The end of the road for rural America

That's home. Floydada is my hometown. Our farm was just a couple of miles from Cone. My mother was born in Paducah. I have a connection to every town he mentions. Ventura whines about how they apparently hate him even as he describes these folks as "large white people of a certain ilk". We get the point. He thinks they're trash. I'm sure his feelings were as clear as theirs. This isn't happening because of some tidal wave of history. There was no "Industrial Revolution" style technological leap that forced people off of farms. This is about cheap labor and government policy. Arugula isn't going to save these towns.

I dunno, my older brother was raised by upper-middle-class liberals and never wanted for opportunity in his life. He still looks with spite at guys in ponytails. The thing about the New World -- with apologies to any American Indians reading this -- is that the settlement patterns of the United States are perforce provisional. How the heck are we supposed to know where to live and how? They homesteaded the Montana prairie, for goodness' sake, not to mention Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. It wasn't a good long-term bet. Nor were the old mining and timber towns up in the conservative far northern California really sustainable.
Not that they weren't all good people and all. It just wasn't meant to be.

Its not just something that creativity will fix. Its not something that the regulations and programs Dreher wants will fix. The Lord of the Rings (the books, not the movies) is the thing to read here. The Third Age ends, the elves pass into the West, and anything that could stop it would be worse. There is no rest and no stability outside eternity. I weep for these people.

I was under the impression that the fact that farming is much more capital intensive than it was 100 years ago when the Great Plains were settled might have something to do with the reason farming is less viable than it was then. And didn't the Great Depression (and the Dustbowl) and the demand for manufacturing labor in WWII begin the migration from the plains? I may not love Monsanto or ADM, but there are other factors than agrobusiness for the decline of rural life on the Plains. And the mechanization of agriculture has had a significant impact nationwide.

living in nyc, i never hear anyone sneering at the 'stupid red states' or at nascar or at fundamental christians. we live our lives and are perfectly content to let others live theirs. this coulterish urban myth of unending derisiveness is absurd and does not stand up to scrutiny.

This trend has been going on for a century, and it is based partially on the increasing capital intensity and improving transportation of the modern economy. Essentially, a market town draws its business from people no more than a few hours ride away. Around 1900, that meant towns about 5-6 miles apart. These towns had a 5 room hotel, a two or three employee bank, and a general store which had everything one needed, which wasn't much. If Mr Drucker didn't have it, you better just do without. By the 20s with improved cars and roads, towns could be farther apart, and people shopped at Sears or Monkey Ward's. Now, they'll trave 80 miles on the interstate to Wal-Mart. Couple this with less labor intensive farms and that's the way it is. The same thing is happening in the rust-belt urban areas where the days of walking into the steel mill the day after high school graduation to a lifetime job with a pension at the end are gone now. Do I have the answers? Hell, no. I dream every night of being back in the Wisconsin north woods. However, ya gots to make a living.
Kim M

andy, The reason you don't hear many derogatoroy comments about people from the red states in New York City is the same reason that you don't hear many derogatory comments about New York City or the blues states in the red ones: for the most part, the twain don't meet. But when they do, there's misbehavior involved on both sides, though, in my observation, it tends to be the blue side that instigates the trouble and the red side that (over)reacts to it. I get much more of a sense that the blue states want the red states to change than the other way around. Most analysis of the red-blue divide is an attempt to explain why the red side is red, not why the blue side is blue, as if being blue were normal and being red were a perverse anamoly -- which is clearly not the case if one looks at all of human culture through all of human history. If questions of social and cultural morality were denationalized in this country the way they were before the 1960's, the red-blue polarity would largely disappear.

The reason you don't hear many derogatoroy comments about people from the red states in New York City is the same reason that you don't hear many derogatory comments about New York City or the blues states in the red ones: for the most part, the twain don't meet. I figured it's because most people are purple.

BF, let's read a little slower, shall we? I'll remove the seemingly confusing and offensive prepositional phrase in country diners and restate: People who waste time whining about how someone from the east coast bought up a big tract of land ten miles down the road are the biggest snobbish bigots in this country in my experience.

BF, Let's think a little deeper shall we? Even with the qualifications you've made, your claim suggests that you must not have had too much experience. There's a wonderful moment in Howard Hawks's film *Air Force* in which a "cosmopolitan" New Yorker who can't stop going on (and on)(and on) about the city of his birth and how much better it is than everywhere else gets gently put in his place by a listener who responds -- with all due respect -- that the New Yorker is just "a hometown hick" like everyone else. I'll borrow that come-back and leave this conversation at that.

Pauli I really don't know what your experience is, or BF's for that matter. But the article is about my hometown and the surrounding area. I have family there. The writer doesn't actually interview any of the people. The only words he attributes to anyone is "Well he's different". I'm sure he hears much worse every day in Austin, but he treats it like some horrible epithet. And based on even less information (since you didn't actually go there) you refer to these people as "agrarian crybabies" suffering from "childishness". Wow. You must have had it tough in the suburbs. You want experience, here's mine. I grew up on a farm out there. I was working in the cotton fields as soon as I was big enough to use a hoe and carry irrigation pipe. When our farm went under I dropped out of high school and got a job so I could help our family afford luxuries. Like food. Like electricity (which was still shut off pretty often - sometimes for a month or more). Not like a telephone or air conditioning, which we couldn't afford and didn't have. I worked at seed plants, slaughterhouses, stacked hay, weeded fields. That's the work they do out there. Those "crybabies" work real jobs that make you sweat and bleed. It took a decade for my family to crawl out of poverty. I spent 6 years on an ambulance cleaning blood and puke off of my boots every night so that we could get out of it. But I'm sure you think I'm a crybaby too. They survived the farm crisis. To you that's just some assorted Willie Nelson concerts from 20 years ago. To them it was another depression. They are hard. But you call them crybabies because of some idle diner chat directed at a pony-tailed effete writer from Austin. You wouldn't last a week out there. Maybe you should go back to your Harry Potter blog and leave the discussion of farm country to the grown-ups.

As Rural America (and anywhere else rural to citified) turns into places resembling "cities" why is it that they also resemble Sodom and Gomorrah? Haughtiness and its resulting suffering of those that cry out from it. And violent hordes of angry men (and now women) always looking to attack the homes of those not "submitting" to their desires. Always. Looking at what is happening to small towns (in the western world), you have Liberals turning them decadent and hedonistic, and Islam looking to replace Churches with mosques. Sodom and Gomorrah are becoming easier to understand now.

People have no idea how bad it is going to get. Our government has allowed an equity extraction of historical proportion, in a feeble attempt to prop up a done for economy. We no longer make much of anything, the deficit is astronomical, and the Chinese finance the house of cards. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and the anger will only rise...