In which I travel in Ohio from one small town to another and am shown the future of America

The summer of Limbaugh and Lorena.

The Adult Sunday School Picnic in Bucyrus, Ohio, July 18, 1993. Lima beans with bacon and marshmallows (the reference to the dish is accurate; the photo is off the ‘net—we had regular cameras in 1993, and taking photos of a church buffet would have been, uh, odd.) With this dish was a line of Jello salads and vegetables (all but two covered with marshmallows). I didn’t “take one for the team.” I went outside and and ate two brats with the men who were grilling in the rain. And that’s why—I’m serious—that’s why we lost Ohio. (Or, as Dan Aykroyd used to say to Jane Curtin on the old, hilarious Saturday Night Live parody of “Point/Counterpoint”: “Jane, you ignorant slut.”)

THE HIGHEST POINT IN OHIO is Campbell Hill: 1,549 feet. For Humboldt County locals: this is 500 feet lower than Ridgewood Summit outside of Willits, which none of us ever remember is there until we’re there. Everything can’t be a redwood tree, and all vegetation is equal in the eyes of God. Right?

Ohio is the American state to which my paternal side of the family immigrated. My great-grandfather was a Scot who came to Ohio from Canada in the years before 1895, when the border was open. He was most likely not a criminal, that side of the family having already learned its lesson sometime in the 18th Century when it was illegal for any commoner in the British Isles to have glass windows. Black Sheep Robertson liked the elegant glass that was available from France, and so decided to make a career of smuggling it across the channel. In the earliest known example of the complete failure of Robertsons to be entrepreneurs, his ship was intercepted by the navy of King George III and he was hung at sea.

The Robertsons spread themselves into Youngstown, Chagrin Falls, and Cleveland, and my specific branch, that of John D. Robertson, Sr. and his wife, Ethel, spent most of their lives trying to leave.

I had a remarkably similar time in 1993. I got there quickly, both in real time, and —now—in narrative time, and then I just fell into the quicksand of confusion —I’ve wandered off point again! I’m still in the swamp in which I’ve been trapped for 32 years— I can’t get out of Ohio.

Late Sunday, July 18, and I’m on road to Bucyrus. The Crawford County Fair is happening, and I’m staying with Lavonne—a woman, now a friend, with whom I had just completed an eight-year stint on the national United Methodist Board of Communications.¹

As I roll toward Lavonne, the little men who “clean the office” of my brain are trying to sort and categorize the experience and conversations from Kinsman. What did we talk about? Not yet the heavy rains and historic flooding of the Mississippi. No. The fervor focused on “the gays and the Blacks.”² And Lorena Bobbitt³ from Manassas, Virginia, who, with one of the most on-the-nose names in the history of female perps had, just a few weeks prior, gotten fed up with her husband’s abuse and infidelities, and chopped off his penis while he slept. Somehow—this is the part I still can’t imagine—he doesn’t wake up in time to stop her from going outside, getting into the car, driving down the highway, and tossing the —item—out the window and into a field.⁴

The hilarity in the kitchen at the bed-and-breakfast is memorable to this day. There were eight marriages among the five of us adult women, and one was still on her first and another had never married. At one point, I laughed so hard I snorted a Squirt.

Lavonne called and told me it was raining, but that the Adult Sunday School Picnic was still on. I had a short trip; only 160 miles, and I was exhausted from all the laughing and talking I’d done in Kinsman. I turned on the radio, please something other than a church service…and heard, for the first time, Rush Limbaugh.⁵ He was making fun of people who say that television contributes to violence. (“What are they watching in Bosnia?” he asked.)

Listening to Limbaugh, I soon learned, was excellent prep for my visit to Bucyrus. All dials were turned to Rush there, much to the annoyance of Lavonne, who owned a competing radio station.

Coming out of the northwestern suburbs of New York, I was unprepared for finding this conservatism in the northern route across America. It was a point of view I firmly associated with the American South and the Dust Bowl. I wasn’t unfamiliar with it: the patriarch of the Crisp family into which I had once married was a store-front Baptist preacher with an eighth-grade education who was also a member of the John Birch Society. The family had lived in California several times, ditto Indiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The preacher beat his sons, berated his wife, and quoted the Bible to support every ignorant thought that supported his own dominance.

But the Crisps had never lived in Ohio, a state so revered that seven of our Presidents were born there (and Wm. Henry Harrison was living there when he was elected). True, there were some numbskulls (Benjamin Harrison, Warren G. Harding), at least one drunk (Grant), one who weighed 300 pounds necessitating a special bathtub to be installed in the White House (Taft), and two who were assassinated (McKinley and Garfield). Oh, and one who didn’t win the popular vote and who set back Reconstruction to its final resting place (Hayes).

I should have done that homework before I left New York, but I was too busy buying the truck.

My extemporaneous notes—how I would have subconsciously rewritten this trip if I had not annotated every detail!—are, at this point, confused. “It sounds like Alabama,” I wrote later that night, after the Adult Sunday School Picnic. “With only a slight, sort-of-southern accent.”

We were only a year away from Newt, and then the Tea Party, and then — it was all there, spreading out before me like the calm, worn road from Kinsman to Bucyrus.

Two days earlier, after I’d passed from Pennsylvania into Ohio, I’d stopped for breakfast in a diner and sat at the counter by two men about my age (49). They were discussing their friend Jerry who worked on his truck every day.

“Jerry never reads nothin, don’t listen to the radio, don’t watch TV. That’s one way from gettin ulcers.”

I said, I wasn’t sure about that. I said, “Doesn’t he get uptight with the truck? Like when the carburetor doesn’t work right or something?”

“Yeah. He swears and screams at his truck all day long.”

I said, “Well, maybe he’s getting ulcers from his truck.”

“Naw. Truck problems—not the same as findin out all the stuff our government is into. Sellin drugs, sellin guns. If we knew all the things our government was up to, we’d be out there choppin those people up like drug addicts do.”

“What people would we be chopping up?”

“For starters, everyone ever elected to anything. Then, I’d move on to the people who’ve never worked for anything they’ve got. You know, that element. And the people who come here for a handout and aren’t willin to do anything for it. And then, the people who give it to them.”

Mid-July 1993. And Project 2025 was written right there on a napkin in a diner in Ohio.

Now, I’m on the outskirts of Bucyrus, two-and-a-half hours north of Middletown, Ohio, where in two weeks, if his mother is sober, John David Vance will celebrate his ninth birthday.

And we say we never saw it coming.

1. This was a big deal for someone who was confirmed as a Congregationalist at the church in Ferndale—which had broken off from the Ferndale Methodist Church in the mid-1950s over strongly differing opinions about civil rights. Of course, I became a Methodist before I showed up for the first meeting, and since that time, have happily I self-defined as an RMP (Radical Mainline Protestant).

2. There was not a Black person visible in the Ohio in which I traveled, and I always think everyone is gay, so I’m not reliable to report historically on that population. In 1993, very few Latinos were working in the northern swath of the U.S. There was not a single mention of “immigration” during the four weeks of my trip, and I took extensive notes. I wasn’t even aware that it wasn’t a topic, since it hadn’t been one in New York. The same bogeymen (and bogeywomen)—Blacks and gays (and those were the terms)—reigned from Ohio to the eastern side of the Cascades in the state of Washington (with a carve-out for Chicago).

3. Lorena Gallo Bobbitt was an immigrant from Ecuador and John Wayne Bobbitt (a novelist would be asked by her editor to find a less blatantly symbolic name) was a U.S. Marine veteran. Today’s assignment: rewrite the story to fit contemporary politics.

4. Where it was quickly recovered by one of the largest manhood hunts in the state of Virginia— in perhaps in all of human history.

5. That’s in my notes. I transcribed them that evening, there was no Google. I have “Rush Limbaw sp?” In verifying some of notes, today I looked up Limbaugh in 1993, and learned that he had been the recipient that year of an award from the National Radio Hall of Fame. He was introduced in a historic speech by Sally Jessy Raphael—an intro so ballsy that today, she would be booed off the stage; goons would roughen her up as she tried to leave, and—as she is a graduate of Columbia University and had lived in Puerto Rico for many years—would likely have placed her, an “administrative error,” on a flight to hell.