America, mon amour: travels in a divided land.

I made this photographic road trip in my home state of Oregon in the summer of 2004, while America was under the spell of the presidential campagne. G.W.Bush was running for a second term against the Democrat, John Kerry. Having lived in France since the early 70’s and following Wood Stock and the Watergate scandal which forced Pres. Nixon out of office, I was having difficulty understanding this conservative backlash that had occurred in America. The trauma of 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq had whipped the United States into a frenzy of jingoism that I had never experienced. Many Americans believed, still, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in spite of the fact that our troops had been on the ground already for about a year and had found nothing! How were Americans still able to support an administration that had lied to them? What had happened to my country?