BEMUS POINT — I was driving on the freeway in Chautauqua County in southwestern New York State when I was passed by a Tesla on autopilot driving exactly 75 mph in a line as straight as a yardstick. I was about ten miles from Thomas Alva Edison’s summer home at Chautauqua Institution — that great place where my late wife, Sue, and I spent many happy hours. We listened to concerts; went to church; enjoyed insightful lecturers; met new friends; talked about many things and all in the very shadow of our Lake house – that utterly beautiful place where I sit on the shores of Chautauqua Lake, a mere six miles as the crow flies from the fabled huge summer learning center for adults.

I love Chautauqua. There, for example, last week I could hear a lecture in the morning on global warming, the symphony winds dazzle with Dvorak, a piano recital of Rachmaninoff and Schubert’s works at night. And if I so choose, I could hear a wonderful lecture in the department of religion on the work of inner city preachers.

But Chautauqua, for all of its erudite smarts, can sometimes make one wonder if their program management has their heads on straight or more accurately if they are living at all in their next door neighbor’s world? This past week a lecturer, more accurately a professor, shared information garnered from 28 counties in Wisconsin, to which this professor of political science went and listened to morning coffee kletz’s. She told her Chautauqua audience that she stayed in a hotel and would get up early in the morning, go and just listen to what the locals were worried about. This she did for many months driving from place to place staying in Motel 8’s. Good hearted professors don’t do this sort of thing for nothing, or on their nickel. She had grants from various organizations, mostly Wisconsin based, that paid for the study. And then she wrote articles, she wrote a book and she got tenure being a good investment for the University.

Four-plus years later a few hundred Chautauqua visitors paid $50/head to hear the good word from Wisconsin. Which brings me to my question – just where is the Chautauqua program leadership living. Five miles from Chautauqua’s gates — Edison’s old summer grounds — are areas so backward in technology that some kids lack a computer, broad band, or even good textbooks. Locals attend the morning lectures too and they laughed about it with me – This erudite woman from a department of political science told every local working for the Institution something they already knew. “they don’t listen to us; we pay too much tax; everything is done by Albany to us; they’re ruining our schools; etc. etc. Washington – that’s a place for navel contemplators (her words not mine) that never get anything done.’ “We don’t trust the federal government, the state government, and rarely our friends and neighbors that govern us at home.” All one had to do is go to morning coffee in Sherman, Mayville, Bemus Point, or Lakewood.

Though I’m from Ohio and call Bemus Point my home, I can drive from Toledo to Columbus by the back roads and get the same message – rural America voted for Donald Trump because they felt they had nothing to lose, and nowhere else to turn. I have no idea how much it cost the Institution to entertain the speaker for near a week. Nor is that really any of my business. But what is my business is that whatever it cost, could have been spent 10 miles from Chautauqua’s gates. All Chautauqua’s management had to do, if the notion of an American voter split was on their mind is take a bus load to the Dutch Village Restaurant in Clymer, or the Bemus Inn in Bemus Point, or if they dared have a hot dog with everything at Johnny’s Lunch in Jamestown. Ten miles from that place where this very practiced social scientist could talk to quiet applause, are many Amish farms where young folks go to school only through the 8th grade, families ride in buggies driven by a single horse, and there are no electric lights in the homes. During the day, women and girls from these farms come to Edison’s Chautauqua to clean rooms, make beds, walk barefooted on the grounds, and I suppose peel potatoes near the spot where George Gershwin composed Concerto in F. (I learned long ago that if I want a meal here, I’m far better off with the Amish cooks in Clymer than the Chautauqua summer locals where kale, fruit drinks filled with more carbonation than orange juice, and meatless hamburgers rule the day.)

Why didn’t they do that? Because had they done so visitors paying hundreds a day to be informed wouldn’t have signed up? Wouldn’t have gone? They weren’t really interested were they? They just wanted to listen to a package. And that’s one real, could be near fatal, problem.

So what, today, is the real America? That of those that frequent Chautauqua Institution? That of the Amish farmers, or of the nearby children growing up in a cultural desert? Is it of the people that feel uncared about – the four retired teachers chatting over coffee in a service station, or the ladies of the morning after the kids are off to school?

Or could it be some combination of all three, and perhaps the inner city, the prosperous suburbs, and various other Americas combined? And if that’s what is how are we ever going to come together?

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a Chautauquan to my core. And I know that if you choose New York or Baltimore or even Toledo as I do as my primary residence, you don’t get to vote here. So I pay a double whammy – for the children of my Ohio hometown schools, and for Maple Grove school students too. The people who can, make sure visitors that own property pay plenty of taxes for local roads, bridges, and most important schools. Maybe the natives want to live the life of the Chautauquan, not that of the Amish or others that are native here now. Maybe they don’t. But to give their children the option, they make sure the schools can help them achieve their own mission. All the while they are complaining together that nobody hears them, the taxes are too high, and they put up with all those foreigners because they bring money.

That all makes sense to me. But what doesn’t make sense is that so many of the same folks vote for politicians who stand for the opposite of what they are. Former President Donald Trump, could talk to those that really live here and gain their confidence and their vote, yet if Trump came to Clymer and lived with those that have breakfast every morning in the Dutch Village Restaurant I’m not at all sure how long he would last. (Come to think about it, that’s a question for the locals – OK guys if a NY fast talker came for breakfast in Clymer, or Bemus could he sit at your table?) Still Trump managed to convince them that he was going to make America great again. So when elected what’s he do? He lowers taxes on the richest – those guys and gals at the Institution where they only come for a few weeks in the summer, while doing little or nothing for the neediest Chautauqua County residents. Some might also argue his policies made the pandemic worse in rural areas. Still the surrounding citizens, who were hurt overall by his policies, whose schools and children’s chances of success were threatened by them, enthusiastically did his bidding. Today, a mere five miles from Chautauqua’s hallowed grounds, one can still find signs for Trump and Pence, eight months after they lost the election.

Edison may have been flummoxed by a Tesla; I’m in awe of the sales skills of a certain New York City con artist. The guys in the city rushed here because it was safer in the time of COVID. They won’t stay. The area can’t afford refined concerts in winter. But the city slicker Trump may have staying power. And that more than flummoxes me. It worries me.

Douglas Neckers is an organic chemist Distinguished Professor emeritus and the founder of the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University. He’s the former chair of the board of the Robert H. Jackson Center.