“What’s Hidden in Rural Areas?”
Take a drive through the U.S. off the freeways, toll roads and the big stroads. Drive through some small towns, especially in the Southern, mountain or plains’ states. What do you see?
 |
| Welcome to Plainville! |
Bad cable TV. Broken streets and broken-down cars. Casinos. Chicken, turkeys, cow and pig factory farms, CAFOs and feedlots. Churches, tabernacles and houses of worship. Closed businesses. Closed hospitals and schools. Drugs and alcohol. Fast food joints. Huge automobile factories. Junkyards and landfills. Lots of dented cars, old pickups and wrecks, because this is exclusively car country. Lousy internet. Massive warehouses. Military bases. Mountain removal. Native reservations. No jobs or public transport. Oil and gas wells. Pipelines. Poorly-paid retail jobs. Poverty. Power and coal plants. Prisons. Ruined houses, burnt and boarded. Run-down motels. Shabby farms. Solar arrays. Super-max federal prisons. Terrible radio. Toxic waste lagoons from animal agriculture. Trailer homes. Violence and crime. Wind turbines. Worst food cafes.
Rural areas are where the U.S. hides some of its worst secrets, or just plain secrets. The things they don’t want people in the cities to see. Certainly, the large auto plants and giant warehouses take advantage of the cheap wages in rural areas, intentionally so. Their parking lots are packed with 18-wheelers, driven by low-paid, exploited and exhausted drivers. Many of the factories and warehouses don’t even have a rail line in sight. So how will they function in a post-carbon world? They won’t…
The power plants puff billowing clouds of smoke, vapor, toxins out of their tall chimneys on the horizon. The hidden-away walled prisons employ locals, creating a flow of state or federal money into some forgotten town. The huge military bases do the same thing, even bringing in a hidden sex trade. All far enough away from the enraged crowds and proletariat of the big and medium-sized cities.
The circuits of poverty are most notable, and everything that poverty drags in its train. It affects not just darker-skinned people, but light-skinned ones too, much as they might be blind to that.
There are rich people hiding about though, with their new 8 cylinder pick-ups, giant ranch-like houses on the hill and many toys. Sometimes they own a big ranch or farm, or own the seedy local business. They boss the small towns, or suck up to the local corporation. Take a drive and see…Nostalgia
Nostalgia is a problem and I don’t mean personal nostalgia. It is an occupational hazard for people who study history or lived some of that history. The Left is full of nostalgia - though so is the U.S. in a general sense. After all, U.S. culture is stagnant and this drifts over into every niche. Lefties are still fighting the battles of 100 years ago. Groups mouth the same simple clichés over and over again. Mothballed chants and archaic labor songs get a rerun. Peeling covers on hardbacks about forgotten strikes fill shelves, alongside repetitive history mining. Rosaries are fingered for the 1917 Revolution and the 1949 Revolution. Leftie heroes and heroines are on buttons, stickers, T-shirts, FB and Twitter posts. Old-fashioned iconography like time has not passed. Clichés that limp on, ideas that are worn-out, protests that are recycled, unionism that repeats on a treadmill.
The most important thing to understand is the present and what is going to happen in the future – based on your actual scientific understanding of the new and the now, along with history, economics, theory and dialectics of course.
Much of the nostalgia comes from older leftists who grew up this way, and don’t realize the ‘ball-game’ is changing (note: archaic sports analogy) – technology is changing, the class structure is morphing, the global situation is over-maturing, economics is shifting. Younger leftists sometimes idolize the heroes of the past, and don’t move beyond that - worshipping relics so to speak. The relics are dead - in practical terms they are not coming to help anytime soon.
Conservatives are based in the past - that is no secret. They live there. Of course, even liberals live in a slightly younger past. The ‘50s; FDR; the “Good War;” the “Greatest Generation,” and every twitch of humanitarian imperialism. But also the myths of democracy and government they learned in junior-high civics - the “Founders,” the Constitution® and so on - just like the Right.
But the Left-wing is not exempt from its own myths. It’s all a sign of atrophy in the left-labor movement. Time to shake the cobwebs, get out of the ruts, the habits, the worn grooves – cultural, political and economic. Because reality and capital are doing that now. The bad ‘boom’ is coming. I’m not going to go into specifics about ‘who’ or ‘what’ is the worst, but you’ll know if you take a moment to reflect … because clearly, something is not happening here, Mr. and Mrs. Jones.
The Cultural Marxist
May 1, 2022
Happy May Day – if you have one!
No comments:
Post a Comment