Welcome friends!
Did you catch the story about the good people of the US Midwestern state of Montana electing some conservative thug named Greg Gianforte to the US Congress? He was in the news recently for physically attacking a reporter who had asked him a question about the Republican Party health care plan and then lying about it until he found it untenable in the face of testimony from witnesses. (He was apparently relying on some Fox News reporters to back him up but they opted to tell the truth for once suggesting some elements of the organization may have some latent professionalism and commitment to ideals beyond making President Trump and the Republican Party look good.) The citizens of Montana are of course free to elect any sort of idiot they like to the US Congress and frankly one doesn’t expect much from a state sparsely populated by the most isolated and provincial of rural folk. Indeed I was about to let it pass without comment as just one of those things but it did get me thinking about something I found mildly interesting: the tendency of many Americans to romanticize these flyover regions of the country by referring to them as the “heartland” of the country. The phrase of course is a little play on words involving the notion of a heartland as the geographical center of a nation and the notion of the heartland as the portion of a nation exemplifying its true character. The problem in this instance is that while the first bit may well be true the latter bit is most emphatically not. As the results of the recent election in Montana so strikingly illustrate the people of the so-called heartland of the USA today exemplify mostly the effects of a sort of rot or cancer of the American character. These hicks of the heartland appear to have thrown over our cherished ideals of democracy and free speech in favor of the rather more authoritarian small town virtues of bullying and lying. I’m afraid it’s time to call it like it really is. The true intellectual and moral heart of the USA is located not in the geographically central farmlands of the Midwest but in the coastal regions and the large cities where most American and in particular most educated and gainfully employed Americans actually live.
One question that occurred to me is where did this fascination with rural small town life even come from? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website. All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee. Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right? If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then. Thank you my friends!
