(2009) Following up on his 2005 documentary film, director/narrator/editor/producer Chris Hume (who has since left Los Angeles for Laramie, WY), accompanied by his girlfriend behind the camera, drove his Prius 10,770 miles across America to interview people in the "flyover states," asking them about their preferences leading up to the 2008 presidential election. It's an eye-opening, mind-filling journey on the road less taken.

Beginning in Las Vegas, Nevada, and concluding in tiny Hope, Arizona, after reaching and returning from the East Coast, over what appears to be 17 days in the film (but actually took about seven weeks in the making), Chris explores ordinary people's views on gasoline prices (a stretch-limousine driver and truckers complaining about getting only six miles per gallon at over $5 per gallon of diesel), dwindling water resources (Lake Mead's drying up as Las Vegas's two million residents consume 500-600 million gallons daily during the peak of summer), housing foreclosures (firefighters say they risk their lives with increasing incidents of arson in New Haven, CT), street violence in Chicago (family and friends of shooting victims relate their grief and frustration with "war on our streets"), the new necropolis of Detroit (a city with over 40,000 vacant lots where nature is reclaiming neighborhoods), healthcare, jobs, the national debt.

He listens to a farmer, critical of so much water being diverted away from crops, and a one-room schoolhouse teacher, upset with No Child Left Behind, in dry and dusty Callao, Utah, population fewer than 40 and 90 miles from the nearest grocery store; he visits with a couple who've made their nest in a decommissioned missile silo near Kimball, Nebraska.

Mounted on their horses, cowboys in Nephi, Utah, express dismay with President George W. Bush's policies. A man in Wyoming warns: "Don't ever take my guns from me." After firing an M-16 at a shooting range, Chris informs us that all but eight states allow the sale of assault weapons. Commenting on gun enthusiasts' calls for laws permitting students and teachers to carry concealed weapons on college campuses, the father of an innocent victim of gunfire remarks that arming students with their raging hormones and binge drinking would lead to massacres unlike anything witnessed so far.

In Kansas near the geographical center of the USA, a woman disgusted with President Bush declares: "Get rid of the dictatorship." Conscientiously neutral in his inquiries, Chris introduces us to a Kansan metal sculptor and crusty critic, M.T. Liggett, unpopular with his neighbors for his liberal live-and-let-live philosophy, who's convinced that "ignorance by choice" will destroy us. In particular white voters in Mississippi, Kansas, and Crawford ("Luvya Dubya"), Texas, sound ignorant in their regarding Barack Obama as evil, dangerous, and being a Muslim.

In Raymondville, Missouri, members of Cowboys for Christ tell Chris that more praying is needed, that no true conservatives are on the ballot, and that creationism rather than Darwinian evolution is the explanation for the ascent of humanity; a man asks Chris if he's accepted Jesus as his Savior. At a Southern Baptist megachurch in Louisville, KY, he finds someone wanting to vote for Rush Limbaugh; an evangelical Christian in Chesterfield, VA, argues that the original intention of the Founding Fathers in the Bill of Rights was to protect religion from the state.

Elsewhere in Hinton, West Virginia, he finds a couple of very humane witches (a man and a woman) who say the Christian community tolerates them. An opponent of the coal companies destroying West "by God" Virginia's mountains (477 have already disappeared) shows Chris the devastation to the landscape when the "overburden" (anything lying above the coal) is removed.

In Washington, DC, Chris interviews Indiana Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who addresses issues of immigration, the Iraq War, and the Bush administration's unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus for detainees. Giving the lie to President Bush's promises to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, a visit to New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward nearly three later, where only 2,000 of the 16,000 ruined dwellings have been rebuilt, leaves a sorrowful impression.

"Is the U.S. still the number one power in the world?" Chris asks. For some Americans maybe a misspelled sign in Arizona answers the question: "Your beyond hope." But for those taking the initiative, such as creating community gardens in Detroit in response to "food deserts" (no local supermarkets), who believed change from the past eight years is possible by casting their ballot and faith with Barack Obama, maybe there is hope that we can do better.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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