“That’s your education talking.”

[supergee]

On Rural America: Understanding Isn’t The Problem

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[arlie]

Someone needed to say this.

[weofodthignen]

I'm afraid I didn't get very far reading this. For one thing I'm on my laptop, with no adblock, and it's one of those online texts that requires constant heavy scrolling to get the text to move down past all the attempts to identify my non-existent Facebook identity, etc., etc. For another, the number of copyediting failures was very high. Thirdly, while there is a valid point about anti-intellectual fundies, not everyone in rural America or even everyone in rural and small-town America is a fundie; nor are all the fundies in America in rural areas (many cities have suburbs packed with them; the suburbs of Minneapolis and vast swathes of Orange County, California, come to mind, not to mention much of urban Texas, and even more so Arizona, Utah (!), and of course it's the default position in most of the Old South; and you're presumably familiar with how Staten Island votes, and hereabouts Cupertino votes similarly; nor is "flyover country" (a ghastly phrase) homogeneous, as the preceding shows; plus the Orange Nightmare got scads of votes in the Rustbelt urban areas. This kind of supercilious over-generalization is nasty and very much counter-productive. Someone whose DW I read—unfortunately it's very much private so I won't name them—has been excoriating the Left for reacting to this election by tarring everyone who didn't vote for the Dems as stupid, evil or both, thereby being no better than the Republicans 8 years ago. This is the first clear example I've seen, although as I say I stopped reading way before the end. (You previously linked to another essay that in my view tipped over into condescension, although the author appeared to be trying hard not to.) Yes, we may privately roll our eyes at these people, but identifying them all as the same kind of contemptible people is just wrong.

M