Let the Red States Drown

By Dennis Byrne
Political Mavens

The “silver lining” of global warming is that it will destroy the “red states,” the bastions of rightwing “troglodytes.”

No kidding. Left-winger Dave Lindorff is gleeful that millions of Americans will be driven from their land or worse by the “deluge” caused global warming. He says this in something called the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel:

Say what you will about the looming catastrophe facing the world as the pace of global heating and polar melting accelerates. There is a silver lining.

Look at a map of the US.

The area that will by [sic] completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

The Midwest, he says, faces a “permanent condition of unprecedented drought, making the place largely unlivable, and certainly unfarmable….[W]e will see the decline and depopulation of the nation’s vast midsection—noted for its consistent conservatism. Only in the northernmost area, around the Great Lakes (which will be not so great anymore), and along the Canadian border, will there still be enough rain for farming and continued large population concentrations, but those regions, like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois, are also more liberal in their politics.”

Finally, in the Southwest, already parched and stiflingly hot, the rise in energy costs and the soaring temperatures will put an end to right-wing retirement communities like Phoenix, Tucson and Palm Springs. Already the Salton Sea is fading away and putting Palm Springs on notice that the good times are coming to an end. Another right-wing haven soon to be gone.

Most of the blue states—the Northeast and West coasts, specifically—are high enough to escape dire consequences of global warming, he says happily.

So the future political map of America is likely to look as different as the much shrunken geographical map, with much of the so-called “red” state region either gone or depopulated.

And when all these conservatives, running from the flood, seek to find a new life in the blue states, Lindorff would yank away the welcome mat.

The important thing is that we, on the higher ground both actually and figurative, need to remember that, when they begin their historic migration from their doomed regions, we not give them the keys to the city. They certainly should be offered assistance in their time of need, but we need to keep a firm grip on our political systems, making sure these guilty throngs who allowed the world to go to hell are gerrymandered into political impotence in their new homes.

By this, I gather that Lindorff means to chuck the “guilty throngs” into reservations or concentration camps, and repeal the constitutional concept of “one-man, one-vote.”

At first I thought this might be parody, written by some conservative trying to make the left look as ridiculous as possible. But apparently, this weird, paranoid publication is legit, at least in the minds of its editors. They needed no help to look like fools.

There’s not much point trying to explain to this crowd what’s wrong about finding joy (or even “poetic justice”) in the destruction of a large hunk of America and the dislocation or destruction of the homes, businesses and lives of a huge number of its citizens. Lindorff might get this point if he thought about the fact that the victims of Hurricane Katrina would be doubly ruined.

Oh, wait a minute, I get it; it’s only people whose political views are different than Lindorff’s who don’t deserve his compassion. He’d allow residents of New Orleans Ninth Ward into his Blue Heaven, because, well, they’re not from the Right Wing.

How very fascist.

This also is posted on Political Mavens