What it means to be “country” has changed in the few decades of my lifetime, I think, from an experience to a brand cultivated by conservative forces.

    Once, when I was about 30, I saw a boy from a small town wearing a T-shirt that read pro-God, pro-guns, pro-life. I was shocked. In my experience, there was no evangelism about my family’s Catholic faith in the 1980s and little overt cross-pollination between our church and our politics. There was, that I can recall, no resentment toward people in cities with more formal education and money. I’m suspicious when I see these tropes trotted out proudly to represent the rural, working-class experience, often by people who have things my family never could have afforded.



kleinbl00:

Fuck this entire line of thinking.

    The people I’d grown up with were missing that information. But the liberal people I met in college often were missing another sort of information: what it feels like to pee in a cup to qualify for public benefits to feed your children. A teenager’s frustration when a dilapidated textbook is missing a page and there’s no computer in the house for finding the lesson online. The impossibility of paying a citation for expired auto insurance, itself impossible to pay despite 50 hours a week holding metal frying baskets at KFC.

I am ten years older than the author and it has been obvious since before I could read that cities were where the good stuff was. There's this litany that "it didn't used to suck in the country" and it's abject bullshit. It's always sucked in the country. We're just in a place where the suckitude of the country is more obvious than ever.

And thanks to the electoral college, the choads too stupid to move get to pick the president.

So spare me the sanctimonious "urban elites" bullshit. Getting the fuck out has been the goal of every rural thinker since "the city" was fuckin' Crete.


posted 2057 days ago