Matt Ferrence, a colleague of mine, and professor of English at Allegheny College, perfectly captures what it feels like to be a liberal in the sea of conservative western Pennsylvania. Matt ran to be the democratic representative to Pennsylvania’s state legislature. Our district not only has twice as many registered Republicans as Democrats but is so hopelessly gerrymandered as to make many races–local all way up to our Congressman–uncontested. Democrats don’t even bother to run. Or, as was the case with Matt’s candidacy, are offered up as sacrificial lambs with little or no support from the Democratic party.
On the political front, Matt does a bang-on job of explaining the self-fulfilling calculus of the Democratic party. Why invest political capital in races that democrats are sure to lose. Democratic failure to engage serves to reinforce rural America’s sense that it is not just fly-over country, but that working class, white American’s are forgotten and overlooked by coastal urbanites. Matt did his best to formulate a campaign that spoke to the needs of locals, but was trounced in the election.
Matt is from this part of Pennsylvania, more precisely from coal country south of Pittsburgh, and describes in painful detail the conflict of feeling tied to this land and yet all the while being cast as an outsider. He is, after all, from two hours south, not really from here. He is, too, an academic, a liberal, and a believer in poetry. His series of essay puts to words, with great elegance, my own feelings of dislocation. His landmarks, physical and metaphorical, are places I know all too well.