MORE FUN WITH GRAPHICS

There's an interesting resemblance between these two maps, no?





Yeah, your kid can still get paddled legally in school in some parts of the country, as this article from yesterday's New York Times notes; as a parent you don't necessarily have the right to say no to this, depending on the school district, and the result to your kid can be "a backside that [is] a florid kaleidoscope of plums and lemons and blood oranges."

Obviously there are some parts of the country that are more amenable than others to self-righteous, cruel, florid violence as a routine, sanctioned, everyday response to violations of societal rules.

I could have put up the 2000 electoral map as easily as the 2004 map, even though that came before Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition. I think Americans had a gut sense that Bush-the-nice-guy-you'd-want-to-have-a-beer-with had that nasty, vindictive streak, that ability to go evil; neither Gore nor Kerry seemed to have it, and the states, perhaps, voted accordingly, knowing exactly what they wanted.

Here's a third map, by the way, which doesn't track the first map exactly but suggests that all that paddling isn't exactly keeping people on the straight and narrow. But if violent retribution satisfies the cravings of the self-righteous, maybe the self-righteous don't care if it actually works.