Literary Ruralism (Part XL): Ezra Klein interviews Barbara Kingsolver about Appalachia (and Demon Copperhead)

Ezra Klein interviewed Barbara Kingsolver for the July 21, 2023 episode of his podcast.  He appears motivated to have her on to discuss her perceptions of rural America as depicted in the Pulitzer Prize winning 2022 novel Demon Copperhead.  I previously blogged about the book (including excerpts) here and here, and I wrote about Kingsolver's interview in The Guardian here.  

This first excerpt from the Kingsolver interview with Klein is about Appalachia, which is both Kingsolver's childhood home and her home for the past 20 years or so, after a hiatus in Arizona and a short childhood year in central Africa, where her father went to work as a physician.  

I’m Appalachian. And it’s a funny thing. It’s a marker. Appalachian means you say, I live in Appalachia. It’s a region that’s a little hard to pin down on a map because it includes parts of a lot of states, starting from north Georgia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina and Virginia, up into the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, and then up into the Ridge Country of Pennsylvania.

So that sounds complicated. But to us, it is a whole place. We’re more connected with each other, culturally and geographically, than we are with the far ends of our own states. It’s a place, and it’s a mind-set.

We are connected by our mountains, our economies, and the fact that, for a couple of centuries, we have been treated almost like an internal colony of the U.S. We have suffered the exploitation of extractive industries, managed by and profited from outside companies that come in and take what they can and leave a mess.

This excerpt is Kingsolver's explanation (at least partial) of why urban people are so disdainful of rural folks--and leads in with things people say to her about her choice to live in the country:  

How many people, well-meaning people, have asked me, how could I live there, in the middle of nowhere? People, this is my everywhere. This is my everything. I live on a farm that grows food where water comes out of the mountain among trees that make oxygen. City folks are depending on us for a lot of things that they routinely discount or make fun of.

It’s been a very long program in the development of the world that economies and governments have urged people into the cities, away from the countryside, tried to get land-based people into the cities because — there are a lot of reasons, but it boils down to this — people in the money economy can be taxed. People in a land economy produce a lot of what they consume on the spot. So if you’re growing your own food and eating it, there’s no way to pull taxes out of that.

So I know this sounds really simplified, but it is the bottom line.

* * * 

It feels like an impossibly simple thing. But if you look at all the ways that rural people are stigmatized, it comes down to their self-sufficiency that’s being mocked. If you look at the cartoon, “Hillbilly,” he’s got a fishing pole — that’s food self-sufficiency — he’s got the jug with the XXX on it — that is alcohol self-sufficiency — and he’s got a straw hat on. That’s because he’s a farmer. It’s all about what he’s making and consuming himself.

It’s so insidious people don’t realize it. But this long, long-term brainwashing has resulted in a widespread notion that city people have got it, city people are the advanced form of humans, and rural people are sort of having this provisional existence. They just haven’t made it yet into the real life. And so everybody looks down on the country people. And the country people sort of absorb that. You can’t help but absorb it.

* * * 

And I think this has left rural people feeling so unseen and their problems so trivialized or ignored that they have gotten vulnerable to a damaged extent so that they’re ready to vote for the person who comes along and says, look, I see you, and I’m going to blow up the system.

OK, not the right answer, not the right guy, but I understand why so many people, for the first time, felt like — for the first time in many election cycles, somebody was paying attention. And now we’ve got a mess because that validated this urban notion that those people, they’re voting against their own interests. They’re not well-educated, so they can’t make good choices, so we don’t really need to listen to them, so we just hate them.

So it’s worse than it’s ever been in my life, this urban-rural antipathy.

A lot of what Kingsolver says on this point is echoed in my recent article on Rural Bashing. 

When Klein challenges Kingsolver to think about the negativity flowing from rural folks toward urban ones, she concedes the point. 

You’re absolutely right. It’s a dialectic. It’s an antagonism. It’s like there’s no point in asking who started this because it’s a really, really old antagonism. And you know, I was just talking about a larger framework of development that has really tried to get people off of the land.

But here we are, in the middle of it, with a lot of rock throwing in both directions. And it’s become devastating for American politics. Because rural people, who are less frequently called heartland as called flyover country, it’s a sort of a self-defense, saying, well, they hate us. We hate them back.

Of Kingsolver's upbringing in rural Eastern Kentucky and the transition to college, she explains:  

Nobody in my school was telling me, you need to take these things called SATs. Nobody was advising me. I just kind of clawed my way into a scholarship. And I got to Indiana, DePauw University. And to my amazement, there, I discovered I was a hillbilly. I’d never thought of myself as a backward — coming from a backward place. But oh, my goodness. I needed only to cross the river into Indiana to discover what ignorant, backward folk we were from Kentucky.

And people laughed at my accent. People actually — I was a curiosity on campus. People I didn’t know would come over to me in the dining hall and say, say this. Say this world. What’s this? They wanted to hear me say syrup and mayonnaise and these other words that they thought were hilariously charming.

And so I set about slowly, not even that intentionally, altering my persona in the world, erasing my Kentuckian affect just so that people would hear my words instead of making fun of them. And so now, I’ve tried to become this imaginary cosmopolitan person.

California rural schools facing teacher shortages

Hailey Branson-Potts reports in the Los Angeles Times today from Modoc County, California, population 8,700, under the headline, "‘No one is coming to our rescue’: Inside rural California’s alarming teacher shortage."  Some excerpts follow: 

In small, rural districts like Modoc Joint Unified in Alturas, a cattle ranching town of 2,700, being short even a few teachers can send a school spiraling.

At Alturas Elementary School, there are six vacancies — a quarter of the teaching staff.

It has become so difficult to hire and retain educators that administrators have attended hiring fairs not just across California, but also in Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon.

They tried going to North Dakota this year, figuring they could attract small-town folks who might prefer the slightly warmer Northern California winters. They made it all the way to Denver but had to turn back — it had snowed too hard, and their connecting flight was canceled.

All of the out-of-state travel has yielded zero qualified applicants.

The teacher shortage is so dire that administrators say they have no choice but to violate a new state law that will require public school districts to soon offer free TK — an additional year of instruction that precedes kindergarten — to all 4-year-olds.

The district, which had a single TK teacher, is scrapping the grade level altogether.

To recruit teachers, school officials try to sell the perks of rural life: The slower pace. The deer that walk right along Main Street. The postcard-pretty sunrises over the Warner Mountains. Low crime and so little traffic that there is only one stoplight in the whole county.

But they don’t sugarcoat the isolation. When they interview job candidates, they note: Alturas is 100 miles from the nearest Walmart, across the state line in Klamath Falls, Ore.

Branson-Potts then links what's happening to political context:   

People in California’s rural north feel as if this famously liberal state is leaving them behind — a feeling of alienation that has long fueled the region’s conservative politics.

The population is dwindling. Wildfires are getting worse. Law enforcement agencies are woefully understaffed. Hospitals are few and far between.

The state’s move to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 is, to many residents, laughable in a vast region with few electric vehicle chargers, where people drive farther and, often, over mountain passes. Like universal TK, it feels like an edict from lawmakers who don’t understand the challenges of rural life.

Don't miss the rest of this well-told story.  

Britain's rural reaches as places of "profound inequality"

Rebecca Smith, author of Rural:  The Lives of the Working Class Countryside (Harper Collins 2023), published an essay/excerpt in the New York Times this weekend titled "The English Countryside is a Place of Profound Inequality."  Graythwaite is an English manor in Cumbria, in the Lake District, where Smith grew up in a cottage that Here's the gist of it: 

[F]or the landless who work and belong to the British countryside but do not own a piece of it, it’s a place of profound inequality. Damp, cold and underresourced but beautiful.

When I was growing up on Graythwaite, it was still possible to live, work and raise a family in some of the most beautiful parts of England on a working-class wage. That’s less true now. Rural Britain, long a scenic playground for the rich, is in danger of becoming only that, for tourists, second-homers and wealthy retirees.

Hawkshead, about five miles from Graythwaite, is one of the prettiest villages in the Lake District. It used to have two banks, a police station, four pubs, cafes and businesses.

* * *

These days, there are still lots of cafes, but now the police station is apartments, one bank is a gallery, and the other one is a ticket office for a Beatrix Potter attraction. Many of the village homes are vacation rentals or second homes, empty for most of the year, pushing the prices higher for the few homes that do go up for sale. There were always bus trippers, but the streams of tourists at this time of year, its busiest, make it feel a bit like a rural Disneyland.

* * *

In some of the villages around where I grew up, as many as 80 percent of the houses are second homes, according to housing advocates.

Over and over again, people who grew up or made a life there have been forced to make way for others. (In Dinorwig, a former slate-mining town in Wales that is popular with visitors, a schoolteacher told The Guardian that her family was evicted by a landlady who admitted that she could make four times as much by renting their home to tourists.) These visitors spend money in the local shops, but they don’t put children in the school. They don’t become part of the church congregation. A way of life slowly suffocates.

In part, Smith's British story is one of rural gentrification like we're seeing throughout the United States of late.  

Richard Benson's review of Rural in The Guardian last month includes this passage about her book: 

Its strength is Smith’s sharp eye for new examples of urban money breaking up the relationships between local people and their landscapes. Corporations who offset their pollution by planting thousands of trees in inappropriate locations where the saplings will die off anyway; absentee landlords who shorten tenancy agreements so farmers can’t plan long-term improvements of the land; the gentry sacking estate workers and hawking their heritage to the leisure industry. For the roughly 20% of Britons who live in rural areas, such trends debilitate in the same way that gentrification does in cities. 

Chronicle of Higher Education again turns to rural, this time with a "Farm-to-Table" frame on agricultural education

I've noticed the Chronicle of Higher Education paying a great deal of attention lately to rural students and rural colleges and universities.  Then this past week, they posted a video "The Science and the Beauty:  A Farm-to-Table Story."  Here's the text accompanying the video: 

How much do Americans understand about the land on which we depend for food? How does education contribute to an appreciation of agriculture? The farm-to-table movement, which promotes direct sourcing of fresh, locally grown ingredients for communities, has helped foster greater interest in learning about and valuing where our food comes from. Colleges play a key role in developing, supporting, and appreciating that movement, and, through agricultural programs and cooperative extension services, farming in general. This short film explores how ancestral knowledge, education and awareness, research, innovation, community engagement, and entrepreneurship foster food production and distribution, through the stories of several Louisianans with ties to Southern University and A&M College, in Baton Rouge.

Nicholas Victorian, from 4Vics Farms LLC, in New Roads, La., began his career by attending free agriculture workshops at Southern U. “It’s all about the knowledge,” he observes about sustainable farming.

Lanie Vernon, a Southern U. alumnus, stresses the importance of educating younger generations about self-sustainability and growing food. A master gardener, he notes, “We live on this planet, so we try to be good stewards of the planet.”

L’Asia George, who hails from a farm family, recently graduated from Southern U. Her studies brought her closer to her agricultural roots and inspired her to help organize a campus farmers’ market. Today, she teaches her community about nutrition and health. “My world opened up through research with agriculture, and it brought me back here. And I was able just to see the science and the beauty,” she says.

The Chronicle presents this as part of a yearlong "visual series that highlights the challenges facing first-generation students and others. The series is part of the Different Voices of Student Success project."

This post is about another recent Chronicle feature in the same vein:  rural and first gen. 

Brookings recommendations for this year's Farm Bill

Tony Pipa wrote this week on a Brookings Institute blog under the headline, "5 recommendations from Reimagine Rural for the 2023 Farm Bill and federal implementation."  "Reimagine Rural" is Brookings' rural podcast, which was new this year.  Here's an excerpt from Pipa's post, the second in a two-part series of takeaways from the podcast: 

The stories captured in the first season of the Reimagine Rural podcast offer important lessons at a pivotal policy moment for equitable rural development in the U.S. The current Congress is negotiating a new Farm Bill, the legislation agreed upon every five years that sets agricultural subsidies and authorizes the rural development programs managed by USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). Implementation is also underway for some of the most consequential place-based federal resources approved this century through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the CHIPs and Science Act (CHIPS), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). All these pieces of legislation implicate rural places to a significant degree, either through programs exclusively focused on rural—or through programs that will necessarily include rural to a large degree.

To enable policy solutions that maximize the public benefit of these federal resources, the lessons from Reimagine Rural suggest a multi-pronged strategy that could be effective in the immediate term.

Here are the five items listed.  You'll have to look to the blog itself to learn more of the details on each.

1. Shift the mindset from decline to opportunity

2. Invest in readiness

3. Improve coherence

4. Invest at a meaningful scale

5. Increase transparency

The first post in this two-part series on takeaways from the Reimagine Rural podcast is here. 

Shasta County, California declares itself a 2d amendment sanctuary

Jessica Garrison reported a few days ago for the Los Angeles Times under the headline, "Shasta supervisors declare county a 2nd Amendment fortress in ‘war on guns.’"  Here's the lede:  

After gaining national attention for dumping Dominion Voting Systems and becoming the largest entity in the United States to resort to hand-counting ballots, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday waded into another issue roiling right-wing America: an unwavering defense of gun rights.

By a 4-0 vote, the board approved a resolution declaring that the county would “use all lawful means at its disposal to support and defend the Second Amendment.”

Supervisor Patrick Jones, whose day job is managing his family’s gun store in Redding, said the largely symbolic measure was necessary because the 2nd Amendment in California has been treated as a “second-class right,” with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and other lawmakers in Sacramento making frequent efforts at stricter gun control.

The resolution had come before the board earlier this year in a more dramatic form. Jones introduced a measure in February that had been drafted by the California Rifle and Pistol Assn.

As originally drafted, the resolution called for county employees to review the county’s support for the 2nd Amendment every year. It also gave the Board of Supervisors, and county staff, “the right not to enforce” any state or federal laws that they deemed a violation of the 2nd Amendment “as originally written and intended.”

Here's a quote from Supervisor Mary Rickert, who runs a ranch and who voted against the measure, noting that her husband "has a shotgun by the door tonight.  That shotgun is going to be there tomorrow."  In other words, she doesn't believe anyone is coming for Shasta County's guns. 

And here's more from the story on the resolution itself: 

The measure that came before supervisors Tuesday had been significantly reworked with the input of the county’s lawyers. ...

The new resolution clarifies that the county intends to adhere to state and federal laws. But it also takes sharp aim at the whole concept of gun control and questions the motivations behind persistent calls from Newsom and fellow Democrats for stricter regulation for firearms.

“The Board of Supervisors believes that the California Legislature has passed laws that will be determined to be unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, and continues to pass laws that will be determined to infringe, unconstitutionally, upon people’s rights under the Second Amendment,” reads one article in the lengthy resolution.

You'll find many more posts about Shasta County on this blog. 

Postscript:  Here's Susanne Baremore's essay in the Los Angeles Times commented on the Shasta County move. Baremore, a resident of Redding, the county seat, and "concerned citizen" writes: 

In any other county, a resolution proclaiming a 2nd Amendment sanctuary might have been interpreted as a routine symbolic gesture allowing veterans, gun owners and sundry other “patriots” a public moment of pride in their heritage and rural lifestyle. In Shasta County, which passed such a resolution this week, there is a lot more to it.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors has made global headlines for strange happenings and curious decisions.

* * *

The Board of Supervisors is currently led by a 3-2 majority that is ideologically further right than anything that used to be called Republican. Its members are also extreme examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, whereby a lack of knowledge leads to an overestimation of one’s competence.

* * *

The collective dysfunction of this governing board has led to an effort to recall one narrowly elected member of the far-right majority, Kevin Crye, as well as an exodus of the county’s top leaders and talent.

* * *

We can’t know what effect the supervisors’ latest questionable decision will have for the people they ostensibly represent, but we do know that it’s promoting the lawless use of firearms in a community primed for extremism and violence.

NPR considers rural youth vote

Elena Moore and Ximena Bustillo reported this segment week before last for All Things Considered.  I wouldn't call it a deep dive into the rural youth vote, but at least the intersection of rurality and young people is on the radar screen--indeed, a focus of the national media in this instance.  

The headline is, "Rural voters lean red, young voters lean blue. So what's a young, rural voter to do?"  The transcript (which is different from how I recall the podcast) leads with Anderson Clayton who, at 25, is the youngest state party chair in the nation and has been featured in earlier posts here and in my academic article (with Kacyelee Klein) here:  

"My own people are the ones that I've got to figure out a way to motivate and mobilize and get energized around building this thing up from the bottom," said Anderson Clayton...

"I want to go out there and fight for everybody — and young people especially," she said.

Clayton, who is from Roxboro, N.C., about an hour northwest of Raleigh, is honest about the party's flaws in her state. Following a handful of federal and state losses in the 2022 midterms, she acknowledged Democrats dropped the ball when connecting with young voters, as well as rural and Black voters — three key parts of the state's voting base.

* * *

Biden's popularity is low among rural, independent and young voters. According to the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist polling, 38% of both young voters and independents approve of his job in office. Among rural voters, that number stands at just 28%.

But within those groups, Democrats may have an in. While rural voters nationwide typically vote Republican, young rural voters are more evenly split. In 2020, 50% of rural voters under 30 voted for Donald Trump, while 47% voted for Biden.

NPR sat down with with six young voters who grew up in rural, small towns across North Carolina to discuss what politicians need to do to win their votes in 2024.

Many were critical of how politicians on both sides see their communities.

Listen to the podcast to hear what these six rural young people had to say.  

Postscript from NPR on Sept. 11, 2023:  Meet the New Bosses:  Younger than the Old Bosses. 

Literary Ruralism (Part XXXIX): Monica Potts' The Forgotten Girls

Monica Potts published her memoir, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, in late May, 2023 (Penguin Random House).  It is set in her hometown, Clinton, Arkansas, within her home county, Van Buren.  Potts tells the parallel stories of herself and her childhood friend, Darci.  Potts went off to a posh college, while Darci didn't even finish high school. Potts tries to explain the divergent paths of two children who were once so close. 

The book is chock full of references--implicit or explicit--to the patriarchy that thrives in rural America.  (That's a topic I wrote about here).  She also talks a lot about the links between the patriarchy and religion.  What follows is an excerpt from Potts' book that illustrates the phenomenon, with implicit reference to what I've written about as "white trash" (also here): 

Children and teenagers were sorted into another binary as well: the upstanding citizens and the ne’er-do-wells. The “good” kids were those bound for college. They avoided partying or did it only discreetly, played sports, spent nights and weekends at ballgames and church events, and formed monogamous relationships early. Parents encouraged their teenage relationships, chaperoning and ushering them on dates and folding them into family events. Their families went to church every Sunday, nicely dressed in church clothes, and went to lunch afterward at the Ozark Café or some other restaurant in town, or to a grandmother’s house for a pot roast. Those students were destined to enter adult life early, marry at a young age, and move seamlessly into roles their parents fulfilled: teachers, doctors, dentists. Their social spots seemed almost inherited.

My friend April, who moved back to Clinton to raise her two children, saw this clearly as an adult. “Like, Kid A: ‘We’re thinking you’ll go to college and make something out of yourself, so we’ll put more effort into you.’ ” Her own kids benefited from the reputation she’d had as a good student. The teachers, who were her peers and sometimes friends from her own school days, automatically trusted her.

By contrast, the “bad” kids were those who sneaked out of their homes and partied on weekends. It was an unspoken assumption that they wouldn’t make it to college. They got into trouble at school. We kids gossiped about them, and so did some of the adults. As April put it, “Kid B: ‘Well, you come from a line of poverty and living off the system, so we’ll just hope you don’t get knocked up.’ ” It could be hard, living in a small town like ours, to escape family history. “I don’t think it’s spoken,” April said, “but it’s kind of hard not to pass that history on in a lot of ways.”

She told me that two boys from her class—rowdy, athletic, good-natured class clowns and troublemakers—now had young sons of their own in the same class at school. A teacher looked at the young pair and joked, “Here we go again!” Everyone laughed, as if the sons would inevitably be the same as the fathers—the same story would play over and over with each new generation. Seeing this cycle helped me understand why my mom had felt strongly about cutting off my dad’s family, and why I had been so careful not to follow in what I thought were his footsteps. People who tried to break the pattern were often alone, set against the larger forces of small-town thinking and small-town gossip.

Darci was getting a reputation as a partier, and hanging out with her became increasingly fraught. During Darci’s fourteenth birthday slumber party, half the girls sneaked out and half didn’t. After that, the “good” girls stopped going to Darci’s house. They also avoided Thriftway parking lot parties, where teenagers sat in cars and got drunk and hooked up. Instead, the “good” kids had serious boyfriends and wore promise rings. Their lives were already revolving around their futures as wives and mothers, regardless of any potential career.

As a child, I felt trapped by this system. I didn’t want to be judged by those around me, but I didn’t have the power to ignore their judgments, so I became judgmental too. And though I never really fit in with either the “good” kids or the partiers, I decided to align with the “good” kids. Today it’s sometimes painful, or laughable, to look back at how severe I was. I didn’t believe in the religious prohibitions on sex before marriage, but I did see the social consequences in Clinton that those who failed to follow them suffered. I can see now that I had few options as a teenager. I was still close to Darci, but in order to make sure others saw the differences between us, I was more judgmental than I might have been. I also felt that in a town where people married and had children young, teenagers’ missteps carried a lot of weight.

I'll write more about Potts' book--and include more excerpts--in a future post.  

Here is an earlier post about the book, when it was excerpted in The Atlantic.  And here is the New York Times review of the book, by Rachel Louise Snyder, who questions the ethics of what Potts' reveals about Darci in relation to what Potts told Darci she was going to reveal. 

Here is a post about a 2019 NYT op-ed by Potts about Clinton and Van Buren County politics in relation to national trends. 

Small-town America, a country music video, and racism

Justin Jones is one of the members of the Tennessee state legislature who was controversially expelled from that body for alleged failure to comply with decorum norms when he stood up for victims of mass shootings earlier this year.  Jones tweeted a few days ago, "Don't let the same politicians tell you that a racist song is about supporting 'small towns' while they allow rural hospitals to close without Medicaid expansion, defund public education in rural counties, and keep small-town folks trapped in poverty with starvation wages."

The sentiment about politicians standing up for "small town" values while undermining them and the wellbeing of rural folks generally was one I was on board with.  That sentiment is reflected in many posts to this blog.  But I had no idea what song lyrics Jones was speaking of--and who was standing up for the song and for small towns.

I went looking for more and found this from the Republican speaker of the Tennessee House, "@CMT [Country Music Television] caved to the radical left.  Mainstream media call songs about 'killing police' powerful, exposing-voices that speak the truth, but @jason_aldean speaks his truth--the media can't handle it, so they attempt to silence him and the #1 iTunes downloaded country song." 

I still didn't know what song was being referenced until I heard this NPR segment on Thursday evening about Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town."  Here's the lede:  

Country Music Television (CMT) says it will no longer air the music video "Try That In a Small Town" by Jason Aldean after critics of the video said it contained lyrics that glorified gun violence and conveyed traditionally racist ideas.

A CMT spokesperson confirmed the move to NPR on Thursday, but offered no comment on the reasoning.

Since the video's release on Friday, it's emerged as a familiar kind of political litmus test, with interpretations of its message often falling along voting divides.

* * *

In a statement released alongside the video, Aldean said the song represents an "unspoken rule" for those raised in small towns: "We all have each other's backs and we look out for each other."

* * * 

But much of the criticism around the video has less to do with these clips than its setting: The Maury County Courthouse building in Columbia, Tenn., which serves as an American-flag-draped backdrop for Aldean and his band.

The landmark was the site of race riots in 1946 as well as a 1927 lynching.

* * * 

Threats to outsiders (and the implication those outsiders are from cities) are present throughout the song's lyrics, which begin with a list of crimes that might happen in urban settings ("Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk / carjack an old lady at a red light") then crescendo into the titular chorus:

Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road / Around here we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won't take long / For you to find out, I recommend you don't.

Aldean ups the vigilante ante by bridging the second chorus with a reference to gun rights, singing:

I've got a gun that my granddad gave me / they say one day they're gonna round up. / Well that s*** might fly in the city / good luck / Try that in a small town.

A journalist who writes about country music for The Tennessean was interviewed for the NPR segment that aired Thursday evening, and he suggested that CMT's removal of the video shows a newfound sensitivity to racial issues within the country music community.   

You can watch the video here.  

What is absolutely undisputed is that the song pits rural against urban, suggesting that the former is more virtuous.  There's an openly nostalgic bit at the end of the video where the singing stops and a video vignette about farmers dropping work on their own crops to help a neighbor in more urgent need.  One of the presumptively rural residents comments on the practice, "it's what this community stands for ... if you need some help, you'll get it."  There's also an image of a farm tractor with a golden glow, in contrast to the images of urban violence that dominate the early portions of the video.  

I was struck in listening to the lyrics of Aldean's "Try that in a Small Town" that the sentiments echo Merle Haggard's "Okie form Muskogee," released in 1969.  

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee
We don't take our trips on LSD
We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street
We like livin' right, and bein' free

We don't make a party out of lovin'
We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo
We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do 

I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all

"Okie from Muskogee," of course, was released back before every reference to urban was presumptively raced Black or brown and every reference to rural or small town was heard as an obvious and irrefutable association with whiteness.  

You'll find lots of posts on this blog about the pitting of rural against urban in this era of polarization.  Here's just one of them.  

Here is a Washington Post analysis of the music video, and here is a very thoughtful essay about it in the Daily Yonder.  

Postscript:  New York Times conservative columnist David French published "Try Tolerance in a Small Town" on July 27, 2023.  He calls out small-tow racism based on his own experiences and that of his family's in Columbia, Tennessee, where the Aldean video was shot.  

Latina Deputy USDA Secretary sworn in

NPR reported yesterday here on Xochitl Torres Small's swearing in as the first Latina Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Torres Small is from New Mexico, where she served one term as a congresswoman from the sparsely populated district that includes Las Cruces and vast portions of the southern part of the Land of Enchantment.  Here's an excerpt from the NPR story about Torres Small, with Ximena Bustillo reporting: 

The former New Mexico congresswoman was tapped in by President Biden in 2021 to serve as undersecretary for rural development at USDA, the branch of the department that oversees infrastructure, utilities and healthcare across rural communities. Now in a higher ranking position, she takes on the role as the administration and Democrats are looking to strengthen their footprints in rural areas.

* * *  

Torres Small has been promoted at a time when the department is undergoing changes to address historical discrimination across its lending and other programs. Late last year the department began making payments on loan cancellations for some farmers and providing $2.2 billion for farmers who experienced discrimination prior to Jan. 2021.

As for new challenges facing Torres Small, they include "looming department staffing shortages. Torres Small has previously raised concerns that nearly half of the employees she oversaw in rural development were eligible to retire, even as demands for the agency have increased."   

The story includes several long quotes from Torres Small: 

To get to be deputy secretary and in charge of the backend of the shop is really exciting because we impact people's lives in so many ways.  I'm the granddaughter of farm workers, and of course, that's a way that it has impacted my life. But my parents were educators. And when it comes to thinking about the kids that they're teaching, making sure that those kids have healthy, nutritious food to help them learn is crucial.

And here's an excerpt where Torres Small highlights the racial and ethnic diversity of rural America, a reality often overlooked (but highlighted in my recent article here and recently on several occasions on this blog):   

One of my favorite things about serving as undersecretary at rural development was that rural America is a lot of different things and a lot of different places, and it's incredibly diverse. Yes, it's a farmer on a tractor, and it's also a rural [fishing village] in Alaska and it's also Indian country.

While cast in a negative light here, an aging USDA staff can also be seen as a positive--opening opportunities for younger rural sociologists and economists in government service. 

New (sub)-California secession movement rises in exurban Sacramento

Eric Ting reports for the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline,  'This state is under tyranny': Scenes from California's latest secession movement.  Some excerpts follow:  

Sharon Durst, leader of the secessionist El Dorado state movement, knows people don't take attempts like hers seriously. Past efforts to split rural California counties off from the rest of the state have accomplished little beyond inspiring ridicule — which the former rancher, now in her 80s, experienced directly as an early supporter of the infamous state of Jefferson.

But Durst also knows that something has to change, if rural counties like El Dorado are going to have a fair say in how they’re governed. On July 10, she and former county Supervisor Ray Nutting co-hosted a town hall to explain to their neighbors why the solution is peeling the county off from California and forming a new state.

It’s true that California has a unique problem of representation in state government. No state in the country has fewer state legislators per capita; the problem is especially stark in rural areas like El Dorado County, population 192,000. In the state Senate, El Dorado is represented by a legislator who also represents voters in 12 other counties; in the state Assembly, the county is split between two legislators, each responsible for voters across several counties, with widely diverging industries and demographics. Not one of the three legislators responsible for representing El Dorado County actually lives there.

The story features a long quote from Professor Isaac Hale of Occidental College, who teaches politics: 

This has long been an ongoing problem in California politics.  There are nearly 500,000 Californians per assemblymember and a million Californians per state senator, and that’s pretty out of whack.

You could double the size of the Assembly, and we’d still have the highest number of people represented by district.  And there are serious consequences to this.

Ting explains the consequences for rural folks in the Golden State:  they feel disenfranched--disenfranchised enough to show up at long town halls to talk about secession.  That said, Ting reports that 25 people showed up for a July 10 gathering held by Durst and Nutting.  And that doesn't sound like a very robust group in the context of a county with nearly 200K residents.  Also, interestingly, the meeting was held at a Raley's Supermarket in El Dorado Hills--the posh planned community at the western edge of the county, just over the Sacramento County line.  In other words, El Dorado Hills is the part of the county one would expect to be least amenable to a secession movement.  (Here is a prior post about El Dorado Hills as magnet for Bay Area migrants during the pandemic.)  Still, here is Ting's description of the crowd: 

The political leanings of those in attendance were on full display. One attendee wore a shirt that helpfully defined the word “patriot.” Another wore a shirt reading “Save the Children” on the front and “WE RIDE AT DAWN” in all caps on the back. Durst’s introduction was punctuated by audience member comments, including “California is red, we all know it,” and “Trump won.” When she mentioned that a reporter was in the audience, the room broke out into groans, like someone had just offered the restive crowd Bud Light from the supermarket outside the meeting room.

Here's what Ting has to say about the current movement's approach to change, including its legal theory: 

Durst and Nutting concede California lawmakers would never go along with it, so Durst is gambling on what she described as a “backdoor” maneuver to go to Congress directly.

In a 7,000-word Substack post published in May, Durst argues that El Dorado County is technically not a legitimate piece of California and is instead “other property” of Congress (though she cites no legal scholars or historians who have promulgated this view). Therefore, she wrote, Congress alone could vote to turn El Dorado County into El Dorado state, without California’s approval.

Durst refused to discuss procedural steps at the meeting. Ting quotes her:

To try to speculate, ‘What if this? What if that? Blah blah blah?’ No. You know what? We’re going to just move forward, do our thing, hope for the best and see where the people take it.

Durst was also uninterested in alternative paths to improve rural representation, including those that might garner bipartisan support because they also afflict metropolitan areas.  Professor Hale provided this illustration as an urban counterpart to what is annoying this small band of folks in El Dorado County: 

Consider Mia Bonta’s East Bay Assembly district.  Why are wealthy homeowners in Piedmont linked with renters in east and west Oakland? They have wildly different interests, and you could make the argument that they each should have their own form of representation. This is a systemic problem.

The story closes with this quote from Durst:  

I’m not going to petition anyone in California. I’m going to absolutely ignore California, as if there’s a barrier between our border and California.

Don't miss this entire, deeply reported San Francisco Chronicle story, not least for its rich descriptions of some other El Dorado County residents who attended the meeting, as well as a bit of backstory on Nutting. (Read more here from a 2014 court adjudication against him).  

Prior posts about secession from California are here, here, here (featuring many photos, including one taken in El Dorado County), here, here (speaking specifically to representation issues, from 2015), here (based on a story in Harper's Magazine), here (comparing the State of Jefferson movement to the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia), and here (reporting on a 2018 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected a legal theory that Californians are underrepresented because of the too-small size of the late legislative body).  Another post regarding frustration over lack of representation, this one out of Siskiyou County in the traditional State of Jefferson territory, is here.

Other posts featuring El Dorado County more generally are here (coronavirus pandemic), here (a food sovereignty movement post from 2012), here (suburban sprawl), and here (resisting the siting of a Dollar General Store).   This is about a Tea Party Meeting in the county in 2012.  This, also from 2012, features a campaign sign for a member of the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors that uses the slogan "Protecting Rural Values."). Another 2012 photo from El Dorado County is here--this one of a sign advertising a Gold Prospecting Summit at the county fairgrounds. 

Posts about other proposals to divide California are here and here.