The Idiocy of Rural Life

Mary Pickford in Sparrows (1926), by William Beaudine. Via Fritzi.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "What Rural America Has to Teach Us", New York Times, 22 March 2019:

What rural America has to teach us is that we should all live in a county with under 1,000 residents, or so few people that everybody has to double up on official functions in government and civil society and amateur sports as well as being bank presidents or owners of a Michelin-star bakery, which fortunately takes up no more than half your time, which will go along with an insane work ethic and "intentionality", which means having a pervasive civic mind-set. Then everybody will be just about perfect, leaving their doors permanently unlocked and going to meetings all evening, except the kids who get good grades and have to leave town to find something to do, and the local immigrants who dismember our hogs, who won't go on Facebook for fear of what they might find out about our political views.

Honest. I made up the Michelin star (in the column it's a James Beard Award), and the town he's visiting has 7,700 people, it's a bunch of other Nebraska counties that have fewer than a thousand, and the hogs are an educated guess, but other than that it's pretty much all in there: even unto

At one dinner, a Latina woman looked at her Anglo friends with tears in her eyes and told them why she had dropped off Facebook: “There’s a lot of people who make me feel at home here, and I’d never had a home. I know you because I know how you make me feel. I don’t want to change my mind about you because you liked one comment on social media.”

And I think he must be lying about the word "intentionality":

The word I heard most was “intentionality” — especially about community. Many people try not to use Amazon so they can support local businesses. They don’t use the self-checkout lanes in the drugstore so they can support local workers. They’re almost fanatical in their support of local arts programs.

Constantly they are thinking: Does this help my town or hurt it? And when you tell them that this pervasive civic mind-set is an unusual way to be, they look at you blankly because they can’t fathom any other.

I don't think he heard it at all. "Well yes, Mr. Brooks, we Nebraskans are chock full of intentionality. I was saying that just this morning at breakfast, Wilma, wasn't I?" "Oh, Ed, you usually say it at dinner. I'm the one who says it at breakfast." I don't think he's using the word right, either. (It's certainly not "intentionality" in the philosophical sense, referring to the property of all mental events of being about something, and it can't be in the ordinary-language sense, that he thinks his Nebraskans have an unusual ability to do things on purpose—as opposed to doing everything by accident?)

As always, the dirty little secret he's keeping from himself is that he's only talking about the local gentry, not the common folk—the ones who "try not to use Amazon" are the ones with plenty of shopping time—and thinking of poor folk basically as the objects that provide the important people with an opportunity to display their virtue. And feeling sorry for himself, perhaps, because in his Capitol Hill house the neighborhood is just too darn crowded, and everybody's a patrician and nobody's a peasant and he can never know the satisfaction of the true Tory country squire, bringing soup to a sick indigent tenant farmer or organizing a jumble sale, intimately acquainted with all the beneficiaries of his generosity, even though he actually has to put in even fewer hours in the office than a bank president does.

Speaking of hours in the office, I don't usually have much to say about mine, but as some of you know it involves reading a lot of disparate things about music and musical life around the world, from the high-class to the tribal, and from formal musicology to economics of the biz, and something I landed on a few months ago was a bunch of German magazine articles about the response of various musical people in large cities and small towns—teachers in the government-funded community music schools that are found in every municipality, performers in the government-funded professional orchestras and amateur jazz and tango bands and traditional Turkish ensembles—to the refugee crisis of 2014-15, when German towns were suddenly flooded with unemployed and traumatized Syrians. It was very remarkable and moving to me how many things mostly young Germans, teachers and musicians, thought of doing to help the refugees integrate in and become more comfortable, from spontaneous concerts to highly organized classes (music lessons that functioned as extra language classes), and not out of noblesse oblige—the instrumental teachers in particular are pretty poorly paid, and far from being a leisure class—but because it was something they could do; from each according to their abilities.

(I should pause to acknowledge, by the way, that nasty anti-immigrant sentiment also exists in Germany, more eastern than western, rural than urban, and older than younger, of course; it's just not what I'm talking about here.)

I don't know if Brooks would admire this kind of volunteering, made possible in the first place by labor laws that assume free time as a basic human need and the existence of these for-everybody state-sponsored institutions, where the volunteers aren't the seigneurie he immediately identifies with, but the idea of some kind of intrinsic connection between underpopulation and volunteerism probably isn't really what he wants to say, and it also isn't true.

And a fairly magnificent rant from Driftglass.