Not too long ago, I visited the neighborhood where I had grown up, in a typical Washington, D.C, suburb.
Back in the day, there was an elementary school at the end of the block where I spent my earliest years (Now called North Forestville Elementary School). The house was typical of those built in the late 60s and early 70s that you still see in many parts of most urban areas. There was once a small (at least by today's standards) indoor shopping mall that was built over the street. It contained several stores famous back in the day. The street was once 81st Ave. NE in Washington, D.C. Then, it became Milvale Avenue in North Forestville, Maryland, technically a part of Suitland and lying completely inside the Capital Beltway.
Although the neighborhood looked pretty much the same, as did the school, the house was practically unrecognizable, as it had been modernized, upgraded, painted and enlarged. The school now sits behind a fence with cameras at all the gates, as most urban schools do any more. The mall has been leveled and is now a strip mall. The church where I grew up is now a nursing home.
Not that it was all that surprising, because urban America changes almost daily, as rural areas get swallowed up for development. But parts of rural America have remained fairly stable and safe, like the one pictured in the song "Americana" by Moe Bandy. It recalled to my mind the days I would sit on a bench in the small town along the rural roads in New England. On sunny spring days you can sit in a park all alone and still get a sense of the place, the history, the people and the culture that courses along those capillary roads. A lot like visiting the rural town in upstate New York where my father was born and raised, which has changed very little, except for the chain hotels and Wal-Mart.
If you go there and visit, that is. If you are looking down from 30,000 feet or from the safe remove of a city, you tweet about how empty and depraved it is. On Twitter recently, Noah Smith, a columnist for Bloomberg, for example, turned his seasoned intellect to rural America. Spot the moment when you eye-rolled so hard your retinas picked up the brief interstitial flashes of the neurons in the recesses of your skull:
"As a country we needed to give rural white Americans some sort of identity they could be proud of other than Confederacy-style white supremacy. We failed to give them one."
Leave aside for a moment the idea that rural white American culture is Dixie-lovin' pale-boy-uber-alles and consider the magisterial regret: We failed to give them the proper identity. Who, exactly, might have extended a kingly arm and granted with noblesse oblige an identity for rural white America? The next tweet explains:
"Of course, the blame for this lies with Republicans who stirred up racial resentment for votes, etc., etc. We all know that story. But what did we liberal elites do to push back on this? Nothing. We ditched the rednecks and fled to hippie college towns and cities on the coast."
"We liberal elites" ran away and let them stew in their rancid juices, instead of staying home and starting an "ideals on wheels" program that would bring Howard Zinn books to elderly shut-ins.
Why did they run? Bullies!
"Getting picked on by rednecks as a kid sucked. So what did liberal Gen Xers and Millennials do? We moved out."
You can imagine how that went. The smart kid is leaving the small-town library and runs into some toughs in overalls, chewing on stalks of wheat. The leader steps forward, grinning and addresses his confederates:
"Lookit him with his glasses and shoes and all, Whatcha readin', nerd? A Theory of Justice. Well, boys, looks like we got ourselves a dee-voh-tee of Mr. John Rawls here. You like it when a just society maximizes its efforts t' extend its liberties to all, doncha? Betchoo subscribe to his notion of the original position, too." (Spits.) "We got an original position for you, dork and I ain't sure you gonna like it."
(Banjo music plays from the tree branch above.)
"So mebbe you'd best toddle off to some big town where they take kindly to that newfangled thinking and leave us Burke-fearin' folk in peace. Gowan, now, git."
We continue with the tweets:
"We didn't stay and work to build a real nation out of the people who gave us a hard time. We got college degrees that allowed us to escape to better places."
At least it is nice to hear someone admit that running off to college to get a degree is not, in itself, the accomplishment some think.
What has changed things? Why, the apps on which he spends all his time:
"Now social media has changed the game. We can't spread out any longer. We're all in one room together. Mobility, in the substantive sense, has vanished. Meaning we have to become a unified nation once again."
He mistakes a lot of people yelling at one another on Twitter for the entire nation crammed into a slaughter-house pen, bellowing in anger and fear. The good news? A new narrative will emerge. And it is racial essentialism!
"Like it or not, the ideology that's going to re-unify America will be based on the thing we call 'wokeness." A pushback now underway will limit it, but overall it will become the basis of the new consensus for how we define our sense of nationhood."
Wokeness will provide a new national narrative. The means of salvation will be the products of a technocratic enclave, built by the savvy members of the rural diaspora. Children in rural white America (Trump's fictional suburbanites) will read the holy texts of Kendi (PBUH) on the internet and set dad straight at the dinner table. The scales will drop from their elders' eyes, clanging like manhole covers, and they will roll up their sleeves and craft a new identity. The Noah Smiths of the world will gaze upon it and say that it is a good and they will, on the seventh day, rest.
"Rest" meaning "maybe stay off Twitter until after lunch." Self-care is very important.
And, if Elon Musk has his way, staying off Twitter may be the best thing any of us can do in the long term.
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