“Red states.” “Fly-over states.” “Jesusland.” Christopher Hitchens took a “Red State Odyssey” for Vanity Fair. David Brooks took a tour all over exurbia for the Atlantic Monthly.

We make a big deal about how the country is divided, and usually we do it with rude rhetoric that shows how little distance we’ve travelled on section and class issues since Reconstruction. While balanced, the chapter (entitled “‘Culture Wars’ and ‘Decline’ in the 1990s”) of the book I’m reading now highlights the perception of difference, whether it exists or not. I suspect we actually like to be divided. It’s our way to avoid reconciling the conflicting impulses that have been with us since we landed on this American rock: the missionary zeal to make humanity more perfect and our equally strong desire to be left alone and live the way that seems right to us.

I was born in a blue county in a state that was too close to call for hours in both 2000 and 2004 to parents who voted for Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan when they were on the ballot. I went to high school in a red county in a very red state that had Democratic governors as long as I could remember and that has a gay mayor. My schizophrenic college town (in the same state where I was born) is just to the left of Ché in the three block radius around the “Zirkle” (a steel monolith that pagans dance naked around in the moonlight) but is ringed by a half-dozen churches and fields as green as John Deere tractors. Now I live in a Democratic, one-party, police-run state that has a Mormon Republican governor who you might be hearing a lot about soon.

I’m a somewhat different person now than I was nine years ago before I started riding the #70 bus through the rougher parts of Watertown and Cambridge. I still yearn for federalism and small government, but riding the bus with other folks who had to choose between the rent and health insurance (like me) and felt people (like me) didn’t care, well that changes a man’s point of view.

This summer I’m taking my left-leaning self and my nominally Republican wife (ha!) and our gas-electric hybrid car on a three-week tour of the Midwest. Based on other trips to the semi-rural middle of the country since we moved Eastward — in 1999, 2000, and 2003 — I would expect to be bored, except baseball and the possibility of reincarnating Tocqueville will save us.

Yes, tomorrow the Kansas City Royals’ singe-game tickets go on sale, and we can round out our trip. We’re trying not to plan out the whole trip in advance, but buying tickets to events really makes that harder. Here’s what we have so far:

  • June 9: Depart the Bay State
  • June 11: Chicago White Sox (vs. Cleveland)
  • June 13: Chicago Cubs (vs. Houston)
  • June 15: Minnesota Twins (vs. Boston)
  • June 17: Milwaukee Brewers (vs. Cleveland)
  • “Jeff’s ancestral homeland tour” of Iowa
  • June 22: Kansas City Royals (vs. Pittsburgh)
  • “Lisa’s ancestral homeland tour” of Kansas
  • June 26: Branson, Missouri
  • June 27: Saint Louis Cardinals (vs. Cleveland)
  • June 29: Cincinnati Reds (vs. Kansas City)
  • July 1 or 2: Home to that place where we live