St Fu

“Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.)

Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon.

But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better.

For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing).

And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo.

Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too.

For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other.

Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.”
― Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society

“In my experience conservatives hate reporters mainly because they see us as phonies. We reject the idea that we belong to a class, or that we have our own tribal beliefs. Sometimes the hypocrisy is something they’ve seen—upper-class liberals, railing about racism in the heartland from the comfort of an all-white suburban town, where they occasionally tip a Puerto Rican gardener or hire a Republican plumber. But a lot of it has to do with approach and tone, the way we openly write for and celebrate professional-sect audiences, unlike the columnists of the past, the Mike Roykos or Jack Newfields, who were unembarrassed to write in the language of the working person.”
― Matt Taibbi, Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another

“Be careful what you wish for, not because you'll get it but because you'll be turned into the thing that can get it. It's not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears, it's a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.”
― Jed McKenna, Jed Talks #2: Away from the Things of Man

“There were others like her. Of course there were. How had she ever thought there would not be?”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens