This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.I'm pretty sure that labor's wages were rising faster than we've seen lately before this happened, led by the 'empty government con man.' That's not what I want to talk about.
As for the 'decaying communities in revolt against the modern world,' son, we've got this if you can just take your systems of debt off our necks. I'm planting a garden, as are all of us. I never thought of myself as a gardener, but because I married a woman who loves gardens, I've built literal tons of them. The current one has three raised beds, more than twenty feet long, with the soil carefully broken and double-dug. They're amended with all organic things like ash and charcoal and manure.
We're going to have food in the harvest like you can't imagine. The forest is full of turkey and deer, the mountains full of bear and grouse. Our population density is minimal, and we live in fresh air and sunshine. School is canceled, but the school buses are still running to drop off food daily to the poor. If only we could figure out a way to push back mortgages, so we don't unhouse a bunch of people in the middle of the growing season, you could otherwise just stop worrying about us and focus on the afflicted cities.
It's the modern world's system of universal debt that's dangerous. Our community isn't decaying, it's growing. It's growing crops.
Well said!
ReplyDeleteYou have to pity the fellow, really. His world just went away.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't new, though this kind of Howl has gotten more blatant. The level of outright corrosive *hate* for people who are rural, Christian, Southern, and/or non-college-educated is just amazing.
ReplyDeleteI speculated on some of the roots of this phenomenon here: The Phobia(s) That May Destroy America
https://ricochet.com/548927/archives/the-phobias-that-may-destroy-america-2/
The mortgages will be taken care of in what they call GESARA, or a world wide currency reset, wiping out most debt or fiat currency, replacing it with a saner system of commerce and banking.
ReplyDeleteHowever, that will have to wait until most of the Cabal has been shown to the public.
Humans panicking is nothing new. Getting their hopes up and then crashing down to despair again... that's not new either.
David Foster:
ReplyDeleteYour piece concludes that:
“The primary factor behind anti-Christian/anti-“redneck” feelings is, almost certainly, the fact that these groups offer a convenient target for in-group solidarity and feelings of superiority at the expense of the ‘other.’”
That’s roughly the explanation that movie critic Joe Bobb Briggs gives in his work titled “How the Redneck Saved Hollywood.” His basic idea is that movies need villains, and by the late 1960s Nazis weren’t that relevant to young moviegoers and Native Americans were heroes. With both of the traditional options off the table, films from the Easy Rider era onward turned on rural and especially Southern Americans as the designated villains, building out that very complex you described as the explanatory narrative for why they were villains.
So partly it’s that we’ve had more than 50 years of storytelling building out this story. If think of yourself as one of the good guys, well, these small-minded backwards racists are the bad guys.
in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world
ReplyDeleteObama 2008:
"They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Now, if he had said that this crisis had exposed our system's failing Congress, incapable of acting for the good of the people instead of private or political-party gain; our ossified bureaucracies, incapable of moving off their own rules even at the risk of substantial loss of American life; our vast over-regulation, which had to be waived in order to keep goods flowing under stress....
ReplyDeleteYeah, he seems to have a pretty selective meaning for "decaying." I think an intelligent live disputant could get an entire hour out of getting him to define that term and giving examples of what he means by that.
ReplyDeleteThis is what goes wrong with echo chambers. In his own circles, there is a shared but vague sense of what he means that they largely agree on. It gets sloppy and lazy. It becomes a feeling, an impression, rather than a tightly-defined word. Everyone nods where he lives, but it hasn't much rigor. People believe they are having an actual conversation, but they are just sharing signals.
I gave up on The ATLANTIC some years ago. It stopped being rational, for my measure of "rational".
ReplyDeleteSam L.
ReplyDeleteI gave up on The ATLANTIC some years ago. It stopped being rational, for my measure of "rational".
The Atlantic turned me off some years ago by its inept management of the Disqus comment system. Disqus will often falsely label pedantic comments as spam. Pedantic comment traits that will cause Disqus to label spam: links (sources:footnotes, yes?), taking some minutes to write the comment, edits/corrections (Disqus doesn't have preview, so any correction/Edit will raise this red flag.).
Other websites that use Disqus will usually allow a comment previously flagged as spam to pass, if you modify it: such as fewer or no links, a quick copy/paste of the comment instead of spending minutes to add.
The Atlantic flagged as spam a comment I made that had two links regarding oil production. When later tried to add that comment, or ANY comment, all my subsequent postings were flagged as spam.
Later, The Atlantic stopped all comments.
I had read The Atlantic for decades. Oh well.
We used Disqus here for a while, and Haloscan before that. I lost all the comments from the early years when Haloscan folded.
ReplyDeleteI am not klinging to my swords.
ReplyDeleteA careful wipe is needed for cleaning, maintenance, and polish/sharpening.
For those that have a long rifle, how are you going to use it by clinging to it? Shouldn't it be at least attached to your tactical/hunting pack's weapon sling...
I lost all the comments from the early years when Haloscan folded.
ReplyDeleteI always hoped the Clowns in Action and FBI had lost them as well. Given the danger of somebody open source data mining me.
Very easy to get red flagged and disappeared back then. Now with Q Anon and the Tea Party tanking most of the damage, it is easier to get lost in the crowd.
Yeah, he seems to have a pretty selective meaning for "decaying."
ReplyDeleteIt's amusing that it is both selective and vague at the same time.
"This is what goes wrong with echo chambers. In his own circles, there is a shared but vague sense of what he means that they largely agree on. It gets sloppy and lazy. It becomes a feeling, an impression, rather than a tightly-defined word. Everyone nods where he lives, but it hasn't much rigor. People believe they are having an actual conversation, but they are just sharing signals."
ReplyDeleteIt's almost unbelievably true. At a meeting at my children's elementary school some years ago where most of the community attended, I literally heard a man get up and proclaim "at least we're all progressives here". When my turn to speak came, I proceeded to inform him- being a lifelong resident of the community- that no, there is a diversity of opinions and ideologies here- some people are classical liberals, some libertarian, and -gasp- some even conservative- just check the voter rolls. You could literally see his jaw drop. Several people came up to me afterwards in appreciation.
They really can be amazingly blindered.