Thinking of picking up Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism. Which means the random toddler-inspired bookshelf grab this morning is timely. Here’s Wendell Berry in The Need to Be Whole, describing a sympathy I have never moved past:
With us, so far, states of mind cannot be out-lawed. But we need to pay some attention to unprominent prejudices that are merely habits of ordinary life: prejudices, I mean, against farmers, country people, people of small towns, white southerners, white people, white men, men, Kentuckians, Kan-sans, manual workers, poor people, people who have not attended college. Some intellectuals are prejudiced against anybody of any religion, and this they see as honesty and courage.
Lately among leftish politicians, intellectuals, and journalists, another prejudice has been revealed: a half-hysterical fear and hatred of a country called Rural America, which they have not seen except distantly and swiftly from the interstate highways or from thousands of feet in the air. Seen thus “objectively,” Rural America is filled only with Trump voters, disbelievers in science, climate change deniers, racists, sexists, homophobes, backward “non-college” country people, manually working white people with dirty hands and blue collars. The further revelation is that when urban Americans speak of “our country” they are using a metaphor; they mean the government, the economy, the military, the transportation system, and the more spectacular parks and wilderness areas; they don’t mean the actual country from which they mine their food, clothing, shelter, fuels, and ores. Their own actual country is to them a foreign and an alien land.