Imagine you met George W Bush at a gas station in Northeastern Tennessee and asked him for directions to the nearest Denny’s. He’s not the President and you don’t know him. He tells you to take a left at the light, then a right half a mile down the road, and asks you what kind of dog that is in the backseat of your car.

Even the most disagreeable people in America are decent when you meet them on a one-on-one basis, removed from a political context.

greeted as liberators is about an America in which you can spend months meeting people with whom you have little in common and being impressed by their kindness and generosity, only to realize that these are also the same people who voted for George W Bush, for war in Iraq, for waterboarding and cementing the legal status of gay people as second-class citizen. It’s about trying to justify the personal and the political, to find where the two meet and where they split.

greeted as liberators is about the last election, but it’s about the next one, too. It takes place all over America. In gas stations and Waffle Houses and in palatial houses in New Mexico owned by total strangers who open their homes to you. It’s about America, and it only looks like it’s about politics.