Here's a FB post. Well, it's a compound post.
--Kim
My friend Nancy posted this and I said Please Lord, just one movie in which city folk represent decency and sanity and country folk are wacked to hell and back (besides Cold Comfort Farm, which is great, but English and from the 1930s). To which I might add the old conceit in which the city represents decadence and the countryside wholesomeness has bedeviled the English-speaking world for several centuries and is now a fixture and a curse upon American politics, the right having convinced rural people that, first, they are the wholesome Real Americans and second that we city folk despise and hate them.
Hate them for their wholesome traditional ways, rather than maybe we don't hate them or maybe we hate intolerance and racism and the repression that hides abuse of all kinds (and maybe not a few city people are refugees from those idyllic-looking rural places that want to kill queer people, unsubmissive women, immigrants, and dissenters). I will give it to Barbara Kingsolver's new book Demon Copperfield, in that it portrays a lot of violence, cruelty, trapped ness, and addiction in rural America. Aunt June who went to Knoxville is maybe the strongest moral force in the book and the most cleareyed character. Thanks to Susan for reminding me that Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is another portrait of rural America as unwholesome, and so is Jane Smiley's retelling of King Lear in A Thousand Acres. What other classics of the unwholesome countryside are there? I think Thomas Hardy straddles the divide, loving some things and recognizing the cruelty and repression of others.
I grew up in a suburban cul-de-sac, the last subdivision before the country, on the edge of dairy farms. Our street was a spur off a long street, and I and learned to ride (western, of course) at the end of the long street become dirt road dead-ending in a horse pasture. I've spent many of the best days of my life in rural and wild places, and I admire the skill and toughness of people who work the land and tend it, but it's probably assumed that since I'm urban, left, and environmental I hate rural people. And it's true that I grew up among middle-class white people who mocked and ridiculed Dolly Parton and country music and southern accents, but I haven't heard that nastiness in a long while.
I got an essay out of it years ago, titled "One Nation Under Elvis": "The story that racism belongs to poor people in the South is a little too easy, though. Just as not everybody up here, geographically and economically, is on the right side of the line, so not everyone down there is on the wrong side. But the story allows middle-class people to hate poor people in general while claiming to be on the side of truth, justice, and everything else good." In other words, a vile class war pretends to be an anti-racist war. I've met rich urban/northern racists and poor southern/rural antiracists. Categories are leaky.
To all this I'll add a few paragraphs from this great column from four years ago by Paul Waldman (but please note that just as far from all conservatives/MAGA nuts are rural, so not all rural people are conservatives/MAGA nuts). Waldman writes: In the endless search for the magic key that Democrats can use to unlock the hearts of white people who vote Republican, the hot new candidate is "respect." If only they cast off their snooty liberal elitism and show respect to people who voted for Donald Trump, Democrats can win them over and take back Congress and the White House.
The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive. It ignores decades of history and everything about our current political environment. There's almost nothing more foolish Democrats could do than follow that advice.
Before we proceed, let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that the desire for respect isn't real. As a voter says in "The Great Revolt," a new book by conservative journalist Salena Zito and Republican operative Brad Todd, "One of the things I really don't get about the Democratic Party or the news media is the lack of respect they give to people who work hard all of their lives to get themselves out of the hole."
But the mistake is to ignore where the belief in Democratic disrespect actually comes from and to assume that Democrats have it in their power to banish it.
It doesn't come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn't come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that's devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them.
It's more than an industry, actually; it's an industry, plus a political movement. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity. https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../why-democrats-cant.../
[I'd also add that the Democrats reliably advocate for legislation--access to healthcare, education, social services, clean water, etc.-- that would benefit anyone poor or struggling and most people who are rural (if not big farming and ranching interests), but this is often ignored by the mainstream media and the right just plies them with the red meat of ideological issues, with the help of conservative Christian churches obsessing about abortion, sexuality, "traditional families" aka patriarchal repression, and lately critical race theory, trans kids, and other us-vs.-them frames.]
p.s. Eric Michael Garcia, the author of this genius tweet, is the author of a book on autism titled We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. Link in comments.
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