They Aren’t Terrible People

 “I’ve met them, talked to them.  They aren’t terrible people.”

A good friend, who is a far more tolerant person than I ever want to be, if I could be, keeps trying to convince me that Trump’s voters have some value, deep down inside, far below the surface, that makes them redeemable. Apparently, it’s hidden underneath their lizard skin “disguises.”  “I’ve met them, talked to them.  They aren’t terrible people,”  he says.  When he lived in an industrial farming area, his neighbors were all red neck, uneducated, agricultural-welfare dependent, Trumpers.  They imagined themselves to be “conservative” and, even, capitalist, while desperately depending on “the big city” to pay their bills, build their roads, install and maintain their communications systems, provide their power, and create fake markets for their toxic commodity “crops.”

He is, mostly, a city kid who grew up with the Mayberry image of rural people being kinda stupid, but good-hearted and trustworthy.  He is incredibly well-travelled, nationally and internationally, I’m none of those.  I’ve been in Mexico and Canada, both by motorcycle and plane, and I tend to keep to myself and rarely put much effort into getting to know people while I travel.  I suspect my friend and his wife are downright gregarious, when they travel. 

First, if they are “not terrible people,” you’re going to have to explain to me what morality and ethical code they use to re-elect a convicted felon with multiple outstanding charges pending, a rapist who has been successfully sued for committing rape and accused of rape dozens of times, and who tried to overthrow an election.  Really?  That’s something “good people” would do? 

I grew up in small town, western Kansas and spent a good bit of my early career years working in agriculture: first, as an electronic scales (weights and measures) technician and, second, as an electrical engineer for an irrigation manufacturer.  In both jobs, I was always surrounded by, what Gene Wilder, in Blazing Saddles, described as, “people of the land, the common clay of the new west.  You know, morons.”  For the ultimate city guy, Mel Brooks read the rural Midwest like it was a child’s first book.  When I hear politicians babble about “hardworking farmers,” I always have to laugh.  As a field service technician working for those characters, when I had to get the equipment owner to make a financial decision, I always had to hunt them down in the local bar, regardless of the time of day.  And they would always be in the company of a half-dozen or more other rich, idle farmers complaining about the size of their welfare checks or pretending to know something about the scary “Big City” based on the stupid stuff they’d seen on television.

I grew up around those people and the one thing I learned, above all others, is that they only tolerate people who look, believe, act, and talk like themselves.  For the first half of my life, I’d learned to become a cultural chameleon: imitating the accent, mannerisms, and appearance of the people I worked with and for, from living in Kansas to Texas to Nebraska and all of the surrounding states and customers.  A rare example of my forgetting to stay “in character and costume” is the story, “The Last Wagon Wheel Gig,” and that experience stuck with me for the rest of my life (which could have been cut very short that night).

It would be a mistake to assume that everyone in the rural areas is an asshole, but starting with that assumption is always a good idea.  Even total asshole states like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, the Dakotas, and the deep south, still have 25%-to-almost-50% of their population leaning somewhat progressive.  As James Dickey tried to depict in his book, Deliverance, in those places, the nicest people are among the finest, kindest, most generous examples of humans on the planet, while the rest are solidly the absolute worst.  It’s always a good plan to stay incognito until you know who you’re dealing with. 

At the other end of that scale, when I was barely 19, I moved to Dallas, Texas for a fly-by-night computer programming school (that folded less than a year after they’d taken all of my college savings and were sued by students and parents).  It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the worst people in “the big city” were rural immigrants and, consistently, the only people who were trustworthy and decent were people who had lived their whole lives in the city.  Of course, most of the people I met were in my economic class (poor), but not all of them. 

For me, moving to California (the L.A. area, in fact), in 1983, was a brief moment in my life of simply being who I am without any sort of costume.  I was there for almost a decade it and, for a closet liberal/hippy/semi-creative, that was my “coming out party.”  When I left California, I (lucky for me) tried Indiana first, which quickly helped me rebuild my damn closet and outfit it with all of my old disguises.  Indiana is a disgustingly red state, filled with beat-down, uneducated, lazy, mostly-white, poor people and a tiny minority of filthy rich, idle and useless, nepo-baby, ruling elites.  That pack of ruling elites are proudly anti-union, anti-education, anti-immigrant, and fascist Republicans.  I was there in a half-hearted (by the company owners) attempt to bring product design and manufacturing to a small audio electronics division of a company that had long-since abandoned everything but marketing and sales and was sinking into corporate oblivion (which would happen two years later). 

From there, I moved to Denver, Colorado and, like Dallas and California, the most vile urban Coloradans are consistently rural immigrants to “the big city.”  They bring their prejudice, ignorance, and gullibility with them and drag the city down with them.  Like most of the nation’s urban areas, Denver is a liberal, “Blue” city surrounded by imbecilic red-staters (Representative Bobert is a prime example of rural Colorado).  From Denver to Minneapolis in 1996 to today, the rule remains true: rural implants to the city are more often than not idiots dragging everyone else down with them.  And it is a huge mistake to assume that they are benign idiots, since they are overwhelmingly the characters who decide gunning down a building full of little kids or assassinating a popular, productive politician is an act of rebellion. 

So, my friend, I disagree with you.  They are “terrible people” and, typically, so are their offspring: untrustworthy, racist, violent, gullible, selfish, and greedy.  Stupid people tend to produce more stupid people and that is exactly why this country is where it is today. 

A Hopeful Unintended Consequence

 At my age and during the current de-evolving condition of this country, I’m not much for hope.  Because a growing majority of the human population is stupid, lazy, vile, and corrupt, it’s hard to see much good happening in the future until we make it all the way to The Marching Morons stage where the functional minority decides to ship the dead weight off to Mars or actually designs a killer virus that attacks the “conservative chromosomes” and purges the planet of the sluggard mass of humanity.  But even with the current race to the bottom coming at us from every direction, I have one slight hope for Republican’s historic tendency for unintended consequences having a positive outcome.  It’s a slight hope, but that’s still infinitely more than no hope.

As was intended by our slave-holding founders, the US federal government is grossly over-represented by low population, dependent, rural red states and red areas in the few populated blue states.  These are not bright folks and, while they are totally dependent on tax-paying blue states and urban areas for every aspect of what passes for “modern life” in backwards rural areas, they imagine themselves as being critical, self-sufficient, and necessary.  If they aren’t from California (almost 50%), Washington, Oregon, the rapidly diminishing unflooded bits of Florida, small portions of Texas, Colorado, and small rural and urban truck farms across the country, rural politicians bragging about their constituents “putting food on the table” for the rest of the country are talking about US agriculture production of inedible commodities like corn intended for energy production, animal feed, and the kind of “processed food” (i.e. “pre-digested food”) that even Worm Boy thinks is harmful. The rest of that “food production” is the world’s carbon production champ: cattle, pigs, and other meat animals. 

The US government pays out somewhere around $38B/year just to subsidize beef and milk production.  Call it what it is, corporate welfare.  Without that money being handed out to deadbeat farmers/feedlots/ag-factories producing products no one but suckers in the US are willing to eat, a Big Mac would cost somewhere more than $13 instead of $5.  As University of Oxford study of British diets pointed out, “meat-rich diets (more than 100g of meat per day) resulted in 7.2kg of CO₂ emissions, vegetarian and pescatarian diets about 3.8kg of CO₂ per day, and vegan diets only 2.9kg per day. Much of this difference comes from heavy reliance on cattle production.” 

In the US, unless we’re giving it away, there are few customers for our antibiotic-saturated, pesticide and herbicide-resistant poisoned GMO-fed meat products.  So, with more assistance from federal subsidies, that is exactly how the slim remainder of our world agricultural “markets” are propped up.  In the meantime, almost 20% of the food Americans eat, including meat products (especially lamb) are imported, as are considerably more of our fruits and non-corn vegetables.  If the reason rural America is propped up by urban consumers is “food production,” urban consumers are getting screwed.  And they are.

And here comes the “hopeful” bit.

The current “administration” (to abuse that word viciously) is bent on eliminating practically every form of federal assistance to anyone who isn’t a billionaire.  Killing off Medicaid, alone, is going to decimate healthcare in rural areas, which are already in dire straits due to a lack of doctors, nurses, and up-to-date facilities.  In most rural areas, up to 50% of the patients depend on Medicaid assistance to have any sort of healthcare coverage.  Almost all “industry” in rural areas is dependent on federal supports and assistance and urban support for infrastructure.  Between the threats to rural infrastructure, education, medical care, and commerce and Trump’s war on cities, we could see a Detroit-style urban food independence movement, nationally.  In 2017, during a visit to Detroit for a technical course, I took a tour of the city that was mostly designed to illustrate the damage white flight, the damage the DeVos mob did to Detroit’s public education system, and the abandoned industrial and residential areas.  The tour ended up highlighting many of the brand new urban truck, hydrophonic, and greenhouse farms and the businesses that sprouted up to make use of the food now being produced in the city. 

If cities take the rural-vs-urban economic and cultural war as seriously as the rural rubes have in their whole-hearted endorsement of Trump’s fascism, cities could decide to keep their wealth, talent, and resources to themselves.  One offshoot of that could be moving protein production (meat) from rural handouts to investing that money into urban “cultivated” or lab-grown meat production.  That could be a game-changer in more ways than any Republican ever imagined.  States can more easily shut off the financial support of their own rural areas easier than blue states can cut off red states.  Once that kind of movement is happening in places like California, Washington state, New York, and even Minnesota, where all of the financial support for red states originates, the country could see an economic battle waged between urban and rural area that would transform local and national economics, food production, and politics.  Without the bogus “food producers” argument, rural areas will be forced to confront their own lack of contribution and value and that could be the end of the kind of communities that the Department of Agriculture has been defending and supporting since 1862, when the department was created by President Lincoln for exactly that purpose: “to provide leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, and rural development, and to promote economic opportunity, foster sustainable agriculture, and ensure a safe, nutritious, and affordable food supply for all Americans and for the world.”

I’m not just hoping that plant-based, cultivated, or lab-grown “meat” replaces feedlot “farmed” meat because I want to see rural America and industrial agriculture get what’s coming to it (that is an attraction, though).  I actually like many of those products, especially sausages from Field and Roast and cheese substitutes from Miyoko’s way better than the animal products.  Vegan replacements for “meat,” like Beyond Beef and several other hard-to-find meat substitutes are not just better for the planet and my own health, they taste as good or better than the “real thing.”  We are long past the point where sustaining rural “lifestyles” is worth the sacrifice the rest of the country is forced to make so that the dumbest kid in the family can afford to inherit the farm/ranch.  Personally, I think that would be a good beginning to updating and redesigning the government of the United States of America.