My friend Tiokasin Ghosthorse said that his ancestors considered politics to be the highest form of spirituality because they knew their political decisions would have an effect on the seventh generation.

Garrison Keillor is not only an old scout, but an old soul, a bittersweet spirit.

Pity such spirits are but ghosts in today's political landscape.

Reason enough not to smother the tartness of the rhubarb.

.........

How about making the case for a simple life in a politically progressive, tolerant, diverse, clean, city populated by educated people where the highest standards of human rights are practiced instead? I'd rather be in Stockholm than trapped in a religious cult in the middle of nowhere. The Amish are not the future.

http://www.dreamingearth.net

One of the limiters is the price of real estate. The housing boom, automobile, and value of lake front property here in Minnesota are joining forces to actually price the locals out of their own towns in some cases. For instance, property values in small resort towns have floated up to whatever upper-crust Minneapolitans are willing to shell out for a seasonal lake cabin -- rather than the going rate for the jobs available locally.

"Globalization" happened probably 25-75 years ago, internally within the US. The rise of the automobile has created a lot of distant economies, encouraged outsiders to buy property, Big Agriculture to grow bigger, and young people to leave. I've roadtripped the US about a dozen times and it's the same story in small towns from Washington to Maine. Main street may have been laid out in good honest stone & brick shop fronts typically somewhere between 1875-1920. And probably 10-50% of the buildings are vacant. But there's a WalMart or large grocery store at the outskirts of town near the highway.

What's needed for Garrison's vision is a decentralization of our economy, a return to local economies, and a boot-out of the big boxes. The nature of for-profit economy is to get more than you give. The crux of the problem with the Big Boxes is an additional liability: a certain percentage of the wealth leaves the state altogether. So it has a parasitic/skimming component about it. It's much worse than the absentee landlord problem -- we've got absentee economies, perhaps a whole culture in absentia.

I love this guy, listen to him on the radio all the time and saw him in person once here in Portland ORegon. Would that there were more thinking people with his voice.

I don't know where Mr. Keillor found his small town to romanticize about. But here in mine the only thing to see on Main Street are empty storefronts where mom and pop stores once bustled with business. The faces on the street are mostly those of the elderly who couldn't get out or were too attached to their family histories to leave. And the cars driving through are just that...driving through.

Small town America is dead thanks to our faceless corporations.

Garrison found his Rhubarb Town about a half hour from my Paradise Farm of the Thousand Flowers. Out here amidst the seas of corn and beans, with prices up due to fuel over food, times are good. I've met young Amish who's favorite (clandestine) tune was "Big Balls in Cowtown." One fellah loved to do power turns with his horse and buggy. Rhubarb town was always beautiful, but tourist money has poured in over the last decade or so and our prettified Mayberry has become a little diamond in the hills. I worry that Current Occupant policies will make idylic times and places a near impossibility for 90% of us. Inexpensive college and health care is a good start. Taxation policies to avoid the growing stratification of wealth is essential.

Clearly stated. Should be sufficient to change enough minds to transform the world but isn't.

Where I live in NWPa Amish country, small town America is alive and well, just as Mr. Keillor describes. Yes, there are some towns in the area that are not so prosperous or picturesque, but most of them hereabouts are lovely little gems. I know and do business with many of the local Amish, who are, by large, honest, intelligent, humourous, friendly, and very hard-working. They know more about the outside world than most people think. Their young people have a period of time where they can "experiment" with the outside world, and they have to chose to join the Church when they come of age. The sensless recent senseless slaughter of their innocent little girls at the hand of one of the deranged "English", and the subsequent grace and forgiveness of the families involved and the Amish community in general, could teach all of us a lesson in the principle of turning the other cheek. Also, they do not prosletize or attempt to force or coerce their beliefs on anyone else. If diaster does indeed strike and the typical excessive American lifestyle becomes no longer viable, the Amish community will offer to teach their skills of sustainable farming and gardening, cooperation and their many, many other useful and practical skills to whoever wishes to learn. That is who they are...they, along with the other peoples of Mother Earth, who have retained the old and "outdated" knowledge, will help others to survive...assuming of course we are not all dead and have not killed off those who possess this wisdom.

It's pleasant to think that people in small towns
have a more wholesome, connected life. Yet,
the majority of those in small-town America have
overwhelmingly supported our current government. They also tend to be the most socially reactionary people in the US. Please read the following article by Lisa Walsh Thomas about small town USA in the Bush era: http://www.counterpunch.org/thomas07172003.html
It's easy to sit back in rural America, enjoying "traditional values," and be willfully ignorant about what the current administration is doing in the Middle East and the world at large, despite the fact that they have consistently given this government their full support and blessing.

Good posts. Not only the Amish, but the few remaining native communities worldwide that still live sustainable lives and are now under siege will become our most valuable teachers when looming disasters strike.

"anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain"
-- E. E. Cummings

Yes, the amish possess the wisdom of beating their children, right wing theological government, christian cult practices, and other "traditional" forms of knowledge to abuse their own people with. I'll take a permaculture vegan hippie free love bisexual atheist commune first, thank you. But I'm sure it is easy for people who have no social consciousness whatsoever to romanticize small towns in middle America where African Americans were lynched, and all minorities are still unwelcome; where people vote for bush and no intellectual or artistic progress is possible. Oh yes, the bible and paddle belts are such great places. People wanted to leave small towns for the city long before globalization ever existed; and for a good reason.

Thanks, iolellity, for the Cummings. He was always one of my favorite poets. You're right to a certain extent. I grew up in a small town, got married in a small town, had children that were raised in a small town. We finally managed to come up with the money (co-signed loan) to buy a little house and about one third of an acre of land. It was about two miles out of town on a little road with light traffic. It was paved, barely, but we had a lovely privet hedge to hide a garden behind, a magnolia tree and lots of jasmine. It went on like that for years. We finally paid the place off. It was ours.
But about that time, the two wealthy 'cattle barons' that lived on the same road decided that we needed a 'new' road because all their farm equipment was suffering from the potholes. Well, money talks and they got their 'new' road, a freshly paved speedway that people used for a short cut at 80 mph.
They tore out the hedge, they took a piece of what little we had and gave us an 800 dollar check for it. My wifes cats, who were used to the light traffic, died in droves by people that hit them and didn't even slow down to see what they hit. My children graduated high school and couldn't even get jobs. Finally, we sold out and moved to a larger town where there were jobs. We had to. We weren't part of the 'good old boy' circle. We couldn't even get a loan from the bank to work on the house
without a 'co-signer' even after we had faithfully paid off the loan. I raised my children by hunting and fishing, growing a garden and scrimping. But I couldn't get them jobs in a dying town that was being strangled by the local power structure.
Oh, by the way, the name of the town was Hope, Arkansas. Boyhood home of Bill Clinton.

Horse manue, the auto industry has been running on horse manure ever since Ol Henry figured there should be one in every driveway.

Reverting to a simple mode of social organization will be possible, but only after society collapses as is happening now. It's not going to be pretty...millions will die....

"According to Joseph Tainter, in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies (1990), societies that inevitably collapse adhere to one or more of the following three models in the face of collapse:

1. The Dinosaur: The best example is a large scale society in which resources are being depleted at an exponential rate and yet nothing is done to rectify the problem because the ruling elite are unwilling or unable to adapt to said changes. In such examples rulers tend to oppose any solutions that diverge from their present course of action. They will favor intensification and commit an increasing number of resources to their present plans, projects and social institutions.

2. Runaway Train: An example would be a society that only functions when growth is present. Societies based almost exclusively on acquisition, including pillage or exploitation, cannot be sustained indefinitely. The society of the Assyrians and the Mongols, for example, both fractured and collapsed when no new conquests were forthcoming. Capitalism can be seen as an example of the Runaway Train model. Current methods of resource extraction and food production may be unsustainable, however, the philosophy of consumerism encourages the purchase of an ever increasing number of goods and services to sustain the economy.

3. House of Cards: In this aspect of Tainter's model societies that grow to be so large and include so many complex social institutions that they are inherently unstable and prone to collapse."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse

Bjb: "Yet, the majority of those in small-town America have
overwhelmingly supported our current government. They also tend to be the most socially reactionary people in the US."

I agree with you. My Iowa hometown is dying - the family farms are now Big Ag, the soil, once rich enough to produce food to feed the world, is dead from too many chemicals and too little care, the high school is closed, there is only one small grocery store, most of the stores on the main street have long since left, and there are no young families.

And yet, here is a sampling of the phrases I heard in one day - just walking down the street ... "We Support The Troops"; "Global Warming Is a Liberal Lie"; "President Bush is Such a Nice Man"; "I Trust That good-looking Dick Cheney"; "I only listen to CNN - it's the most watched news, don't you know?" and other such nonsense.

The idea of idyllic life in small town America is just that - an idea. These places are the rockbed of conservatism. Sadly, what the people in these towns don't know and don't care to find out about is the fact that their conservative spokespeople have fooled them even more than the 'liberal spokespeople' have fooled us.

ezeflyer: Maybe we can count on those in the small towns to help when the disaster comes. But I'm not betting on it. The people in my hometown are narrow-minded and reactionary and racist and sexist and classist and every other -ist that you can come up with. My experience has been that the idyllic niceness and compassion of most small-town people is not any deeper than big city folk. They'll help who they want to help, by god - and that's likely not going to include most of the world's population.

epona,

While I certainly like the Amish, I have found that the non-Amish Pennsylvania small-towners are a reactionary lot - bigoted, homophobic, anti-culture, anti-environment, anti-city, and intolerant of any other lifestyle than their own. Since moving here 8 years ago I've been around the state more than most natives, and I frankly get tired of the looks I get when I tell them I live in Pittsburgh, you can immediately tell that they are wondering why I haven't been mugged by a black man or if I'm a faggot.

And do they love their fundamentalist Jesus and their Bush!

The majority of Pennsylvanians live in the cities, but we have seen our public transit and infrastructure destroyed at the hands of the small-minded, small town, Republican majority it Harrisburg who do nothing but complain that their taxes are going to an undeserving black welfare recipient or to the cities.

There is nothing sustainable about small town and rural living - they drive far more miles than someone in the city does, and when they aren't driving their big pickup, they are tearing the forests up in those infernal four-wheeled things or shooting something. Most of them care little about nature, beyond being able to recognize a white-tailed deer, turkey and black bear, so they can shoot them. Me, a city slicker, can recognize and name many more trees, birds and wildflowers than a typical rural Pennsylvanian can.

The friendliest neighbors I've ever had have been the ones in the barely-middle-class, mixed race/ethnic/sexual preference, inner city neighborhood I lived in in Pittsburgh - everyone for the most part looked after each other.

Garison Keilor can't decide whether to be profound or cute and manages to be neither. Go back to Lake wobegone and your radio vaudeville schtick Garo and leave thoughtful commentary to those who are thoughtful commentators.

Virginia Woolf discovered it long ago: slow country folk are slow country folk for a reason, intolerant to novelty and averse to overstimulation, conservative by default. Then again, Woolf drowned herself, so whadda ya gonna do?

Shortly after September 11th, when it seemed like the entire country was hell-bent and foaming at the mouth for war, I was very depressed. Suddenly while driving through Pennsylvania, I spotted the black horse buggy and was filled with hope. There are countercultures and subcultures that will never buy into the All-Consuming Empire and the Neverending War!
A couple of Saturdays ago I attended an Amish Relief Auction and saw a gasoline lawn mower sell for $10 and then a gasoline-free push mover sold for $200.
The Amish have sustained themselves with simple hard work and an aesthetic Gospel-based lifestyle for many generations. We can learn from them if we open our eyes and our minds.
BTW, the huckleberry pie was delicious and also not oversweetened. There's a lesson in that, too.

Rural Americans are too easily conned by evil men like Bush and Cheney. We're used to news from the major networks and funny guys like Limbaugh. However, Rhubarb Town lies in my county, which (bjb) was one of the few rural counties to vote for Kerry in '04. I take a measure of comfort in that. My hundreds of letters to the editor garnered me more words of thanks than hate. Thanks, iolellity for the bit of 'anyone lived in a pretty how town.' Along with Yeats'"Second Coming," they're my favorites. I've spent a few years in the city and sometimes miss the attractions, but the country is my home and I think the Scandinavian influences in our area have helped make everything "above average."

Poet,

Agreed.

But I always found Keillor's Lake Wobegone schtick, and his offend-no-one style geriatric entertainment to be annoying to say the least. But then, I'm not from Minnesota where everyone is cloyingly nice all the time...

I read Keillor's article while listening to Nanci Griffith sing "Love at the Five and Dime," a lucky coincidence of the MP3 player. Of course, Keillor trades in nostalgia for an older, simpler time. However, those who listen to his radio show realize that he does not automatically romanticize the residents of Lake Woebegone. His characters are modern people who happen to live in a slightly isolated and backward town, but they tend to have similar problems to those of us who live in a more urban environment.

However, Keillor is also making the point that the Current Occupant's bull-headed and ill-informed decisions may force our children and their children to live in a world that more closely resembles the world of the Amish than it does our world. Is this better or worse? We cannot predict, but our decendents may need to learn to live with reduced expectations and fewer resources.

bjb: I just read the article link you posted, and thank you for doing so. It's excellent. I have pondered this issue a good deal and here are a few of my conclusions: 1. If you've ever driven through the rural south, often the ONLY viable radio station you can pick up is a Christian one. 2. In many of these areas there is no industry and the ONLY social place is the church. 3. These people get locked into their way of doing things and are very suspicious of outsiders. Why? They are afraid of change because what it mostly does is "attack" the way they have been living, render their lives a lie; and since the vast majority are trained by authoritarian church creeds, they feel it's a form of sin to challenge the way their fathers lived. To them loyalty is to continue on as thus, making the past into an inescapable feedback loop.
I live among this type of mentality and keep my distance. Just to speak would reveal my NY accent and they are very suspicious of "Yankees" anyway. Their 700 club luminaries call intelligent women lesbians and witches, so it would be a waste of time to argue against their well established limitations.
I don't put the Amish in this class at all. And PDJ, these big fat brutes who probably have IQs of 90 brag about killing gentle deer. They disgust me.

I live in a small town in a red state, so I've found the discussion here interesting and a bit disturbing. Interesting, because as an atheist-leaning agnostic with decidedly liberal political beliefs, I'm about as cross-threaded with the place that I live as it is possible to be. Yet, I really like it here. Granted, my small town is a little different than some. It's a university town in Kansas, which means more diversity than one might expect to find. While it's true that conservative political views are fairly common, it's also true that one sees plenty of 'no W' bumper stickers, and in the last election we replaced our right-wing, fundamentalist congressman with a progressive congresswoman. We also have a thriving (if small) arts community, interesting street festivals, live music in the park every Saturday, and a whole host of people who can speak in complete sentences. So, I'd say some of the posters here should be a little less quick to judge. In a recent trip to one of those progressive 'big cities' (in fact it was to one of our MOST progressive cities) I saw plenty of NRA bumper stickers and heard plenty of sneers directed at Al Gore (I'm a climate scientist, and so I frequently talk to people about this). On the other hand, my right-leaning, farmer neighbor recently became interested in climate change and is working to cut his carbon footprint. This is a guy I've had some rather heated political discussions with (over neighborhood barbecue, generally) yet he is also a gentleman who, if treated with respect, will return that favor in spades. So, to all the somewhat smug blue-state urbanites who have weighed in here; accusing an entire region or state of harboring some sort of uniform belief or opinion is just plain unwise. No place is a monolith and nothing exists in black and white. Believing in a black and white world (regardless of who or what you define as 'black' and 'white') is intellectually lazy and only serves to perpetuate the already overwhelming problems we currently face. It's the tactic that the republicans have used ever since Reagan to divide and conquer, and frankly I refuse to be part of it.

Sorry to be cranky, but extremist thinking sets me off.

I hail from alaska, the last frontier. lake front propety and lots of kids with no Jobs tho I live in the fish village and there are some folks mostly up from small town south doing the RED thing and working on OIL platforms or the Big oil places like the Artic slope or Barrow the Oil capital of alaska. I see little progress in small town America here with its muti cultural facets and the cultural native peoples problems: their subsistence lifestyle is so comprimised because they sold out to OIL companies or now the Pebble mine. what i am trying to say Is this was once Rhubarb town 20ty years ago, Now we is just a fishing town with many out of work people. Water pollution and Global warming and GAS prices have people living in some sort of capital FEAR/ so I will just enjoy Prarie Home companion and breathe my fresh country air and hope that it can remain just a little Alaskan Tourist trap town. Alaska known as the state of misfits, some one should write about this town or others that are in similar crisis. Thanks for the thoughts and posts. I will chew on this for awhile like the cow chewing her cud!!1 Gina

Ok where do I start? I am in Minnesota and went to the farmer's market and saw almost the same scene. But I think it was Steve buying not the man himself. Well due to my union penison and social security plus all the same costs of working; the money is down. I saw that the prices were up and no air conditioning. This small town with them porches get hot too so I went to the only store in town to get what I needed not what I wanted, yup Wal Mart. This is the way things are. damn.
may pigs fly in single file.
bill