In my hometown, someone opened up a porn-and-love-toy shop downtown. Almost instantly the place was being picketed. It's still being picketed, and the sucker's been around for a couple of years now. What's gutwrenchingly sickening is the way the community stubbornly refuses to connect the dots between the disintegration of its city and their refusal to pass operating or improvement levies for their schools or to execute their plans for a new library.

It's tragic, because I don't believe these people openly recognize how self-defeating their behavior actually is – I think they simply feel overtaxed at a point where the local economy is still completely depressed. A ton of jobs have been lost in Wooster lately, and there's no great improvements looming on the horizon. Small-town Ohioans are typically Republicans for this very reason – a dislike of higher taxes and big government. I can understand that when it comes to controversial elements like the National Endowment for the Arts and NPR, which are usually identified with the "citified New England yuppies", but when it's so clearly in your own backyard, I find that utterly unconscionable.

In the words of H.L. Mencken, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."