 |
| 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
