On Steve Bullock, the most rural of the candidates for Democratic nominee for POTUS?

I loved reading this op-ed by Sarah Vowell in the New York Times a few days ago, in part because I like Steve Bullock--and I love Montana--and in part because Vowell's writing is so much fun to read.  Part of her wit is invoking rural characters, like the Republican state senator described below who participated in the state Council on how to comply with federal Clean Power Plan.

Vowell presumably knows that of which she writes because she is from Montana.  The headline is, "This guy got Republicans to vote for a Democrat," and a few of my favorite sentences from the column follow (admitting at the outset that I'm a sucker for folksy, most of the time):

Introducing himself as the new governor in 2013, Mr. Bullock said, “My name is Steve, and I work for the state.” That is not the voice of a Democrat who wants to do away with the private health insurance of more than half the population. It is the voice of a Democrat who would go on to expand Medicaid coverage — twice — in a blood red state with a Republican majority legislature, a Democrat committed to keeping rural hospitals open, which probably only matters to people who don’t plan their heart attacks two hours ahead.

* * * 

When he goes out stumping for one of his squishy liberal plots to get fewer people killed, he tends to choose words that won’t make wheat farmers barf. Why, no, old coot in a feed store cap from Roundup, he’s not going to expand Medicaid, he’s going to “bring our taxpayer dollars home.”

* * *

His council on how Montana was going to comply with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan included a never-boring, ex-miner Republican state senator you definitely want pissing from the tent, the Montana Wildlife Federation, the Farmers Union, energy company executives, a couple of Democrats from the Environmental Quality Council, the chairman of the Crow tribe and for all I know the ghost of Norman Maclean.

* * * 

On the off chance there’s a question [in the debate] about the nuts and bolts of actual governance, I wonder how the governor could explain, in under 60 seconds, the coalitions of strange bedfellows he conjures to solve problems in a state with seven sovereign Indian nations that’s crammed into a single ridiculous congressional district the size of Japan.

Now that's sparsely populated.  Oddly, Bullock was not among the three candidates who actually uttered the word "rural" during the debate.  Those were Delaney, Sanders and Klobuchar, as discussed here.

But my personal favorite line from Vowell's column:

I swear Steve Bullock spends half his workday just sitting around listening.

Seems like that's been a winning strategy; perhaps more politicians should try it.

In other Bullock news, Maggie Astor brings us this brief profile, of sorts, in the New York Times.

Mr. Bullock has made money in politics the centerpiece of his campaign: It’s so central, in fact, that where other candidates have an “issues” or “policies” link, his website says, “One Big Idea.”

And here's a post-debate piece from CNN's John Avlon on the candidate, "Bullock offered a way of out partisan divides."

Bullock spoke with credibility as the only presidential candidate to have won in a state that Donald Trump carried by 20-points. 

He’s an easy target for the Twitterati to dismiss as a red-stater out of step with the party’s progressive wave. But with an opening statement that slammed “wish-list economics,” Bullock represents an almost forgotten tradition that scrambles the divisions that have come to define our times: he’s a western progressive, someone who has taken on big-money special interests while defending farmers and rural families who just "want a fair shot.”                                                            

He’s a gun owner and hunter who briefly silenced the audience by making the gun violence epidemic personal, citing the death of his 11-year old nephew on a school playground.

* * *

He talked about the reality of climate change by pointing out that the fire season is now 80 days longer.

* * *

So much of the partisan debates of the day are not actually red state versus blue state, but urban versus rural. A two-term red state Democratic governor offers a way out of those divides.

And while we're on the subject of Montana, here's a WaPo piece by Ben Terris from May 2017, "Jon Tester could teach Democrats a lot about rural America--if he can keep his seat."  It's a great story.  Here's a brief excerpt:

You’ve gotta be folksy if you want to win in Montana as a Democrat. But the truth is that Tester is as much a member of the Beltway elite as any other senator. He just happens to know how to use a tractor for more than a photo op.

Rural garners several mentions in first night of Dem debate, none in second night

Here are the mentions of "rural" in the July 30 debate, first night of two in the second round of Democratic candidates debating (emphasis added to the "rural" mention each time):

First, from former congressman Michael Delaney of Maryland, regarding the viability of Medicare for all, specifically Medicare reimbursement rates:

DELANEY: Listen, his math is wrong. That's all I'm saying -- that his math is wrong, it's been well-documented that if all the bills were paid at Medicare rate, which is specifically -- I think it's in section 1,200 of their bill, then many hospitals in this country would close. 

I've been going around rural America, and I ask rural hospital administrators one question, "If all your bills were paid at the Medicare rate last year, what would happen?"

And they all look at me and say, "We would close." 

But the question is, why do we have to be so extreme? Why can't we just give everyone health care as a right, and allow them to have choice?

(Here's a resource I just came across on rural hospital closures).

Second, there was Bernie Sanders when challenged about gun control wore the fact he's from rural Vermont as a defense:

SANDERS: I think we have got to do -- I think what I meant is what President Obama said, in that nobody up here is going to tell you that we have a magical solution to the crisis.

Now, I come from one of the most rural states in America. I have a D-minus voting record from the NRA. And as president I suspect it will be an F record. What I believe we have got to do is have the guts to finally take on the NRA.

Third, Beto O'Rourke talked rural and urban, red and blue, when asked how he could beat Donald Trump:

O'ROURKE: Bernie was talking about some of the battleground states in which we compete -- there is a new battleground state, Texas and it has 38 electoral college votes. And the way that we put it in play was by going to each one of those 254 counties. No matter how red or rural, we did not write you off. No matter how blue, or urban -- we did not take you for granted. 

And we didn't trim our sails, either. We had the courage of our convictions, talking about universal health care, comprehensive immigration reform, and confronting the challenge of climate before it is too late. We brought everyone in...

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota came next, when asked who on the stage was making promises they could not keep:

KLOBUCHAR: Everyone wants to get elected. But my point is this: I think when we have a guy in the White House that has now told over 10,000 lies, that we'd better be very straightforward with the American people. 

And, no, do I think that we are going to end up voting for a plan that kicks half of America off of their current insurance in four years? No, I don't think we're going to do that. I think there is a better way to get what we all want to see, which is lower costs for health care. 

Do I think that we're going to vote to give free college to the wealthiest kids? No, I don't think we're going to do that. So that's what I'm talking about. 

But what I don't like about this argument right now, what I don't like about it at all, is that we are more worried about winning an argument than winning an election. 

(APPLAUSE) 

And I think how we win an election is to bring everyone with us. And, yes, I have won in a state every single time statewide. I have won those congressional districts that Donald Trump won by over 20 points. He just targeted Minnesota last week. And I have done it by getting out there and talking to people, by knowing rural issues and farm issues...

I noticed that Klobuchar touted her midwesternness, presumably as related to her electability, several times.

The fifth mention was back to Senator Bernie Sanders, responding to Montana governor Steve Bullock:

SANDERS: Look, Steve, there ain't nobody in the Congress who's more strongly pro-worker than I am. So when I talk about taking on the fossil fuel industry, what I am also talking about is a just transition. All right. We can create what the Green New Deal is about. It's a bold idea. We can create millions of good-paying jobs. We can rebuild communities in rural America that have been devastated. So we are not anti-worker. We are going to provide and make sure that those workers have a transition, new jobs, healthcare and education.

And the sixth mention brings us back to Senator Amy Klobuchar, who was talking rural infrastructure:

I think the Governor here in Michigan smartly ran on the slogan, “fix the damn roads,” and it is an issue for union jobs. And so I think what we need to do is not have a president that’s promised he was going to do that on election night, if anyone remembers. And then he hasn’t followed through -- he has done nothing, he blew up a meeting at the White House. 

I would put $1 trillion in to this, and I would pay for it by first of all changing the capital gains rate by doing something when it comes to that regressive tax bill that left everyone behind, but really made his Mar-a-Lago friends richer as he promised. 

And I would take that money and put it in to rural broadband and green infrastructure so you won't have what you just saw in Detroit with the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood, the African neighborhood -- that was African-American neighborhood that was most-hit when you had those recent rainstorms. 

And I truly believe that if we're going to move on infrastructure --

Klobuchar also mentioned rural --as in rural and urban--when talking about the need for economic development:

The second thing I would say is that economic opportunity means economic opportunity for everyone in this country. I know that because I have lived it. And that means when we put out there better childcare and better education, and we pay teachers more, and we make sure there's a decent retirement system in place, yes, we help the African-American community and we must, because they have been the ones that have been most hurt by what we've seen in the last decades, but we help everyone. 

So what I say to the people in my rural parts of my state, just like I say to them in the city and bring them together, is that economic opportunity must be there for everyone.

I just finished watching the second night of the second debate, and I didn't hear any mentions of "rural."  I'll be checking the transcript, however, to be sure because perhaps I missed some.   

Krugman conflates working-class whiteness and rurality (or, a return to The Geography of the Class Culture Wars)

Paul Krugman asserts in his New York Times column, "A Racist Stuck in the Past," that Trump is stuck not in the antebellum period, Reconstruction or even Jim Crow--but in 1989, a mere 30 years ago.  It's an interesting rhetorical strategy--to talk about the relatively recent past as "the past."  Krugman's point is that Trump conflates the urban with blackness and black dysfunction, and he dates this back at least to Trump's response to the brutal 1989 beating of the so-called Central Park Jogger:  Trump called for the death penalty for the so-called Central Park Five, the five men arrested for the crime.  The five were later exonerated, in 2002, but Trump has never admitted he was wrong about the men.

Krugman uses those events as a jumping off point to talk about how urban black dysfunction has evolved into rural white dysfunction in a short three decades, a trend he says Trump is in denial about:

[Trump's] vision of “American carnage” is one of a nation whose principal social problem is inner-city violence, perpetrated by nonwhites. That’s a comfortable vision if you’re a racist who considers nonwhites inferior. But it’s completely wrong as a picture of America today. 

For one thing, violent crime has fallen drastically since the early 1990s, especially in big cities. Our cities certainly aren’t perfectly safe, and some cities — like Baltimore — haven’t shared in the progress. But the social state of urban America is vastly better than it was. 

On the other hand, the social state of rural America — white rural America — is deteriorating. To the extent that there really is such a thing as American carnage — and we are in fact seeing rising age-adjusted mortality and declining life expectancy — it’s concentrated among less-educated whites, especially in rural areas, who are suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” from opioids, suicide and alcohol that has pushed their mortality rates above those of African-Americans. 

And indicators of social collapse, like the percentage of prime-age men not working, have also surged in the small town and rural areas of the “eastern heartland,” with its mostly white population.

Note that Krugman's definition of rural is quite broad--seemingly any place not the inner city.  

Krugman goes on to explain how these events confirm what William Julius Wilson wrote decades ago: the problem of three or four decades ago was not "some peculiar problem with black culture."  Rather, the catalyst for the decline of African Americans was poor job opportunities and the attendant decline of the traditional family.  Krugman asks how one might test Wilson's hypothesis:   

Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America effectively stranded by a changing economy.

Krugman concludes:

What the changing face of American social problems shows is that people are pretty much the same, whatever the color of their skin. Give them reasonable opportunities for economic and personal advancement, and they will thrive; deprive them of those opportunities, and they won’t.

The colorblindness aspect of the first part of conclusion will annoy many, but I generally like Krugman's argument.  What I'm less comfortable with is his conflation of rurality with whiteness and white dysfunction.  Indeed, his column seems to me a terrific illustration of what I called, in my 2010 article, "The Geography of the Class Culture Wars," a progressive tendency to project what's wrong with America onto rural people and places, who are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) raced white.

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.

Solving outmigration from rural America is anything but simple

When we think about the future economic vitality of rural spaces, what often comes to mind? We think about the shortage of skilled labor, of course, plumbers, electricians, and the like. Do we often think about the need for doctors, lawyers, social workers, and teachers? This answer is going to depend upon who you ask and what they have been exposed to. The Bangor Daily News recently featured an article by a seasonal Maine resident that posited that rural Maine needs more tradesmen in order to secure its future vitality.

The article starts off by noting a demographic trend that has become all too common, the local high school experiencing a decline in enrollment. My own high school experienced a similar fate and was recently closed as a result. The author thinks however that students are being pushed too heavily into the college prep curriculum, which he says leads to students leaving because those jobs are often not found in rural Maine. He instead says that students should be pushed into vocational studies because there is a pressing need for tradesmen in rural Maine, an idea that he says that "too few are discussing."

I respectfully disagree with this viewpoint.

As anyone who reads my writing knows, there is a pressing lawyer shortage in rural Maine. I wrote about the numbers behind this shortage in a recent Maine Law Review article (link forthcoming). The University of Maine has even launched a rural lawyer initiative to help solve this shortage. Others have written about Maine's doctor shortage, a professor at the University of New England even wrote about the possibility that physician assistants, which UNE trains, can help to alleviate this shortage. There is also nursing shortage in rural Maine, which the University of Maine has pledged to work to solve by increasing its enrollment of nurses over the coming years. School districts in rural Maine are having difficulty filling teaching positions, often in subjects such as math, science, and special education. The social worker shortage in rural Maine has also been a topic of conversation for years. There is a dire need for people to fill positions in rural Maine that require at least a bachelor's degree.

In my opinion, the author is trying to falsely equate correlation to causation. The causes behind outmigration are multifaceted. For example, many high achievers are pushed to leave. A 2016 study of the phenomena zeroed in on Aroostook County, Maine and found that students often do not return home because of societal attitudes towards doing so. The book Hollowing Out the Middle, written by sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas in 2010, did a great job of describing how high achievers in rural spaces are often driven away by adults who feel that they can "do better." Working to change people's attitudes about home would go a long way towards helping to solve this problem. Increasing the number of students that are pushed into a vocational curriculum would do little. Students need to be pushed into the college prep curriculum because these communities need college educated professionals to fill critical health care, legal, and social needs.

The author of this piece draws an overly simplistic false dichotomy to describe how to solve the problem of outmigration. This problem is anything but simple and shuffling kids into vocational programs won't stop the bleeding.

Oregon climate legislation torpedoed by rural interests

High Country News reported a few weeks ago on the failure of state legislation that would have curbed carbon emissions.  The story is headlined, "Rural anxieties derailed Oregon's climate plans."  The proposed legislation sent Republican legislators fleeing the state--to Idaho, just across the state line for many in the state's most conservative eastern reaches--to avoid the vote.

These excerpts sum up the rural politics (and some other aspects) of the matter:

After the climate legislation was shelved, lawmakers passed more than 100 bills in a frenzied weekend before the legislative session ended on June 30. But the battle over the carbon emissions legislation revealed a deepening political chasm between Oregon’s conservative rural areas and liberal population centers. Republicans held firm to their base, aligning with legacy industries and the rural jobs they support, rather than engaging in restructuring the economy to address carbon pollution. While the potential costs of the climate legislation took center stage, a deeper economic truth went unspoken — that the issues that hamper the fiscal well-being of rural Oregon have less to do with environmental regulations than with broader market forces, from international policy to demographics.

* * * 

at least initially, the climate bill would have cost rural Oregonians more. According to an analysis by The Oregonian, fuel taxes would hit wallets harder outside urban centers, where people drive longer distances in less fuel-efficient vehicles and lack access to public transportation. Higher energy costs also raised concerns about milling and manufacturing jobs leaving the state for friendlier economic conditions.

Still, Oregon’s rural communities face larger forces than the proposed carbon pricing system. For nearly three decades, the state’s less-populated counties have fallen behind urban centers in wages and employment.

I have written elsewhere about the higher cost of transportation in rural areas--in part for the reasons mentioned here.  Yes, some rural people could get by with smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.  Many others could not because of the nature of the work they do.

I appreciate the tone of Carl Segerstrom's reporting in this piece--and also that High Country News typically takes the perspectives of rural folks--including their economic concerns--seriously.  I don't recall ever seeing this publication ridicule "rural people as rural people," because their rurality was accompanied by an implicit (let alone explicit) presumption of incompetence or idiocy. 

Massive California oil spill leaves locals unbothered

I've been hearing coverage of this major spill for a few weeks now, including of Gavin Newsom's visit to McKittrick, population 115, the town closest to it on the western edge of Kern County.  Here's the Los Angeles Times latest:  "California's biggest oil spill in decades brings more defiance than anger from locals."  Here's an excerpt from Louis Sahagun's story, specifically excerpts from interviews with several folks at Mike and Annie's Penny Bar:

“Environmentalists have it all wrong,” argued Troy Smith, 46, an oil field worker who grew up in the area. “Compared with the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and BP’s deep-sea spill in the Gulf of Mexico, our little outbreak is nothing. Yet, they’re using it as an excuse to shut down California’s oil industry and wipe us out. 

“What more do they want?” he asked no one in particular. “We already work under the strictest standards imaginable, and adhere to them tooth and nail.” 

Smith, like many others in McKittrick, was more worried about how the largest California spill in nearly three decades would affect election campaigns and new oil industry legislation in Congress and the state Legislature.

Interesting California fact:  5.5 million people live within a mile of an oil well in the Golden State.  Of course, given California's 40 million residents, that's a relatively low percentage. 

Are rural and working class white women re-thinking their support of Trump?

Recent focus groups conducted by Stanley Greenberg (the Democratic pollster) and colleagues in Bangor Maine and perhaps some other places (on this point, the sources are not absolutely clear to me) suggest that working class white women may not be as loyal to Trump as working class white men.  In particular, white working-class women are put off by Trump's crassness and bombast, while their male counterparts tend not to be.  Ronald Brownstein summarized in The Atlantic a few days ago, under the headline "Will Trump's Racist Attacks Help Him?  Ask Blue-Collar White Women":

And a new set of focus groups in small-town and rural communities offers fresh evidence that the gender gap over Trump within this bloc is hardening.

In the Rust Belt states that tipped the 2016 election to Trump—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—few things may matter more than whether Democrats can fan doubts about Trump that have surfaced among blue-collar white women or whether the president can rebuild his margins among them with his polarizing racial and ideological attacks. 

“The white working-class men look like they are approaching the 2016 margins for Trump, but not the women,” says the veteran Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, in a judgment supported by public polling. “Clearly the women are in a different place.” Greenberg conducted the focus groups, whose findings were released today, for the American Federation of Teachers.

The Intelligencer also ran a story on the focus groups, quoting liberally from the Brownstein story.  Here's a link to the Greenberg survey/focus group docs.

And here is my own 2018 law review article about rural and working class white women in the era of Trump.  I speculated that most working class white women see their economic well being (if one could fairly use the word "well" to express what I'm thinking about) as so connected to the jobs of their husbands and boyfriends that they are not troubled by Trump's bad behavior, including his crass language.  In other words, to quote James Carville, "It's the economy stupid."  I sure hope I'm wrong.  Interestingly, the Brownstein story above includes the following, which suggests that people are not voting based solely on their pocketbooks--that Trump's "exclusionary racist and cultural messages" are off-putting to them:

In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released earlier this week, fully one-third of adults who said the economy is working for them personally still said they disapprove of Trump’s job performance. An equal share of these voters said they now intend to vote against him for reelection. To offset that unusual defection among the economically content, Trump must maximize his margins—and turnout—among the groups that have been most receptive to his exclusionary racist and cultural messages: older, nonurban, evangelical-Christian, and non-college-educated white voters.

And speaking of blue-collar whites, here's a feature story from today's Des Moines Register out of Clinton County, Iowa (population 49,116), whose electorate twice backed Obama only to flip for Trump in 2016.  The headline is "Democrats' Hope for White House Success Run Through this Iowa County."  The story by Brianne Pfannenstiel features the chair of the county's Democratic Party, Bill Jacobs, who takes campaign organizers for the various presidential candidates on tours of his county:

When a new campaign organizer arrives in his corner of Iowa, he meets the person in the gravel parking lot outside the party’s headquarters, they climb into his gray Toyota minivan, and they set off for a drive. 

With the radio tuned to classic rock, Jacobs drives northeast along Liberty Avenue past the looming Archer Daniels Midland Co. plant, where a constant procession of grain trucks loops through to drop off corn for processing. 

He follows the curve of the Mississippi River where the city has invested in recreation and tourism. He points out the boarded-up retail shops on Main Avenue. 

"So much of the tour I give is talking about things that used to be here," Jacobs said. "We're really looking for the next big thing." 

He drives past the recently renovated lodge at Eagle Point Park, where the unions hold their annual Labor Day picnic.  (emphasis mine) 

Note the focus on what the county previously had and the need for economic revitalization.  The feature also touches on race--of course--and is well worth a read in its entirety.

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.

My Rural Travelogue (XXIII): A California summer on the road

Redwood Coast Transit Schedule, Smith River (Del Norte County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Most of my travel this summer has been road-tripping through parts of the Golden State.  I'm on my third trip of the summer now, to Sonoma County.  The other two have taken me farther afield (meaning farther from my Sacramento County home), first to Del Norte County, the state's farthest northwest reaches and then to Los Angeles via the coast, back through the Central Valley.   All told, these journeys have added up to well over 2,000 miles, many of them on Highway 101.  For this post, I'm using photos of post offices and (meager) public transit systems to illustrate my journeys, though I have included in some earlier posts this summer (here) a wider array of photos from Del Norte County.

On these three trips, I have passed through 25 different counties--nearly half of the state's total.  Specifically, I have traversed some part of the following California counties (in order of my passage, and showing county seats and populations in parentheses): 

U.S. Post Office Smith River (Del Norte) County, California, July 2019
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Trip 1:
Yolo County (population 200,849, Woodland)
Colusa County (21,419, Colusa)
Glenn County (28,122, Willows)

Redwood Coast Transit Bus, Del Norte County, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 

Tehama County (63,463, Red Bluff)
Shasta County (177,223, Redding)
Trinity County (13,786, Weaverville)
Humboldt County (132,646, Eureka)
Del Norte County (28,610, Crescent City)
(then heading south again through Humboldt)
Mendocino County (87,841, Ukiah)
Lake County (64,655, Lakeport)

U.S. Post Office Cambria (San Luis Obispo County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

U.S. Post Office Big Sur (Monterey County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Trip 2:
San Joaquin County (685,306, Stockton)
Stanislaus County (514,453, Modesto)
Merced County (255,793, Merced)
San Benito County (55,269, Hollister)
Monterey County (415,057, Salinas)
San Luis Obispo County (269,637,  San Luis Obispo)
Santa Barbara County (423,895, Santa Barbara)
Ventura County (823,318, Oxnard) 
Los Angeles County (10 million give or take a few, Los Angeles)
(the heading north again through Ventura, SB, SLO...)
Kern County (839,631, Bakersfield), though I just nicked the corner on that one
Kings County (151,366 Hanford)
Fresno County (994,400 Fresno)
then back through Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties to Sacramento.

Trip 3:
Yolo County (see above)
Solano County (413.344, Fairfield) 
Napa County (136,484, Napa)
Sonoma County (483,878, Santa Rosa)

So, of the 25 counties through which I traveled, only 8 are classified as nonmetropolitan (population less than 100,000), and 7 of those 8 are in far northern California.  The 8th is San Benito, between Central and Salinas Valleys.

U.S. Post Office, Los Alamos (Santa Barbara County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

One striking thing about these journeys:  the incredible variety of terrain and climate across the Golden State, from mist-shrouded redwoods to parched rolling hills dotted by chaparral. 

U.S. Post Office Bodega (Sonoma Co)
California (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Then of course, there's farmland from end to end:  orchards, cattle, and row crops including broccoli, strawberries and wine grapes.  (No doubt I've also driven past some cannabis, though I wasn't aware when I did.)

Sonoma Coast Transit Bus, near Bodega Bay, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Decades ago, the Republic of South Africa used the tourism slogan, "A World in One Country."  California could readily go with a similar slogan, "A World in one State."

Federal help for rural hospitals, including some in northern California

The Sacramento Bee reported yesterday out of Jackson, California, population 4,651, under the headline, "As rural hospitals and health care struggle, California hospitals are fighting back." Here's an excerpt:

For the past three decades, the number of hospitals in American rural areas has been declining at a steep pace. Among California’s 50 rural hospitals, four are at high risk of closing. Twenty have shut down since 1995, experts say. 

On Thursday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services attempted to stop the bleeding with a $20 million grant, distributed across 21 states. 

California hospitals received $1.5 million. Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital in Grass Valley and Sutter Amador Hospital in Jackson each received $750,000 in Rural Residency Planning and Development Program grants to spend over a three-year period.

Journalist Caroline Ghisolfi quotes a press release from Alex Azar, the Secretary for Health and Human Services, who invokes Trump's commitment to (or at least popularity in) rural places:

Promoting the health of rural America is one of the Trump Administration’s healthcare priorities.  Supporting the training of healthcare providers in rural areas through grants like these is a key way to help expand rural access to care, and is part of an overall effort to support rural healthcare in sustainable, innovative, and flexible ways.

The Sutter Amador Hospital "will use the funds to expand its Family Medicine Residency Program to Jackson, making space for six additional physicians." 

Literary Ruralism (Part XV): Annie Proulx's comments on rural North America

This is from an interview Proulx did with the New Yorker in 1999 in which she commented on some of her literary influences.

Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time.

This interview came two years after the magazine published Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain."  Here's the opening paragraph from that story:

They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road, leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age fourteen for a hardship license that let him make the hour-long trip from the ranch to the high school. The pickup was old, no heater, one windshield wiper, and bad tires; when the transmission went, there was no money to fix it. He had wanted to be a sophomore, felt the word carried a kind of distinction, but the truck broke down short of it, pitching him directly into ranch work.

Brokeback Mountain was, of course, made into a film released in 2005.

I'd say Proulx's 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Shipping News, also nicely lives up to her "difficult circumstances of place and time" description. 

According to amazon.com, Proulx lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland, the places these two stories are set. 

Rural So Cal epicenter of big California quakes

The two earthquakes that struck on 4 and 5 July, with Richter scale readings of 6.4 and 7.1 respectively, were centered in California's high desert, closest to the Kern County city of Ridgecrest, population  27,616.  The small city lies nearly at the point where San Bernardino County and Inyo County meet Kern County; another nearby population cluster is called Inyokern.  This is a sparsely populated area several hours east/northeast of Los Angeles, in the Mojave desert.

That the epicenter of the quakes occurred in such a sparsely populated area would seem to explain why the quakes caused relatively little damage, as this LA Times story speculated a few weeks ago.  The headline for Rong-Gong Lin II's story is "Ridgecrest earthquake mystery:  Why so little destruction from such huge tremblors?" Here's a key quote about the relative lack of damage and the reasons for it: 

Yes, mobile homes were torn off foundations, chimneys fell, gas lines leaked and some homes caught fire. But overall, most buildings did fine — and many businesses were up and running within a day or two of the biggest shock, a magnitude 7.1. 

“Ridgecrest, I’m just amazed,” California Earthquake Authority structural engineer Janiele Maffei said of the light damage.

As a result, Ridgecrest suffered far less damage than cities hit by less powerful quakes in recent years, including Napa and Paso Robles, where older buildings in the downtown areas crumbled amid the shaking.

Ken O'Dell, president of the Structural Engineers Assn. of Southern California, commented: 

You take a 7.1 and put it into the Hollywood fault or Newport-Inglewood fault in Long Beach — we’re going to see substantially different levels of damage.  Ridgecrest did a very good job surviving this particular 7.1.

But Keith Porter, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said Ridgecrest’s result should not be seen as a “victory lap.”

We still have dangerous buildings, and we still have a building code that is not optimal and doesn’t protect society as well as it could.  Instead of a dozen collapsed manufactured homes, hundreds or thousands of collapsed manufactured homes. Instead of four or so building fires, hundreds of building fires.

Porter thus suggests that the relatively small population and limited built environment of Ridgecrest accounts in large part for the minimal damage.

Lin also compares the relative lack of damage from the Ridgecrest quake to the likely damage from quakes of similar intensity in most populated regions of the State.

A U.S. Geological Survey simulation said a plausible magnitude 7.1 earthquake on the Hayward fault in the Bay Area could kill 800 people, burn the equivalent of 52,000 single-family homes and displace 400,000 people, worsening the region’s housing crisis.

And a hypothetical magnitude 7.8 earthquake that would send violent shaking waves along a 186-mile section of the southern San Andreas fault could kill 1,800 people, leave 50,000 injured and cause lasting harm to Southern California’s economy.

Finally, here's a link to some cool satellite photos showing the actual shift in the earth/plates during the earthquake.

Another interesting story about the Ridgecrest earthquake regarded the town's newspaper, the Ridgecrest Independent, and the fabulous job it did covering the quake.  Here's the lede for the CNN story:

Saturday's edition of the Ridgecrest Daily Independent newspaper was just about to go to the printing press when the earth shook again Friday night. 

The front page headline -- "The Time Ridgecrest Rocked" -- was all about the prior day's 6.4 earthquake, which was centered near Ridgecrest. 

So the staff stripped a new banner at the very top of the page and explained that the 7.1 earthquake had caused further gas leaks and fires in the area. The Friday night timing of the quake made the paper's website and Facebook accounts the best way to get updates to readers. 

The Daily Independent is a true local paper -- with standalone stories on its home page about damage to a mobile home; the fairgrounds; and the community college.