I used to be embarrassed to have been born in the South.

Surely, a taproot was the teasing I got from friends and classmates I grew up with in Detroit, and later in Grosse Pointe Park across the street. They’d heard my parents’ drawl, learned I was born in South Carolina, and smelled blood in the water.

All children have at least one exposed flank. The arch of my Achilles was the hick taunt. And the kids knew just when to launch the barrage; around summertime dusk, as light was calling an end to the day’s football/baseball/basketball/bike rides.

“Scawwwt!” they’d howl out in an outlandish (but piercing) southern accent. “Tahm fa suppah!”

So as I aged I was proud to tell people I was from Michigan. And, essentially, I am: I moved to Detroit in the middle of first grade, stayed in the area through high school, went to the University of Michigan and returned for a professional stint at the Detroit News.

I don’t know why, but I always thought of Michigan as a progressive, if not liberal-leaning, place. Perhaps I was too young to see my state through a political prism, but in retrospect I realize I was just in Michigan’s liberal pockets: the metro Detroit area; and Ann Arbor. At the News, my beat was cops, and that only further confirmed my blue bias. Black mayors ran the town and minority council members were the norm, not exception.

So when I became politically aware, I brought along my political blind spots. And when Trump took my state — and the nation — in 2016, the only thing that dropped faster than my jaw was my internal glass compass, which sharded into a million tiny little pieces.

My home voted Trump? My blue-collar state turned as red as the president’s jowls? There had to have been a glitch in the Matrix.

But now I every time I hear “Meanwhile, in Michigan…” I get queasy. I know what’s coming. Some dumbass is protesting not being able to carry his AK-47 into a nursery school. Or “protesters” are chanting “Lock her up” outside the state capital because the governor recommends masks.

Last week, Michigan closed its capitol in Lansing and canceled its legislative session rather than face the possibility of an armed protest and death threats against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

The session, meant to advocate opening the state for business despite the coronavirus pandemic, followed one in which military-clad goons carrying rifles into the capitol confronted police and taunted lawmakers.

What the actual fuck? I used to go to the Detroit Science Center, now the Michigan Science Center. I remember the exhibits on space, motion, gravity. In the halcyon gauze of memory, I recall a place straight out of The Jetsons.

Apparently, Mitten dolts still do. I see a surprising number consider concepts like physics an exercise in ideology — one they take a frightening amount of pride in rejecting.

You see, it’s legal in Michigan to carry a firearm in public — including the grounds of the capitol — “as long as the person is carrying the firearm with lawful intent and the firearm is not concealed.” So how the hell do you determine lawful intent? Does the guy below look ‘lawful?’ You can’t bring 3.5 ounces of water on a plane, but you can bring your semis to assembly meetings?

Governor Whitmer is probably right: The protesters in Michigan are just political rally organizers hawking for Trump. But there’s no denying that the state is nearly about half red — tacitly endorsing an existentially dangerous brand of politics. One that has decided concepts like Flat Earth, Creationism and global warming are legitimate scientific controversies. They’re not. But giving the “theories” intellectual credence has  muddied concepts once considered universal truths. like protective masks.

We once accepted as beneficial a filter mask in a pandemic. Now, masks (or lack of them) have become political honor badges, appropriately shaded blue: Masks have become the latest totem of virtue signalling, the hottest trend in national politics. Democrats wear masks. Republicans don’t.

Michigan, like so many other states, has entered into a Faustian political bargain with this thinking: endorsing the president of an organization (in this case government) who doesn’t believe in the organization (in this case the government). Who prefers a conspiracy theory to a pragmatic one. Whose one compass reading is unilateral.

Consider how profound the shift Trump brought to American politics. Our own administration does not trust its own intelligence branches. It does not trust its own medical authorities. It does not trust its own scientists. Are we expected to?

What an odd position for an American citizen. Say, for instance, you need a new car, so you head to the closest dealership.

During the test drive, the blunt salesman tells you how corrupt all dealerships are. That they take 20% of all car sales minimum, which consist of only $10,000 worth of equipment, maximum. That when a salesman tells you he’ll have to check with the manager about the price, most of them get coffee. Some even brag about going to the bathroom in a moneygasm jack off, just to have a sincerely relieved face and sincere smile when they tell you congratulations,  “the manager somehow said yes!”

At the end of the drive, are you going to buy the car? Would you offer $10,000? Would you rethink the offer when the salesman says, “Lemme check with my manager?”

That’s where the administration has left us. The GOP has become so consumed with profits and polls it will consume any cult defector and honor any suicide bomber. Whistle blowers? They’re just disgruntled employees. Contradicting scientists and military leaders? Those poor Obama brainwashees. Global warming? Remember that cold night in February?

Meanwhile, Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty for lying to the F.B.I. about his meetings with the Russian ambassador, was set up in an Obama-borne conspiracy on the president fully knows. Trump has ordered Bill Barr to dismantle that entire Russian unpleasantness.

And my state uses his rallies to shout his name in victory, to hoist banners adorned with swastikas and nooses. Because America.

I was ready to renounce the entire state as the dark crow’s nest of my early days on the wing. Then I read about this guy:

Meet Shalinder Singh. Before the pandemic, Shalinder Singh spent Sundays at his gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, helping serve a community meal for about 300 people in suburban Detroit.

Now, he’s all about pizza.

Singh and his family have paid for and delivered hundreds of pies to Detroit hospitals, police stations and fire departments since the gurdwara suspended in-person services. Singh and his family wanted to carry on a tenet of their faith: helping others through langar, the communal meal shared by all who come.

That’s the Michigan I remember. So let’s clarify, now that I’m not so naive and embarrassed.

Detroit will always be my hometown. But I was born in Charleston, y’all.