Sugar Land, Texas--population: 74,189, altitude: 82 feet--is a former company town nestled in a sharp crook in the Brazos River, about 20 miles southwest of Houston. Founded to house workers for Imperial Sugar, the town has grown in roughly equal proportion to the state's largest city, its cypress forests and rows of wooden postwar company homes supplanted over the decades by "planned communities" that started sprouting in the 1980s and, further out, by gated communities whose wide, winding streets are lined with 10,000-, 15,000- and 20,000-square-foot McMansions. Streets with names like Sugar Mill and Cane Crossing wind past artificial lakes and rows of pecan trees through neighborhoods named after the area's original settlers, including Stephen's Crossing and William's Grant.
Sugar Land is where I go home for the holidays. It is the reddest city in the reddest state in the reddest region of America--a place so conservative that the Washington Post singled it out for feature-length treatment, under the headline "For a Conservative, Life Is Sweet in Sugar Land," last April. Tom DeLay, the House Majority leader for whom House Republicans changed their rules to allow him to continue to serve as House Majority Leader even under the threat of a possible ethics indictment, started his career as an exterminator in my community; this November, 55 percent of Sugar Land residents, including my parents, voted to return him to Washington, in spite (or perhaps, defiantly, because) of his ethics scandal.
Heading home to deep-red Sugar Land from deep-blue Seattle after the November election was a humbling experience, made more so by the fact that my relatives, unlike their neighbors, aren't mere Bush supporters; they're right-wing Republican Party activists, so conservative that they've stopped going to movies because they don't want a single dime of their hard-earned money going to the Hollywood liberal elite. Mine is a house where "the news" comes not from the New York Times, nor even from the (right-leaning) Houston Chronicle, but from Fox, Rush Limbaugh, and the Drudge Report; where books like Bill O'Reilly's No Spin Zone and Rush Limbaugh's See, I Told You So bump covers with autobiographies by Barbara Bush and Dan Quayle; and where I spent my formative years engaging in thunderous, cataclysmic political arguments with parents who'd sooner chew off their own arms than vote for a Democrat.
Plenty of people I know went through their own versions of this dilemma this Thanksgiving: swim out into the red sea to face a potentially emotional (and humiliating) argument about the election or simply avoid the issue, holing up on their urban islands, licking their wounds until they scab over and start to heal. Among people I know with red-state relatives, one spent the holiday with friends in Oregon; one left the country entirely; and another headed, girlfriend in tow, to the bluest place she could find: New York City. Me? I decided to confront my fears head-on. I traveled straight to the heart of red America--to hell for the holidays--on the condition that my family agree to avoid the only topic that was on my mind.
My parents proved surprisingly amenable to my request. And they invited a fellow Democrat, my mom's sister from Austin (Texas' bluest island) to even out the political balance. Aiming to avoid all talk of politics, we landed almost immediately on the one solution guaranteed to render us mute: television. Over the course of four days, we watched episodes of Desperate Housewives (the top-rated show in red America, according to the New York Times), The Apprentice, and an entire season of Sex and the City. In values-obsessed red America, where there's a church on every corner, one of the most popular programs is a show about a bunch of materialistic, oversexed New Yorkers. In four days, cocooned in the climate-controlled coolness of my parents' 2,500-square-foot suburban home, I heard the word "fuck" more times than you'd read in a whole month of Strangers.
People like my parents choose to live in suburbs like Sugar Land, among many other reasons, to avoid exposing themselves to new, discomfiting ideas. People like me flee the suburbs because we crave that exposure. That's why, as soon as I was old enough to drive, I spent most of my free time in Houston, where all-ages clubs and cultural institutions offer an alternative for kids who would otherwise spend their days ambling aimlessly through the suburbs, watching MTV, and smoking pot out of homemade bongs. And it's why I left the suburbs for the liberal urban oasis of Austin, and then the even more liberal oasis of Seattle, where I've lived for the past four years.
* * * *
There are more of them than there are of us.
That's one of the many depressing thoughts that have occurred to progressives since November 2. Not only did more Americans vote for Bush than for Kerry, those Bush voters are out-breeding Kerry voters. Birth rates in the suburbs and rural areas are higher than they are in the cities, a demographic trend that some have pointed to with alarm. Won't all those red-state babies grow up to vote like their moms and dads? That's far from guaranteed. Lots of suburban kids pack their bags, pick up, and head for the islands of urbanity that stretch across the country. I did. Look around you: How many of your friends--the same ones you got drunk with on election night--are refugees from red families in red states?
Despite every attempt by our parents to instill in us a set of solid red-state values--among them, in varying degrees: intolerance for cultural and religious differences, hatred for big-government programs and the taxes that support them, and fear of whatever is unfamiliar, including gays, science, and the East Coast press--some of us--lots of us--choose to seek out and find our own blue islands.
* * * *
But sometimes, you have to come back home.
Over years of visits, my family has gradually learned to avoid talk of partisan politics. Although my parents aren't the archetypal "values voters" of red-state mythology, they, like most everyone in their suburban enclave, keep at bay any ideas that would contradict their unshakable view of the world outside. My dad believes, in all sincerity, that newspapers--the "liberal media"--just make things up. And, considering the steady diet of Bill O'Reilly and Matt Drudge on which he subsists, who can blame him?
Every morning while I was home, I sought a break from my self-imposed political information blackout by heading out along streets populated by SUVs whose drivers eyed me suspiciously from behind tinted windows to hunt for the day's New York Times. On every day but one, this search proved futile, as the two or three copies that had been ferried out to the suburban Houston hinterlands were snatched up well before 10:00 a.m. I called a friend to kvetch about my quest. "Imagine," he joked, "all those kids reading the New York Times under their covers with a flashlight. To conservatives, there's nothing more pornographic than ideas."
Even suburbs like Sugar Land aren't impenetrable. Even in a town where the local Democratic Party operates under the incredibly desperate slogan "Because the two-party system is the lifeblood of democracy," the New York Times flies off the shelves, Sex and the City sets the bar for family entertainment, and kids get exposure to a world that isn't afraid of ideas, whether their parents like it or not. And some of them, like me, flee the red ocean to islands like Seattle, where, even if you're a stranger to the neighborhood, no one stops to stare.
