Sheridan, Wyoming:  My friend took me to the local Walmart to pick up supplies for the long drive home.  He introduced me to the lady at the checkout counter.  In a small western town, you get to know pretty much everyone.  If not, you assume everyone is a friend.

"Where are you from?" the lady asked.

"You don't want to know," I answered.  After a bit I relented.  "California."

"Oh, you poor thing."

Sadly, in parts of California that I used to love, she would be met with scorn and derision.  By way of contrast, her sympathetic reaction pretty much says it all regarding the difference between red states and blue states.

Some of those differences were immediately striking.  Every restaurant and bar (the two are often the same) has its wall-mounted TV.  CNN is banned.  News, if any, is Fox.  After a few days in Wyoming, I was not surprised when I stopped for lunch, and President Trump was giving a speech on the giant screen above the bar.

Why Sheridan?  Well, there was going to be an eclipse – a total eclipse of the sun that would pass through the center of the state a hundred-plus miles to the south.  This would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me.  I had to go see it.  Much more than that, it would give me a chance to once again visit with my lifelong friends, John and Gloria.  They had moved to Sheridan from California several years ago and found a place they had come to deeply love.

The several days I stayed in Sheridan gave John a chance to show me around and meet some of his rapidly widening circle of friends.  John took me to a little shop down on Main Street – a shop owned by another John, a Different John. 

Different John's shop was typical for that part of the world.  Racks of used and new rifles and shotguns lined one of the walls.  In front were the usual glass cases containing an assortment of pistols and knives.  All these were working tools, obviously intended for heavy-duty use.  Throughout the rest of the store was an assortment of odds and ends for sale ranging from a motorcycle to camping gear to containers of various kinds.  Different John even had an airplane for sale, but that was at the airport.  And there were the books - prepper books, mostly.

While John, Different John, and I were sitting and chatting, a striking middle-aged couple walked in.  The lady's dress was a stunning ruby silk chemise.  The man was tall, slender, and weather-worn.  On his head was his best Stetson.  The hat had been around, but it preserved its dignity.  His boots were mixed snakeskin and carved leather – expensive, but they, too, had been around.  What really caught my eye was the shirt tucked into his Levis.  Starched and whitened to snow, it was.  These two were in their Sunday best. 

The couple had a small ranch in Utah, some 450 acres, or about two thirds of a square mile.  They had driven the several hundred miles to attend a wedding.  Sure enough, within a few minutes, the newlyweds rode by, down the middle of Main Street, in a horse-drawn surrey. 

The man's large brass buckle suggested he was important.  It turned out that he was a kind of impresario for rodeo bull riders.  Whether he had once ridden bulls remained undetermined.

The two examined various long guns from the racks.  One particularly expensive shotgun caught their fancy.  Even though it was August, I suspect that some early Christmas shopping was taking place.

Different John did not regard the visiting couple as unusual.  After all, Wyoming is still a frontier, and country people go to the big city (in this case, Sheridan, with its population of seventeen thousand) to get their supplies. 

The spirit of the place reminds me of what I found when I first joined the aerospace industry more than half a century ago.  Those were heady days.  We were going to the Moon.  Nothing was going to stop us.  Wyoming is something like that.  Its promise is its enormous latent wealth in its rich ranch land and in an almost inexhaustible stock of hydrocarbons. 

Wyoming is a red state because its people demand their individual freedom.  Wyoming is a red state because it looks to an expansive and ever expanding future.  It is a place of optimism.  There is room for anyone who shows initiative. 

This is in contrast to the blue-state enclaves – the big coastal cities (their hinterlands are mostly red).  These blue enclaves look backward.  They are places of pessimism.  Perhaps it is the crowding that makes their dominant ideology nineteenth-century socialism mixed with eighteenth-century international aristocracy.  They have learned nothing from the savagery of the twentieth century.  To blue-staters, it seems easier to have someone take care of you and tell you what to do.  Individualism, initiative, is bad – it is disruptive.  

People absorbed in the blue-state syndrome believe themselves to be elite.  After all, the noisiest of them often have diplomas from prestigious universities.  But who really are the elite in this great nation?  I suggest that the true elite are not the many whiney, over-schooled but under-educated self-appointed elitists of the blue states.  You may never have heard of the real elite.

The dictionary defines elite as "the best."  Indeed, a sports hero is elite – but only in that sport.  Sadly, our celebrity culture amplifies specialized excellence so as to make the hero something he is not.  He is not elite outside his sport.  The same is true of many different specialties.  A great actor has no business preaching politics.  A news reader may be a public policy jackass.  A university professor may be a very erudite fool.  In all areas outside their expertise, these people are ordinary citizens, the same as you and me.  And they should be so regarded.  In ordinary affairs, they are not elite.

So who are the true elite?  I suggest a further definition: the elite are those who make an essential difference. 

Several decades ago, I spent a couple of weeks camping out with a billionaire.  That was in an era when a billion dollars was really big money.  This individual did not start out rich.  He made it the hard way.  In the beginning, as a young man, he scraped together enough money to buy a beat up old pickup truck.  He made bucks hauling goods around.  With hard work and shrewd investment, he built his business up so that he was by now the sole owner of a very large long haul trucking company.  Coincidently, he also owned a huge working ranch in Wyoming and a couple of high-prestige art galleries together with an important personal collection of art.  He accomplished all that without a fancy diploma from a prestigious university.  Moreover, he did not impose his opinion on others.  That gentleman indeed made an essential difference!

Now consider Wyoming.  This state produces food and energy and the requisite skills for such production.  It is also very good, as it has to be, at repairing things.  If complex American society were to fail, Wyoming would suffer because it no longer would have the products produced by the blue enclaves.  But Wyoming would survive. 

On the other hand, the blue enclaves would die without the food and energy from Wyoming and the other primary producing areas of the country.  Wyoming makes an essential difference.  The people of Wyoming make an essential difference.  The blue cities do not.  Fancy diplomas are nice to have, but they are not essential.  They do not make a real difference.

So who are the true elite?