Sweet Home Anywhere But West Virginia

In much the same way that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews (say some!) and Palestine is the ancestral homeland of the Palestinians (hmm...say others...), and Georgia is the ancestral homeland of felons, West Virgina is the ancestral homeland of the idiots. It is their Promised Land. It is the place where they can go when no other state in the Union will have them.

I realize that is an offensive generalization. Not everyone in West Virginia is unintelligent. In fact, some West Virginians are quite smart, and also not married to their immediate relatives. And also probably do not keep assault weapons in their homes.

But I digress. People from Maryland may subscribe to unfortunate stereotypes where their Southwestern neighbors are concerned, but every so often, I read an article like this. In general, I approach political journalism warily, maybe because it's so prone to sensationalism. In fact, the real story might not be the fact that West Virginia's voters went against Obama, but the fact that Pat Healy waits until halfway down page two to mention that those who did so also felt, in large part, that the economic slowdown had affected them. West Virginia, unlike Maryland (a state with which it shares almost nothing except a slave-owning past) is not a rich state. West Virginia may be the whitest state in the nation, but blaming that for the entirety of their prejudices may not be fair.

Then again, I may just feel guilty that West Virginia ranks behind every other state and all US territories when it comes to places I'd want to live.