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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2545 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 18, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Rich Men North of Richmond

I don't think I've seen this discussed here yet? I have to admit, the song has grown on me. It really feels authentic in a way that say, Try That in a Small Town doesn't.

My family's background is roughly speaking confederate descendants who roamed around after the war with about three separate main branches settling between Appalachia and Texas.

As other comments have pointed out "whiny"-ness, let me double down that - this song continues a long tradition of folk/country/bluegrass fatalism that I have little tolerance for. "My daddy grew up here and lived as a poor man, and so did my grandaddy, and so did his daddy...but we all grew up right, and I'm gonna stay here and be just like them!" .... Why / how is inter-generational poverty a virtue? If it's the case that your in such an awful economic situation that you can't advance your lot in life more than several generations before you, you have all of my sympathy. And that same sympathy disappears the second you turn that situation into some sort of battle cry of authenticity or moral superiority.

There's something to be said here about crabs in a bucket, and how it seems like - for more than a few cultures inspired by Southern Clanish / Honor cultures - the only way to prove authenticity and adherence to "traditional" (and, therefore, right) cultural norms is through demonstrated poverty and dysfunction.

Why is that the goal? Sure, I have a deep appreciation for stories about the dust bowl I heard growing up, but I have more appreciation that my Dad and Uncles used the G.I. bill to get STEM degrees and were also willing to move the family around for job opportunities. Law obeying, studious, industrious, and economically astute seems like a good rubric for "Rasied 'Em Right!" when compared with impulsive, prone to violence, substance abuse, obsessed with vague notions of honor but .... geographically consistent?

The unfortunate fact is that your suffering alone yields no accolade or social currency. No one cares. The best you can do, as this song tries to, is whip up some strong emotionalism and try to trade-the-currency for moral deference. But that exchange rate is never strong and that commodity expiry is measured in hours.

In a country of 330 million, not everyone can pursue a STEM degree. There will be those with lower income, and the song is about their quality of life being worsened. Complaining is wildly effective at causing change when you look at LGBT or Jewish issues, so I’m not sure why we should presume a song like this is ineffective. Do you think the protest songs in the 60s were effective?

my Dad and Uncles used the G.I. bill to get STEM degrees and were also willing to move the family around for job opportunities. Law obeying, studious, industrious, and economically astute seems like a good rubric for "Rasied 'Em Right!" when compared with impulsive, prone to violence, substance abuse, obsessed with vague notions of honor but .... geographically consistent?

Why should smart people move away from small towns, especially now that the Internet has come? It’s not the dirt that’s dumb in rural communities, and it’s not the water which makes addicts of the townsfolk.

As for geographic consistency, their kin died for that ground within two or three centuries of folk memory. It’s a far more precious price than a mortgage. (I can’t say I feel that same drive myself, as my parents’ families are from Ohio and Michigan, yet we live in a huge modern city in New Mexico. I can, however, sympathize with Barney Google and Snuffy Smith over in the holler by the crick.)

Why should smart people move away from small towns, especially now that the Internet has come?

That's a fair enough point for the current generation. I have no idea how you would mean to apply that to the generations that grew up in rural America (especially Appalachia) before .... 2000? "Go get an education and come back" was also not reasonable because local economies often lacked the professional infrastructure to support (let alone attract) degree holders.

As for geographic consistency, their kin died for that ground within two or three centuries of folk memory.

Quiet part out loud, bro. You emphasized "died" instead of "fought for." Fatalism.

And what's the salience of the piece of land on which the dying occurred? Before the Civil War, a lot of sons of Appalachia died in all kinds of strange spots west of the Ohio, South of the Rio Grande, and elsewhere. Grandpa lost friends in France and Germany ... not a whole lot of country songs about the Ardennes. World War 2 veterans are remembered for the dedication to American values and a conflict against evil, imperialism, subjugation. That promotes a more generative outlook on the possibilities post-combat than the immutable fact of location and time of death.

I can, however, sympathize with Barney Google and Snuffy Smith over in the holler by the crick.

I don't know if this is an attempt at humor or not.

I have no idea how you would mean to apply that to the generations that grew up in rural America (especially Appalachia) before .... 2000?

Convenient, then, that we're focusing on a songwriter who was born nearly a decade before 2000, and whose hometown has a university and a college, each with the kind of Internet access which allows business to occur remotely from port cities.

Quiet part out loud, bro. You emphasized "died" instead of "fought for." Fatalism.

Don't QPOL me, bro, I'm a damyankee whose grandparents come from Ohio, Michigan, and parts further north and east. I'm saying a death is usually considered a higher price to pay for a plot of land than a successful battle, despite the PTSD, alcoholism, and generational child abuse from "fighting for". (Although to some degree, it shouldn't.) A death means a tombstone, and a tombstone often anchors a family to a locale.

And what's the salience of the piece of land on which the dying occurred? Before the Civil War, a lot of sons of Appalachia died in all kinds of strange spots west of the Ohio, South of the Rio Grande, and elsewhere. Grandpa lost friends in France and Germany ... not a whole lot of country songs about the Ardennes.

Facetious, almost farcically so. The salience is that their grandfathers and fathers built the towns and cities they died for; their names went into family bibles with generations in the same spot, while their brothers and cousins left for big cities or adventurism out west or across vast oceans. There's a very romantic, very human tendency to work to keep what previous generations paid costly prices for, even when the going gets tough and it looks like a depreciating asset.

The Americans in the Ardennes was an ideological battle, an estimation that if Hitler took the Bulge from a band of brothers, someday he might roll over the Appalachians.

I can, however, sympathize with Barney Google and Snuffy Smith over in the holler by the crick.

I don't know if this is an attempt at humor or not.

Why, I do dee-clare I believe my dislike of revenooers done come from ol' Snuffy Smif hisself.

Why should smart people move away from small towns, especially now that the Internet has come?

They don't 'have' to move, but if they stay, complaining about a lack of jobs is questionable. The Amish stay in their small towns, but they 'make their own luck' and configure their economies to work for them. There is no reason why Appalachians could not theoretically pursue localized, autarkic economies that maintain their communities, but they don't, instead complaining when the large company in their town shuts down the factory or the mine and then refusing to leave.

And it has to be said that their ancestors, whom they venerate (eg. in the very song OP links) often moved for economic reasons. The Kevin Williamson argument is essentially that these small, economically unproductive communities can only survive because of welfare. Often in deprived communities, the main employers are the state (healthcare, government, schools) - all subsidized by state and federal government - and welfare, and that these are the only things keeping the economy going. Dollars only flow in through government. They are not self-sufficient in any way, but they preach a gospel of self-reliance, and that's hollow and hypocritical.

They are not self-sufficient in any way, but they preach a gospel of self-reliance, and that's hollow and hypocritical.

I think it's that they see the giants astride the land (the corporations, the governments) and despair of how to make a living once they've trampled the earth and moved on.

Then too, the analogy of red and blue buttons which was the hot topic last week; these are the blue buttoners who depended on those who declared it would be forever safe to keep pushing the blue button, never realizing their fellows skipped town to China leaving them ever closer to the 50% mark of death.

To elaborate on this, a town has to have an economic raison d'etre: Something they produce to export in order to get money to buy imports. A mining town might export minerals, a factory town might export manufactured goods, a farming town food, a tourist destination might "export" hotel and restaurant services. Everyone else earns money by by providing services to people who produce the exports, or by providing services to those people, and so forth. In principle you could have a small town supported by exporting things like software, but I don't know whether any such towns actually exist.

When a town no longer produces things to export, it no longer has a reason to exist. The sole service it provides to the outside world in exchange for money to buy imports with is qualifying for welfare.

People blame the government for not giving it a reason to exist, but if the government subsidizes unprofitable industries for the sake of propping up a town with no economic reason to exist, the residents are just LARPing at being productive. Maybe it's cheaper than just giving them straight-up welfare and getting nothing at all in exchange, but in the long run, this isn't good for anyone involved.

This has been eating at me since reading the ACX guest review of Jane Jacobs.

To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located.

Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants.

By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities.

That review was incredible, and I've wanted to write a post on it since I read it. It suggests a lot of pointed questions about the nature of economics as a discipline.

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