Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

For the past few months, I’ve been watching old episodes of Northern Exposure when I don’t have anything else to do, and it looks like I’m on my way to watching all six seasons. I’ve liked this show since the early ’90s, when I was still in high school, but didn’t pay as much attention to it as I did in the late ’90s, when A&E was showing re-runs. By then, I had finished college and was working nights in restaurants, and those re-runs came on late-morning about the time I got out of bed. Purely by coincidence, the show became part of my morning routine— coffee and Northern Exposure. These days, in the age of streaming, re-runs in a daily time slot are passé, but marked by old habits, my version of bingeing takes months, not days. I like to digest what I’ve seen before taking in another episode. And Northern Exposure is a show worth savoring.

Not long ago, it was an episode from February 1992 titled “Democracy in America” (season 3, episode 15) that caught my attention. The nation would have been heading into the Clinton-Bush election when the episode first aired. Thirty-two years and five presidents later, I have been watching in the months leading up to a Trump-Biden rematch, amid overheated debates about democracy in America. In the episode, long-time mayor Holling Vincoeur is challenged for his job as Cicely’s leader by local misanthrope Rita Taggart, who is angry that Holling never installed the stop sign she asked for five years earlier. The disgruntled woman is a loner who openly disdains other people, while Holling is well-liked and often-seen since he is the owner and proprietor of the town’s only bar. The outcome of such a matchup seems obvious, yet a challenge is issued, so an election must be held. Holling’s role as mayor is so miniscule that Joel Fleischmann, the New York City doctor who has by this point been in the town for a few years, wasn’t even aware that they had a mayor. Yet, the couple-hundred townspeople stir themselves up at the prospect of this choice. Ed Chigliak, in particular. He finds himself suffering from anxiety over doing his forthcoming duty. This is the first election in his lifetime. (Joel is also flabbergasted by this: there has never been an election held in the tiny town in Ed’s lifetime!)

But it is the ever-eloquent Chris Stephens who makes the episode. Those who are fans may remember, but for those who aren’t: Chris came to the tiny Alaska town years earlier after skipping parole in West Virginia. He had been a petty criminal who had spent a little time in prison, so as a convicted felon, he had lost his voting rights. Moreover, Chris couldn’t afford to appear on the government’s radar anyway. While Ed is suffering the throes and Joel is trying once again to satisfy his dismay, Chris is more excited about the election than anyone. On the radio, he is reading from Walt Whitman and pontificating about American freedom. By the end of the episode, Chris has cut off his long hair, shaved his scruffy face, and put on a suit-and-tie just to go stand in the polling place and experience the event. Ultimately, he is the character who makes us understand that freedom and the right to vote may be valued and appreciated most by people who don’t have them. 

I’ll spoil it, since most readers won’t go and watch anyway: Holling loses the election, but only by a few votes. The campaigning has the side effect of revealing some long-held bitterness over past conflicts with the generally affable bar owner, individual resentments over an old slight here or an old argument there. When people are asked to make their choice official, we see a community divided and voters driven by a variety of motives. No one likes Rita, nor does she like them. She doesn’t really want the job, and the people don’t really think she’ll be a good mayor. But grouchy, antisocial Rita Taggart wins the mayoral election because some people want to see change, while others are simply voting against Holling. It’s a microcosm of our country, then as now, showing voters and their many ways of reasoning, and thus was aptly titled: “Democracy in America.”

Democracy is messy, and despite its beauty and value, it exposes unfortunate antagonisms, both individual and societal. It is by far the best system for governance, but its application can show us for what we too often are: lazy, uninformed, selfish, unforgiving, capricious, manipulative. I remember, back during George HW Bush’s presidency, the main fact that Americans knew about our president – the leader of the free world – was that he didn’t like broccoli. Across time, voter turnout statistics show that massive numbers of voters don’t show up at all. Some voters are influenced not to support the candidate they prefer because they don’t see that he or she can win— which is what makes the candidate unable to win! In Alabama, where I live, crossover voting had to be criminalized, because some voters were using the primaries as a way to infiltrate their opposing party’s process with a ballot for the weakest candidate. Alabama is also one of only six states that still allows straight ticket voting, which offers a single political-party check box on the ballot instead of having to mark every race. That practice’s issues and flaws have led to its abolition in sixteen states since the mid-1990s, but in Alabama, 67% of voters cast a straight-ticket ballot in 2022. It was just as true in that fictional Alaska town of the 1990s as it is in our nation today: there are few things that reveal our imperfections, our quirks and inconsistencies, our humanity, warts and all, like an election will.