“All politics is yokel.” – Christopher Hitchens
Say what you will against backwoods America, a small town in the middle of nowhere is a great place to grow up. As a free ranging kid, I enjoyed limitless freedom to bike the streets and hike the surrounding hills. I knew all my neighbors and most of the local merchants by name, and of course they also knew mine, and who my parents were, which made it next to impossible to make much mischief, let alone commit a crime. So things were pretty idyllic, which is not to say I’d ever want to go home again.
Why? Well, because if you stay in the small town where you came of age, you’ll never advance socially beyond whatever your status was in high school, which in my case, isn’t a thing to be desired. Also, whenever you step out your front door, you’ll run into one former classmate after another. So you’re constantly waving, or honking at passing cars. Your only hope of social advancement is that your kid will be more popular in high school than you were, so that you can bask in reflected glory.
And of late there is this other problem–something I never ever dreamt could possibly happen. For the first time in recorded history, a majority of the citizens of Carbon County voted Republican! How could this possibly happen in coal mining country, where pictures of FDR and John L. Lewis once hung on every living room wall? Labor doesn’t side with management—not according to the gospel as I was taught by blue-collar forebears who, ever since the invention of the time clock, had been dutifully punching it.
Mind you, we’re not talking here about traditional management, but rather catastrophic mismanagement as practiced by the Trump Administration. I blame Fox News, and also the local radio station, which in my day aired news of the world from the microphone of Gabriel Heatter. Nowadays, it’s right wing bullshit from the fevered brain of Rush Limbaugh.
And now comes the burning question of whether it’s wise to reopen schools in the middle of raging pandemic. How is this even a question? What kind of parent would deliberately put his child in harm’s way? And it so happens I’ve been asking this question even before the pandemic hit, because of the danger your child might become popular in high school and thus have no trouble securing a date to the junior prom. A likely result will be an unplanned pregnancy, followed by a shotgun wedding, so instead of going off to college, your son will be obliged to take a job at the mine in order to support his growing family. Your daughter? Instead of going off to college, she’ll be sitting at home, tending kids, listening to talk radio and watching Fox News. Result? Donald Trump will miraculously manage to be elected to a second term, and that will surely mark the beginning of the end of the American experiment.