Thomas Frank captures the myriad ways in which the very real economic damage that swirled through crimson Kansas spawned anger directed at just about everything except for the tornado itself. Stoked by an assortment of fuming demagogues, Frank writes, “the [conservative] backlash mobilizes voters with explosive issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art.”  The stories Frank tells to illustrate that insight explain a lot to those of us who have been scratching our heads along the northern half of Interstate 95. Capsules of a few:   

-- In Garden City, a “rural boomtown” that thrives on its meat-packing industry, new waves of immigrant workers from Southeast Asia and Mexico have been imported to work in the slaughterhouses and live in dilapidated trailer parks. Frank writes: “Confronted with some of the most advanced union-avoidance strategies ever conceived by the mind of business man, these people receive mediocre wages for doing what is statistically the most dangerous work in industrial America. Thanks to the rapid turnover at the slaughterhouses, few of them receive health or retirement benefits. The ‘social costs’ of supporting them—education, health care, law enforcement—are…pushed off onto the towns themselves, or onto church groups and welfare agencies, or onto the countries from which the workers come.”

Frank cites two anthropologists who studied the region and warned about the impact of a development strategy that forever puts a town “at the mercy of the meat industry’s insatiable appetite for cheap labor and the social turmoil that follows from it.” Frank reports that Garden City voted for George W. Bush in even greater numbers than did affluent Johnson City.

--  John D.Altevogt is a former county GOP chairman writing a column for the Kansas City Star who Frank describes as a  “one-man symphony of indignation, a composer of rhapsodic rages as well as dark dirges of self-pity, all of them orchestrated around a single, favorite note that he pounds again and again. Religious conservatives, he argues, asserts, hollers, wails, are the victims of unspeakable persecution by the ruling class, that is, by liberals….In setting up this vision of a hostile world, Altevogt draws heavily on the language of the other side….Commenting on a news story about the squabble in the Anglican Church over homosexual marriages, he writes: ‘All of the rhetoric of the sixties comes alive describing our totalitarian liberal establishment. Fascist pig, baby killers, sick society, it’s all applicable. What we need to do now is change it by any means necessary. Power to the people.’

-- In the summer of 1991, Operation Rescue organized protests in Wichita that prompted the city’s abortion clinics to close for a week on the advice of police. That “success” prompted thousands more protesters to come throughout the summer, with the climactic event a mass meeting that filled the football stadium at Wichita State University. Frank writes, “In one Spartacus-like moment,  an event organizer asked those from out of town to stand up; according to press accounts, two-thirds of the audience did so. Then she called on Wichitans to stand, and the whole crowd got to its feet.” Frank later quotes Mark Gietzen, a Christian activist who became chairman of the Sedgwick County GOP, as saying that the 1991 “Summer of Mercy” definitively shifted Wichita to the right, bringing in thousands of conservative recruits who were enthusiastic about campaigning door to door.

Frank’s a polemicist, and his own rage often matches that of his colorful cast of characters. That style has worked beautifully in helping to get the broadest possible audience to pay attention to his observations about what has happened in Kansas. As for his arguments about what liberals/progressives/Democrats have done to inadvertently spill red ink on the state, and what they can do to begin adding some blue tint, for now I’ll leave that to the other contributors – who may want to do some venting of their own.