage with 71% of the country’s population to the Confederacy’s 29% and a huge percentage of manufacturing, merchant shipping, railroad miles, banking capital, and the like.

Now we are divided into Red and Blue states. Many of the states that were around at the time of the Union and the Confederacy are populated with people native to that soil and just as likely to disagree with those from elsewhere as the Yanks and the Rebs did then. 

In 2020, the states that voted Republican Red and Democratic Blue were evenly divided 25 and 25. Yet the map that shows allegiance by sectors remains similar. The South is still largely Red and New England, the Northeast, and much of the Pacific coast still lean Democratic. The great plains and mountain states that only joined the union after the civil war are largely Republican but are relatively sparsely populated so entitled for fewer electoral college votes

Millions of us in this mobile country who have relocated due to our jobs, educational choices, or marriages can find it disorienting and are likely to feel that they are no longer at home where they now live, more like aliens lost behind enemy lines.

But we adapt. Blue state folks may learn to like grits and hush puppies or Red staters to embrace New England clam chowder, but they will probably be less likely to trade evangelical preachers for unitarian or quaker congregations. Nor are those born to root for The Crimson Tide or Bulldogs likely to be converted to fans of the Wolverines or Buckeyes, or visa versa.

Political allegiance can be influenced by geography, local folkways, traditions, and ethnicity. Blue states have tended to vote Democratic and Red states Republican. For a long time, rural and agrarian voters leaned Republican while urban and industrial voters leaned Democratic, but allegiances can shift over time. 

In the last four elections -2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 – many states have consistently voted the usual Blue or Red. But longtime Red state Virginia has begun to lean Blue. Three indecisive purple states —Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — have voted twice Democratic and twice Republican. And four Red states — North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Illinois – turned Blue once.

In the 2020 election, when voters decided four years of Trump was plenty, 67% of eligible voters, 159 million of us, turned out giving Biden a 51.3% to 46.9%, 306 to 232 electoral college win. He was helped by Red States choosing to flip to Blue — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. Democrats also retained control of the House and won a majority in the Senate. It was the first time an incumbent president lost an election and his party its control of both houses since Herbert Hoover’s loss to FDR in 1932. 

Ever since, Trump has claimed the loss was due to a rigged election, but there is no evidence for such a theory and plenty of evidence that voters had tired of his act and in response to rejection Trump tried to steal the election by means of a violent insurrection. 

The demographics of the 2020 vote tell the tale of the Red and the Blue. Trump got 57% of rural voters, but Biden got over 50% of the larger pool of urban and suburban voters. Biden got 92% of Black voters, 59% of Hispanic voters, a majority of Asian voters, 56% of college graduates, 59% of voters 18 to 29, and 55% of those 30 to 49. Whereas 61% of Trump voters were 50 or older.

Today, recent polling suggests only 17% of Republicans are satisfied with how democracy is working, presumably because a Democrat who they have been led to believe stole the election from Trump is in charge. But only two-thirds of Republicans say they would be satisfied with Trump as the 2024 candidate. 

And yet, only 14% say Trump had any responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection compared to 56% of Independents and 86% of Democrats. The ground is being prepared for a polarizing Red and Blue campaign which will pit reality against disinformation from the Trump campaign, right wing social media, and partisan media like Fox News. Such myth making ought to remind us of the Confederate claim that the enslaved were happy in their work and didn’t want to be free.