Ahh, the days of the Cold War

It’s an odd thing about South Dakota. Some days it feels like Brigadoon.

I spent most of the first 25 years of my life there, and yet some days it feels as though it disappears in a mist each time I leave.

Thankfully, it reappears almost every summer when I hop on a plane through Salt Lake City and fly home right under George Washington’s nose. I soar into town under the gaze of Mount Rushmore and spend a week re-creating my childhood vacations in the Black Hills.

But these days I feel like Brent Scowcroft describing his old friend Dick Cheney in The New Yorker. I feel like I don’t know my old state any more.

When I was a girl, growing up in a conservative Western city, a “live-and-let-live” mentality reigned. A local gynecologist could perform pre-Roe-vs.-Wade abortions without the sky falling in.

Now they’re legal, yet not a single doctor dares to perform the procedure in my hometown. The hard right wields such power that physicians fear once word got out, their practices would suffer.

My ancestors’ old “live-and-let-live” mentality has been roped and tied like a desperate rodeo calf.

When Republicans spotted a chance to beat former Senate minority leader Tom Daschle by infusing the place with cash and candidates, the anti-abortion furor only seemed to grow.

It seems amazing to me that a state settled by the likes of tough prairie women – some as hardened as Calamity Jane, a Victorian-era Janis Joplin, or as spunky and resourceful as Laura Ingalls Wilder – now chooses to control the reproductive choices of its contemporary women.

The governor signed the state’s abortion ban this month, and soon a long legal battle is expected to begin. This law may be quickly overturned, or it may slowly find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Either way, it revitalizes the abortion issue and wakes up feminists all over the country.

A friend recently forwarded an e-mail from a group called divasfordemocracy.com. This wacky bunch has launched a campaign to mail 50 boxes of wire coat hangers to every South Dakota legislator.

I’m hoping a statewide vote on the ban might be more effective.

I’ve racked my brain, trying to figure out what’s come over my home state. I think it’s a combination of forces; the vigor of the Christian right, a new cultural conservatism and a feminist backlash seem most obvious.

But I’m also blaming the fall of the communists. Yeah, I know. But hear me out.

I’ve noticed there seems to be a dark side of the American psyche that wants to find someone to blame for all that goes wrong in the world. Back during the Cold War, when I lived in the Sunshine State, local crackpots spinning dark fantasies could easily dash off a letter to the editor deriding the pink scourge.

Sometimes they mixed things up with a tirade about flag-burning or the Panama Canal, but it was the evils of communism that consumed them most.

Then the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved, and they were momentarily flummoxed. But the nuts living off the back roads soon regrouped. They needed a new enemy, and with the help of conservative radio hosts, they found one: liberals.

Swept up in their ire for all things “liberal” were new targets – gays, feminists and the pro-choice movement. Soon they were sharing Rush Limbaugh’s hostility against “feminazis” and “bleeding hearts.”

Suddenly wingnuts everywhere had found a new enemy, this one much closer to home.

And so my home state – and a batch of others likely soon to follow – drifted off like Brigadoon to another century. In this case, it landed in the 1800s, when laws against abortion were first passed in this country. No matter that those laws were devised primarily to save women’s lives.

I haven’t rounded up any coat hangers yet. But I’m growing a bit afraid of flying back under the noses of Washington and Jefferson next summer. When they were in charge of this country, abortion was legal.

Perhaps, like me, they’re starting to miss those lousy communists after all.