Recommended.

4 thoughts on “Recommended.”

1. First, he cherry picked the movies. There are plenty of movies that depict the hillbilly redneck interbred white trash country hicks as the bad guys. To his credit, he even named a couple of them later in the piece. In my opinion, that storyline is way more prevalent than the “country folk good, city folk bad” kind.

   But I get that he was just using that as a metaphor, not as evidence, so I’ll give him a pass on that.

   I have to say that his descriptions of rural attitudes about the city are pretty on point, at least from my experience.

   I seem to have had a similar experience to him, except that I didn’t grow up in a small town in Illinois. I grew up on a farm, 5 miles from the nearest small town, which was the county seat of a county with a total population at that time of less than 10k. The town had a population of about 3k.

   We had some similarities in our life experience, the difference is that I ended up living in cities as an adult because I joined the military, not because I went to an indoctrination center….er….university.

   Here’s where it all became clear:

   “I know the Good Old Days of the past were built on slavery and segregation, I know that entire categories of humanity experienced religion only as a boot on their neck. I know that those “traditional families” involved millions of women trapped in kitchens and bad marriages. I know gays lived in fear and abortions were back-alley affairs.

   I know the changes were for the best.”

   Obviously someone who grew up in a small town who went off to college and got properly indoctrinated.

   That’s the only explanation for “knowing” so many things that are not precisely true. Heck, he’s from Illinois. How much of Illinois’ history was built on slavery? ’cause I kind of remember it being in the North and losing quite a few men as part of the northern army fighting *against* slavery.

   As far as the “women kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” myth, I have to ask: what percentage of “modern” women are under care and medication for mental health conditions and how much of that might be related to the abandonment of traditional gender roles in society? Women these days are from birth taught that their natural tendencies are wrong and that they should really want to be essentially men with boobs, then they can’t figure out why most women are profoundly unhappy with their lives (and a good many of them are outright nuts).

   With all that said, he explores the differences between city folk and country folk but doesn’t really touch on the “why” (another clue that he’s not really a country kid per se but actually a suburbanite who was a bit farther away from the city than the norm).

   As someone who grew up on a farm, joined the military at 18 and spent my entire adult life in cities, I’ve thought a lot about that “why” part.

   It’s dependence. City folk just don’t grok how independent one has to be to really live out in the middle of nowhere. When your roof leaks, there aren’t 75 roofing companies vying for your business. There’s you, your brothers (if you have any) and any of your kids that are old enough to help. When your plumbing breaks, you don’t make a long distance phone call to a plumber – you fix it. If you don’t know how to fix it, you call a few of the other farmers in the area for advice. If you’re lucky, one will actually come help. When a tornado knocks a tree across the road in front of your house, you break out the chainsaw, cut it up and get it out of the road. Then you mill it into boards and posts to replace the 20 feet of barnyard fence the tornado knocked down. Then you go looking for the livestock that escaped while the fence was down and hope that most of them survived the storm.

   I could go on…all of those actual occurrences from my youth.

   In the city, if your roof leaks you call a handful of roofing companies and get competing bids to choose from. If your plumbing breaks, you call one of 1,000 plumbers on Yelp. If a tornado knocks a tree down, you wait for the city to come remove it and hire someone to fix the fence. Heck, if you you want to repair the fence yourself, you have to file and pay for permits, get a survey to make sure you’re not building it an inch too far onto city property, build it to specific codes and then get it all inspected and approved after your done. Most people don’t bother even if they could do it themselves.

   They don’t grow their own food, pump their own water, dispose of their own waste, dump their own trash. They don’t have land to take care of, they have property managers.

   City folk don’t know anything other than dependence. That’s why the question applied to every problem is not “how do I fix this” but “how do I get someone to fix this?”. To most, it never even occurs to them that they should know how to do things for themselves. Everything is someone else’s responsibility.

   I once rented a room for a few months in Northern Virginia (suburb of DC) while I had a short term job up there. The doorknob was broken on the room I was renting. I went to Lowes and bought a doorknob and fixed it in about 5 minutes. The owner of the townhouse was flabbergasted. He had no idea how to replace a doorknob and couldn’t fathom that someone who’s not a licensed, bonded, qualified contractor could understand such arcane alchemy. I told him not to worry about it, but he took $100 off my rent for a $10 doorknob and 5 minutes of work.

   Anyway, I think that’s at the root of the differences between city folk and country folk. dependency vs independence.

   Sidenote illustrating the point: My wife and I purchased a piece of land that will eventually be our retirement home. It had a house on it at one time that had burned down. The rubble was still there, all overgrown with weeds and even a couple of trees growing up from it.

   I tried to hire someone to come out and get rid of the debris and just couldn’t find anyone who would do it. Last summer I ended up taking a week vacation from work, having the biggest dumpster I could get delivered (it actually ended up being cheaper that way than hauling it to the dump myself), renting an excavator for the week and cleaning it up myself. Then the next trip out I had about 12 tons of top soil dumped and spread and leveled it myself with my John Deere garden tractor.

   That’s how country folk solve an intractable problem.

2. “redneck interbred white trash”

   Should have been “inbred” of course. I just got back from a trip and am still fighting jet lag…my brain is only firing on 7 cylinders.

   That’s as good an excuse as any so I’ll stick with it.

3. I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore. Live in a different one, returning after four years at Fort Knox (ROTC scholarship obligation). Never liked either the city or very rural areas. Baltimore City has some good areas and some bad areas, incomes don’t always predict which is which. But there was too much bad government. Rural life, from my time at Fort Knox, was just as boring to me as you would expect. Suburban life was what I grew up with and was familiar with.

   One thing about rural folks that I hear city folks gripe about is that they are insular. Gee, when you are hours from the nearest grouping of others, and need to depend on your neighbors from time to time, I would think insularity is a survival trait. But those self-described cosmopolitan city people are just as insular. Neighborhoods in Baltimore are like little towns. Being cosmopolitan means a guy from Little Italy drinking at a Greek bar. And the wealthy enclaves are quite insular, too. Nice people, going by all those I know, about a few dozen. Several of them helped my wife and I in hard times (support during personal tragedy). But they are very different from me, as I am from rural folks. (I have many relatives living in rural areas. FB friends mostly, some I grew up with, but I know I could visit and have a good week or two. But I am mobility limited.)

   The point is that we are all insular in different ways. In suburbia, you get an HOA, and there is little, short of a theocracy, more repressively insular than a bad HOA. Or a middle school clique. Humans band together into tribes and use many different criteria to filter membership. Location, income level, ethnicity, veteran or not, politics, religion (woke socialism rivaling hard core Abrahamic sects for intolerance), or even hobbies, among many others.

   Right now, American society is stressed. Rural areas are being squeezed economically. Cities are decaying from within from decades of perversely bad management. Suburbs are about to get hit by the loss of many white collar jobs if AI performs as predicted. And (hat tip to Mike Rowe) we don’t have nearly enough young people going into work-with-your-hands jobs needed to keep all the wheels turning.

   Can Trump, or any one Man on A White Horse, turn things around? No. And the brief bromance between Trump and Musk makes me doubt that a cooperative group of competent, powerful men can do that, either. Because it’s much easier to destroy than to rebuild, so men like Soros, Gates, etc., can work in parallel to replace our (mostly) republic with some type of autocracy with them at the reins. Can they do it without a fight? I don’t know.

4. That article was so full of BS it was pouring off his keyboard. I have neither the time nor inclination to bother to fisk the whole thing, but I will try to make one point.

   There is no longer any production of wealth in the inner cities. Anybody with a manufacturing facility has long since moved out, and if they needed to be near the utilities, products and services that are offered near (not within) a large urban area they have gone well out past the ring-roads of freeway into 3rd tier suburbs. Need a left-hand threaded bolt to keep your assembly line running, you’re going to need it fast and locally (within 50 miles). That is the only thing keeping them near these hellholes.

   I grew up in the Heart of the Hive™ (SW Minneapolis) and since the ’60’s have watched the collectivist/statist/authoritarians utterly destroy what was once a beautiful place to live and work. We started with the Dem-wing, and they morphed into “Democratic socialists”, and now they’ve finally admitted that they’re simply straight-up Marxists. The nicest parkway system in any city has been destroyed to the point where you can’t walk without stepping in human waste and used needles, and is covered with aggressive and dangerous alcohol/drug riddled bums (aka, “homeless”) camping wherever they wish. Crime has gone through the roof, and the stats are being covered up by both the police and the city as much as possible. Heck, James Lileks just got car-jacked in front of his house in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Mpls. As soon as I retired from an engineering job at a Mid-Corp (Fortune 500 but not quite a Mega-Corp) my wife and I got the heck out because anybody with two spare brain cells to click together could see what was coming.

   They made a deliberate choice to tax the productive out of the state, and to subsidize the parasites of all stripes, both government and free-lance, to the point where they turned a state budget surplus into a massive, unrecoverable deficit. Every single government-run pension fund is now horrifically under-funded. The Twin Shitties will eventually drag the entire state into that black hole of financial disaster. What’s their plan when things eventually go toes-up? Plan? We don’t got to show you no stinkin’ plan, we’ll just tax…oops, nobody productive left to tax. Never mind.

   I’m very glad we’ve put 1,000 miles between us and that pending burning mess. How many days food supply do you think the average dazzling urbanite has in stock? How much water? When the trucks stop rolling, and the water pumps stop turning, and the electricity goes off, how long before the subsidized classes start burning things (like that will help their problem)? Our old house was within 1 block of businesses that were looted and then burned to the ground back in the St. George of Fentanyl riots of 2020. They’ll try to walk out of the city, and will probably roll over the first couple of rings of suburb. Then they’ll be in the country with people who can actually shoot at ranges two football fields long, and gang-bangers and other assorted scum will be chopped into dog-meat by people defending their lives, their loved ones, and their homes.

   This is just ONE of the reasons why we left.