This is how a small town dies

There's a really moving story in the Times today, about a Kansas farmer watching his way of life die. This is such a rich and complicated story, and touches on a lot of things that "Crunchy Cons" is about: families, place, tradition and the inexorable pull of modernity.

Next year, Mr. Warner believes, there will be even fewer farmers here, in part because of fuel costs.

And he wonders what will become of his legacy and his land.

His son Travis, 18, wants to know more people besides his dad and the salesman at the John Deere dealership. The nearest pretty girl is 20 miles away.

He wonders if there isn’t something better than stumbling out to the fields with sleep still in your eyes and working past midnight. The summer air here is as stifling as corduroy drapes. Travis hasn’t spoken about this to his father, but his father suspects it just the same.

Travis is a state wrestling and hog breeding champion. He is going off to college soon and doesn’t know if he’ll ever come back. His brother, Dustin, left for good. “I like to work with people, I guess,” Travis says. “Be around people. And we come out here every day. It’s Dad and myself; that’s not working with people.”

The kid is lonely. The kid wants to get married. Who can begrudge him that? And Warner's wife, Travis's mother, she hardly ever gets to see her husband, who's in the fields so much. Almost no vacations, either. She's lonely and isolated too. What kind of life is that? “The best kind of life there is," the farmer says.

No political party seems to care much about the working man’s life, Mr. Warner feels. Stick a Republican and a Democrat in a sack, shake it up, pour it out, and the same rapacious thing crawls out. Creatures from a smoke-filled room.

Mr. Warner, a Pentecostal Christian, believes in miracles. He believes in speaking in tongues. He believes that abortion is taking a life and that gay marriage is an abomination. So he voted Republican.

What crumbs do the Democrats offer him? Two men in tuxedos on the steps of City Hall with a marriage license in hand? Handouts for those who won’t work? Mr. Warner says he could be peeled away from the conservatives if the liberals would talk to him about his values:

“God. Family. Work,” he counts them on his fingertips and adds them up. “Heritage.”

If the liberals would talk to him about God, family, work and heritage. Well, fat chance of that happening. But it's pretty to think so.