Bill Maher and the ‘M-Word’

Last month, comedian Bill Maher stirred up controversy — yet again — on his HBO show “Real Time.”

Interviewing U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, Maher said, “I’ve got to get to Nebraska more.”

Sasse replied, “You’re welcome! We’d love to have you work in the fields with us.”

Mr. Maher replied using the racial epithet for African-American slaves who worked inside Southern plantation homes rather than the fields.

“Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a ‘House N-word.’” (Maher used the actual word.)

The backlash was immediate and fierce. And Maher made an immediate and full apology.

Well, maybe not full.

He apologized for using the “N-word.”

Strangely overlooked in the episode was the fact that Maher’s insult wasn’t limited to African-Americans; it also deeply insulted farmers and Midwesterners.

When a Midwestern senator suggests Maher visit a Midwestern state and pitch in with farm work, Maher had an instant, knee-jerk response:

(1) Farm work is slave work — the lowest of the low;

(2) More explicitly, with his offensive “House N-word” comment, Maher was saying Midwest farming is somehow plantation-slave based farming.  Of course, Midwest farming never was slave-based, and in fact, not even Southern farming has been since the Civil War.

Watching the HBO clip, Maher’s apology and his complete ignoring of the Midwest, I came away thinking Maher is a deeply prejudiced man — not against African-Americans, but against Midwest farmers.

But it’s not just that Maher is so prejudiced. It’s that he is so incredibly ignorant.

The Midwest, after all, did more than any region to end the sin of slavery in this nation.

From the role of “Bleeding Kansas” and the St. Louis Dred Scott case — to Illinois’ Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, to humanitarian efforts of the Iowa Quaker abolitionists and Annie Wittenmyer to Midwest troops’ victories at Vicksburg, Atlanta, and Savannah and Charleston, the “Battle Cry of the Freedom” was sounded substantially by Midwesterners.

Nebraska was no exception.

From the very start, Nebraska was a free soil state. The territorial legislature voted to ban slavery in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War, and Nebraska’s first state Constitution in 1866 banned slavery forever.

And yet Bill Maher somehow thinks Nebraska farming and slavery go hand in hand.

Maher’s ignorance goes beyond history to farming generally. Maher seems to imagine Midwestern farming is like labor intensive cotton farming in the 1800s. He clearly has no notion that modern Midwest farming is more high tech, and a John Deere combine more expensive, than his Ferrari sports car — such that a half-section family farm, labor intensive though it is, requires fewer hands to operate than his HBO show.

Maher falls short even of the world of coastal elites and cable news pundits. In 2016, after President Trump won Iowa, and — very narrowly — Wisconsin and Michigan, the talking heads began scrambling to understand this strange new land called the “Midwest” that seemed to have changed so dramatically.

They found two books to study: “Hillbilly Elegy” and “White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America.”

Never mind these books were about Appalachia and the South, and have nothing to do with the Midwest.

But Maher couldn’t even be bothered to have the authors of those books on his shows. He’s content to live in his coastal elite bubble. His worldview resembles nothing so much as that famous “The New Yorker View of the World” cartoon:

That iconic cartoon shows a New Yorker’s point of view, looking west at the Big Apple in all its great, gritty detail — Ninth Avenue, 10th Avenue, the Hudson River, New Jersey. You can see people, buildings, cars, boats.   

Beyond there is a vast emptiness. A few rocks in the distance are, presumably, the Rocky Mountains. Texas and Las Vegas are on the map, with some red rocks and cacti, and Los Angeles beyond. Notably, Chicago, Kansas City and — Bill Maher, take note — Nebraska are scribbled in — though in crayon as if an afterthought.

Sadly, if that cartoon were updated today — it’s 41 years old — I suspect the Midwest would be even less prominent.
It’s time to reverse that trend.  

“The Midwest: How the Heartland Made America” is a new documentary film in development by my production company, Democracy Films. The film’s goal is to show how much of America — from citizen democracy to cowboy culture to our modern education system to mainstream American culture to American industry — was born, and continues to thrive, in the Midwest.

Maybe it will help make the Midwest more prominent on that New Yorker map, and in Bill Maher’s mind.

A tall order to be sure.  

But Midwesterners have never shied away from a challenge.

Dan Manatt is a documentary filmmaker and director of “Whiskey Cookers: The Amazing True Story of the Templeton Rye Bootleggers” and “The Fort: 177 Years of Crime and Punishment at the Iowa State Penitentiary.”

Based in Bethesda, Md., he is a partner in Manatt Family Farms in Audubon County.