Eshu Walking through Blue States and Red States

You might gather I am more of the liberal persuasion than the conservative one; so I was part of that rather large minority that did not vote for George Bush. However, I don’t really intend this blog to be about the politics of the election – well not directly anyway. Still, when pundits, pollsters, anchors, and general folks talk about Red America and Blue America, I am reminded of Eshu, the African trickster, who wears a hat of two colors (one different on each side) so that depending on which perspective one has of him, one thinks his hat is either black or white. This discrepancy, this contrary variance, in how Eshu appears is, of course, the source of great conflict as one person or another swears that Eshu is wearing a hat of a particular color because that is the color they see. This contrarines is so much true that Eshu is the source of discord and arguments between friends among the Yorba. [See Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World (New York: Straus, 1998), pp. 238-240.]

Actually since the 2000 election, that little meme of blue/red America has been circulating in the national consciousness. Like a mantra of division, it has been used to explain all things political, religious, economic and social, and we all seem to have become meme replicators of that bicolor/bi-coded template. We find increasingly easy to use this meme to explain all sorts of things about our current public life. It works like a rational imitation of a conspiracy theory – just figure out how someone is a “blue” or red” person, and you can predict all sorts of things about them – what they eat (or don’t eat), what they drive (or don’t drive), what (they shoot or don’t shoot), what they pray (or don’t pray), how they worship (or don’t worship), how they rear (or don’t rear their children), what movies they see, what television they watch, and on and on, but what everybody wants to find is how a color will determine how these folks vote.

The problem with this meme is that is clearly Eshu driven. Not only is it divisive (because of appearances), but it closely tied to a ownership, property, and domination. In short, the emphasis on “things” rather “ideas,” on media images rather than actual people, or on polls rather than discussion is mostly a media advertising spin game – one that detracts from the more significant issues (that may really divide the country) from actually being discussed in a public forum that recognizes that not only are issues complex, but that things and people are always more than they may appear.

Princeton Prof. Robert Vanderbei’s Purple America Map shows a whole different view of this bicolor, bi-coded division.




When one views the country county by county even when coded with the two colors, the country looks purple. One has a sense of how varied things really are, and how silly Eshu’s game of showing us only blue or red really; so let us think more complexly and approach the supposed conflict in “values” as just an argumentative meme used to bring on empty quarrels to deflect one's attention from more significant issues.

……………………………Look again, Trickster is in the Nation