The Romance of Place

There was a yearly custom (a festival really) in many ancient and medieval villages in which parents would take their children to a local boundary marking stream and toss them in this stream, or bump their head against that tree and this rock: manuscripts report children crying out in laughter and repeating demands to do it again.

A curious custom: but it touches the heart. One cannot love a world. It is too large. But a piece of ground, a small corner of the world - where one knows each tree, each rock and stream because he has banged his head against them in his youth - one may hold that precious above all.

O the customs we "moderns" have lost!

The Arkansas Weed

Wal-Mart cometh - behold, and beware this socialist behemoth. "Socialist!?!" You shout? "On the contrary, respect for Free Market Enterprise is such that denying Wal-Mart a building permit is just . . . socialistic! And besides . . . they sell jeans and shoes and charcoal cheaper than in the diminishing town center remnant on Main Street."

Forget that economic-man, who worships at the idol of Free Market Enterprise (which is not the same as working in and with free markets), is the vision of Karl Marx, not Frederick Bastiat; and, never mind that Wal-Mart is an excrescence of a grand Republican experiment in state socialism, the Interstate Highway System.

Goddess Worship

Progress: America's true and only Goddess.
Resist and rebel.

Xenophobia

The isolationist opposes war because he loves his country (or his region of it at least); the localist detests social engineering because she loves her neighborhood. (Why is it, by the way, that we isolationists are called xenophobes - when we are the ones who oppose killing foreigners? And have you noticed that "Not In My Backyard" is deemed mingy and selfish by the editorialists of the corporate media - the kind of placeless people who never stay in one spot long enough to learn to love their backyard?)

Preserving the Small Things

Have you noticed that almost any appeal for preservation of the small things - the Main Street in the small town - runs into the buzz-saw claim that one's memories are fraudulently idyllic? Weary and worldly put-downs are made, you will begin to notice, by people whose only knowledge of Middle America comes from the TV screen, which is why they frame their arguments with Hollywood referents. They know nothing of America's Mt. Angel's, only the parodies of small-town life they have watched on the idiot box. To them, our fathers are Robert Youngs and our mothers are Donna Reeds. "Aha!" they shout, in a case-closed voice. "Your idyllic little world is a lie! Robert Young was a suicidal drunk, and Donna Reed's life was the same blur of abortions and divorces and infidelities as that of the next starlet slut. So cut the pastoral crap!"

The problem with the above defense is reality: the simple fact is that Mt. Angels do exist. Yes, with all their failings, but THEIR failings.

Renovation Nation

The hand that renovates is always more sacrilegious than that which destroys.

Every Vote Counts

What sanctimonious horse-shit. Even the most naive civics teacher knows this: no statewide (much less national) election in U.S. history has ever been decided by a single vote. But locally, this canard metamorphoses into a truism. Vote locally; hell, vote regionally. Nationally? What is that?

Resist!

Resist and rebel:
Against rampant homogenization.

If that is too much, refuse to learn the metric system.

On Parochial Provincialism

Parochial:	adj. 1) of or pertaining to a parish or parishes. 2) of or pertaining to parochial schools or the education they provide. 3) of very limited or narrow scope; provincial. [Random House College Dictionary]
Parochial:	Relating or belonging to a Parish. [Black's Law Dictionary]
Parish:	In English ecclesiastical law a circuit of ground, committed to the charge of one person or vicar, or other minister having cure of souls therein (1 Bl.Comm. 111). The precinct of a parish church, and the particular charge of a secular priest. An ecclesiastical division of a town, city or district, subject to the ministry of one pastor. 2. In Louisiana, a territorial governmental division of a state corresponding to what is elsewhere called a county. [Black's Law Dictionary]

I find it particularly amusing that, in these cosmopolitan times of political-correctness, people should equate provincialism with being narrow-minded, or presume that either is necessarily a bad thing. The words themselves are more often used as pejoratives, the kind of insult that one hurls at an opponent upon being bested at argumentation. And why is it that narrow-minded rural folk often lead the happiest lives, have stable relationships, and appear to be least in need of government intervention? Is there, perhaps, something that our social engineers (our overlords) have overlooked in their haste, some undefined virtue to be found in provincialism — something that may yet teach us a little more about what it is to be civilized?

I think there is, and so I emphasize the word parochial because it addresses a social concern that is often underemphasized, if not altogether overlooked: the dynamic equilibrium, or dialectic, that has always existed between church and state, or religion and politics, and which is crucial to maintaining that social harmony which is fundamental to a healthy community. I suggest that this subject is infinitely sublime, and that there is no one, single, perfect moral and social governing system that has all of the answers, or which can be — or ought to be — enforced upon everybody, everywhere.

And yet this is exactly what is happening.

Modern Urbanites

We lose ourselves in crowds, yet a terrible fear of anonymity haunts many Americans: we want to be known, remembered, thought of, and except in the tawdriest sense this is only possible in small communities and networks of families. Those cut off from such possibilities are driven to freakish acts of exposure, such as flashing strangers on blue cable channels - blogging? - or running for President.

On Not Going Far

Consider this pair of colloquialisms: "He'll go far," and "He's not going anywhere." "He'll go far" is what approving elders say of promising youngsters. This is consistent with the popular notion that success can be measured in terms of the distance one has traveled from home. If, on the other hand, we say of a boy, "He's not going anywhere," we are not praising him for his steadfast loyalty but damning him as an ambition-less sluggard.

Me? I'd prefer my family to grow up not wanting to go anywhere Why is stripping a child of his attachment to place and family ("going far") considered something that would strengthen rather than enfeeble a boy?

Place-ism

Stand on what you stand for.

One town is not pretty much like the next.

Main Street:

Wall Street:City living dehumanizes.
You decide.

Wallowa County, Oregon

Where there is an informal if rigidly observed ban on polysyllabic words:

Sounds like home to me.