Thanks to FPR reader and my fellow Hoosier Brandon Seitz for pointing us to The Daily Yonder, a webzine dedicated to writing about and analyzing what’s going on in rural America. I’ve only begun to poke around, but it certainly looks like a site worth keeping tabs on. And I note that it is coedited by Bill Bishop, whose book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of America Is Tearing Us Apart I’ve been meaning to check out, as it is directly related to the meritocracy conversations we’ve been having here. Yes, “The Rural Compact” promoted by the webzine’s publisher, The Center for Rural Strategies, may not quite get at the heart of what’s ailing folks out in the country. But at least they give a rat’s ass (to use one of my rurally embedded father’s more pungent terms). Give them partial credit, at least.
I post this in the full knowledge that merely to talk about rural life seriously is to invite accusations of “romanticizing” it. The Romanticism Police, like the Nostalgia Police, enjoy full employment among the blogospheric classes.
. . . and what they misunderstand about Romanticism is exceeded only by their daft conception of Nostalgia. Their got their badges from a box of Cracker Jacks.
Heaven forfend that anyone should romanticize anything that might have occurred before the Great Technocratic Circular Onanism. Nostalgia and Memory is anathema to those who confidently manufacture reality in accordance with the Mission Statement.
But, to be sure, to ponder the injury rates of the Farm worker puts a bit of a damper upon any nostalgic tendencies.
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