I was at our State Fair yesterday, watching among other things a pig judging contest. I was watching kids of no more than 6 years old in some cases in a ring with a bunch of others, wearing cowboy shirts, Levi’s, and large belt buckles, using switches to guide their pigs around the the enclosure, while being watched carefully by a judge–a slightly hunched man who I knew was quite capable of working hard 20 days many days in a row–and watching the spectators, who came in families, and who slept in groups on cots with their animals, sometimes with the family dog in a cage, and thinking that these little boys and girls will in all likelihood be proud to grow up like their mamas and daddies.
There are of course many temptations–boredom with living in a small town being the main one–which draw people away, but there are many country songs about coming home, too. Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj9b3QqTOtY&index=4&list=PL4-T2yIoXjcWmyA51sB8tAf8E2gBMJd79
“I ran off when it came to blows with my old man, but I came home, and this is where they’ll bury me.”
What they have is a template for life. They don’t have to reject their parents. They might argue for a time, but there is peace where people largely think the same. This is the fact with multiculturalism which nobody wants to talk about: everyone, all groups, of all beliefs and backgrounds, are happiest with their own kind. This is a sociological fact. What one makes of it politically is determined by what mania, or what compassion, motivates one.
I would distinguish this from the City, broadly understood. In the city you get nothing but motion. Your parents are not nested anywhere, and there is a good chance they are divorced or never married in the first place. There is no “way of life” worth speaking of, other than continual, largely random and anxiety driven motion.
I look at bumper stickers from movies, like the “Abide” ones referencing “The Big Lebowski”, and it occurs to me that all the shared referents for people in both suburbs and the city are not just mutable, but highly mutable. There are no Great Stories, no Great Myths (in Joseph Campbell’s sense). This makes all social connections tenuous, easily severed, and life emotionally precarious.
This, in my view, is the root of the effectiveness of the propaganda which our media perpetrates. If you find yourself out of lockstep with others–and I have commented on this before–you risk losing inclusion. To find yourself fully alone with nothing is unthinkable. I think most people ingest the lies our media tells without even pausing a moment to question it, because they KNOW that everyone around them is doing the same.
And all you need to create a fully sustainable propaganda bubble is vast anxiety and alienation, and synchronizing signals whose channel–which in this case can be taken literally–is known to everyone you know. All you have to do to belong is repeat what everyone else is belonging.
But the cost of this belonging is the capacity for independent judgement, and for genuine individuation. When everyone’s primary emotion is loneliness, they grasp at straws. Provide them the straws, and you have a leash on them.
And it occurs to me further that the dominant emotion of any authoritarian regime has to be shame. Christianity is rooted in shame because it is a powerful tool for controlling people. And this is the reason that the very first trick the lunatics who occupy the core of the Left employ is teaching Americans, particularly, to be ashamed of their history, of who they ARE. This makes them clay, which is malleable, and can be shaped and fitted to any form deemed suitable.
For myself, of course, I see the limitations of both world views, but the “country” worldview is at least stable, and the simple fact is that pride enables independence, and independence enables individual judgement. It is possible to be genuinely tolerant when one has no shame in who one is. And whatever the defects of Christianity otherwise, tolerance is something it preaches, and which in my experience most Christians try to practice. America is uniquely tolerant, at a genuine, gut level.
But large numbers have ingested this poison that we are wicked, that we should bear the sins of our fathers, and this leads to grief, shame, alienation, and violence.
This is what we see on the streets today. Oh, if only one could bottle sanity, could bottle the idea that we are all sufficient in ourselves, that joy is our natural condition, and acceptance the gift of and from God.