Country vs. flag

The "near-nomadic life" is something we've all come to accept as an inevitable part of life in the modern economy.

We've all? Again, what share of the population lives outside of the canton (in your case tributaries of Baton Rouge, in my case, Rochester) in which they were reared, and how does this compare to the shares that did so in 1960 or in 1920?

Does settling someplace different than that in which you were reared constitute a life of 'nomadism'? My mother has lived in the same city since 1954, and is civically engaged as anyone.


When I was in California visiting with P., we talked about how our fathers could barely conceive of leaving their hometowns behind ... and yet both of us couldn't wait to do so.

Your father and his father, but who else's father? Do you think you might be making an unwarrented extrapolation - i.e. taking the experiences of a relatively small corps of salaried employees and entrepreneurs as the norm? The majority of the workforce are wage-earners and many salaried and professional people are not highly mobile either for reasons of personal preference or because it does not pay.>

scotch meg:

Your analysis is spot on. Well said.

In the end, I believe that a culture of life (think of the Shire) can only resist 'Americanism' by a fierce unity and exculsion like the Amish or even Mormans practice.

One can hold out for a single generation, maybe even two - but after that, expect to become swallowed up through intermarriage and economic pressures unless agressive measures are taken.>

Is it sensible to complain about the rootlessness of modern Dallas inhabitants when the city itself is less than 175 years old?

Have we as Americans lost something with their moving from wherever they came from to Dallas? Well, did we lose something when the city's original inhabitants do the exact same thing in the 1850's?

Have we lost something twice?

Or did the city of Dallas become a community after those original "nomads" built those connections and relationships on which communities depend? That particular form of community may have been lost with the advent of the car and the telephone, and with the subsequent arrival of new settlers, but that doesn't mean that a new form of community is henceforth impossible.

Let us not so fetishize the old that we think of the old as the eternal, and the new as the uniquely ethereal. The old community in Dallas was once quite new, and the new community may one day become its own old community.>

Check out todays surprising editorial in the NY Times about the dimished role of the Local Banker. Great stuff.>

Is your concept of coherent, consistent crunchiness possible in a nation whose founding principles include severing ties with its roots?

I often wonder the same thing. It seems that Rod and his likeminded friends seem to reject a lot about modernity, but I wonder where precisely they draw the line between what was good and what is now bad.

Surely that line precedes the postwar growth of suburbia. Does it also precede the industrial revolution? It seems to precede even the enlightenment; does that mean it even precedes things like the movable-type printing press, that helped lead to the enlightenment?

If the reactionary agrarians reject the Reformation that informed the motives for many of this country's first settlers, the mobility that shaped its culture of individualism, and the Enlightenment that shaped its politics, in what way are they -- to borrow from the original subtitle in Rod's book -- attempting to save America?

They may be loyal to the ground beneath our feet, but it seems like the oppose the foundational ideas at the heart of this country. By an apparent rejection of things like the Enlightenment and the Reformation, they urge a return to Europe's roots, not ours.>