77'05''West
Back in his day, the Western territorial portion of Abraham's Lincoln's America was constantly changing while those in control of the Southern statist portion of the same map dug in their heel in a doomed effort to hang on to their ways and means:
Of course, in the end, Lincoln had to step in and deal with those dug-in heels for all kinds of reasons, some of them pragmatic, some of them idealistic, but all of them ultimately right.
One can only wonder how he, Lincoln I mean, would step in and deal with today's map of America:
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Why is this site called 'The Gazetteer'? Because I like maps, especially when they are in atlases with explanations and details and stuff....In the old dinosaur days (i.e. back when Stockwell Day was still, actually, relevant, and/or riding jet skis) almost every post was marked by the subject's latitude and longitude...
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4 comments:
Interesting to read that your site is called "The Gazetteer" because you like maps. I have loved looking at maps all my life. As a kid, I had a number of maps (which came in some issues of the National Geographic) taped to the wall of my bedroom. Not so anymore, but I do have some stashed away near my desk so I can look at them now and again.
EG--
I must confess that I also liked it when different countries/provinces/states were different colours.
Still remember how the pink northern-most islands, in pink, looked like a galloping horse warrior on my bedroom wall.
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I love maps too, made lots of them, tree-root fungal diseases on the Wet Coast—organic shapes, computer-labeling challenges, licensee denialism, whole nine yards. (I mentioned to my in-law it’s a natural human characteristic: we like maps. He published and gifted me the beautiful Historical Atlas of Canada.) These CV19 maps are telling—just exactly of what I’m not 100% sure.
With respect data collecting, statistical methodology and the art of the politic, it’s temping to draw many conclusions, but I think it’s fairly plain the Deep South (the core of the Confederate States of America) stands out for having such a broadly distributed pattern of contiguous infection classes (decreasing, static and increasing), suggesting CV19 is literally inoculating, festering and plaguing in detail throughout the entire region while, in comparison, other regional clusters tend to have one class or epidemiological phase dominant, and generally in more discrete locales.
I have to ask myself if I’m reading what I want to see into the conspicuous (I could have said “suspicious” if I wasn’t trying to keep an open mind) correlation between this region and the ZIP codes of presidunce tRump’s most loyal voting base.
In addition to partisan character, the region also has other, well-known and historically mythologized, possibly biasing features: slavery, its cursed legacy of hatred, cruelty, secession, war and defeat, thence chronologically unbroken through Jim Crow, racial segregation and mass civil-rights protests, whites ginned by the slave revolt it’d always feared, rationalized lynchings, from spontaneous and illegal to official policing culture-in-effect. Analysis risks over-associating this region’s coincidental poverty, poor and unfairly inaccessible healthcare, poorer health and associated bad habits, low wages, high generational underemployment, and poor education which seem to follow from the graphic CV19 distribution. (Seen firsthand, the racism’s pretty bad, too.) tRumpers would rather analysts just stick exclusively to incidences of reported CV19–which, you know, in the Land of the Free, you don’t even have to believe is anything more than a flu-bug all gussied up by the Deep State (there’s a map for that, too).
It makes sense the regional population most likely to heed tRump’s CV19-misinfo would show a distinctive epidemiological pattern. Contagion spreads more quickly in urban populations, the mostly rural Deep South rate is typically slower. However, blessed by optimal warmth, soil and rainfall, farms in this region have been worked much longer and subdivided into smaller parcels than could be feasibly farmed in, say, the Midwest—thus the South has some of the highest density rural populations in the USA and is peppered with small towns. It seems conspicuously distinct from other rural areas in CV19 terms.
Slower, poorer CV19 diagnoses and intentional under-reporting from Old South states whose governors find themselves cornered with tRump, and availing the geographic overlaps to gin, confuse, and gull their respective citizens into seeing— or being willfully blind to —ulterior motives like turning back the calendar 190 years or ‘returning’ America to ‘Christian values’ seem, in whatever extent they skew the CV19 data, rather moot. I take it to mean: that’s how bad it is—and probably how much longer the virus will pester the Land of Cotton: so bad it can’t be hidden under the layers of baggage that have carpeted over the South so separately from the rest of the Union.
It’s difficult not to hear that devil ask not what this map means for CV19 but, rather, what does it mean for tRump’s election chances in November. If the homeland of his regionalized base sufferers more and longer from CV19, what does it need to fabulate to recommend the incumbent who’s arguably culpable in making it worse. I’m afraid that will only manifest in votes-not-cast posthumously.
Scotty--
When I first saw the Times' 'Hot Spots' map of the States, I immediately thought of the Mason-Dixon line.
I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know the actual line is really just confined to the Eastern-most portion of the North-South divide which is why I went further afield which led me to the rendering of the land before Lincoln (not to be confused with Illinois).
As for what it would mean for Trump if the 1st wave now Tsunamis in the South....I don't know, if the effect will actually be negative electoral numbers-wise given the propensity to double down and blame everyone except the Perpetrator-In-Chief.
We shall see...
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