Jul 27, 2023·edited Jul 27, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
I’ve seen the same thing happen all over AZ and NM. Bisbee Az comes to mind: Californians turned the old jail into a B&B. Reopened the closed grocery store into a mostly useless candle store that closed after a year. That sort of thing. Now I’m in Vermont and a Californian couple (of course!) have opened a cafe that is great—when it’s open. Which isn’t nights or Sundays, Mondays or Tuesdays. Because they want more “work/life balance.” Sigh. People in the town want a place to get hot food after 4:30. But nope. And then people begin to wonder how the owners survive? Don’t they need money? Are they drug dealers? **
And then people get resentful (“they must be rich, coming here like it’s a playground!”) and stop eating there at all, and then it closes after a year. It’s the “Field of Dreams” syndrome, only the field isn’t open and players stay home.
**I knew some drug dealers who ran an antique shop in AZ that was never open and once a month moved drugs from the border to an LA swap meet, in amongst the old lamps, I suppose.
People may be leaving CA but unfortunately, they are bringing some of the bad/stupid parts of it with them. There's a bumper sticker that says, "Don't Californicate New Mexico." Thanks to the movie industry, regular New Mexicans can't afford to live in Santa Fe or Taos. Well Gov FUBAR lives there. She has Soros and her cartel buddies to help financially.
Great point. Santa Fe is beginning to seem like little San Francisco. And Gov FUBAR’s incompetent (or just malicious) underlings are decimating the Department of Cultural Affairs and Office of Archaeological Studies—which should be some of the premier institutions of their kind in the country, given New Mexico’s rich cultural treasures. It’s a shame, and now I’ve actually heard some Democrats around here start to sour on her because of it. Still, I doubt it will change their voting habits. As for Gov FUBAR herself—I’m sure she’s just looting the place and angling for a position in Washington for Biden’s second term.
Considering all the things we're working on for a referendum, you could say that the idiots have been very busy! They passed all of these idiocies: SB 397, HB4, HB7, HB207, SB13, SB180 were passed by the idiot patrol. I can't tell which link to use or I'd reference it. Yes, we now have "gender-affirming" mutilation, with or without a parent's permission or knowledge.
There is a lovely shop in the charming downtown of historic Norcross that sells...vinegar...and I have heard jokes about what they might actually be dealing.
That does what a vacuum cleaner does (sucks)! Yuma looks like parts of Phoenix. Unrecognizable! I had to be told we were driving past where my family lived before my parents split up. House looks a LOT different; so does the neighborhood. It isn't even weird there anymore.
can’t evaluate it economically in light of the Fed funds rate, tax base, etc. but will say Bisbee was my best weird stop on my last cross-country trip. I’m from urban So. Calif. overpass-land, not used to that sort of thing, though the nearby ironic-retro ghost town street overlooking the copper mine pit did vaguely resemble a studio tour backlot attraction (except for the giant open mine).
Mentioning it to someone back home drew the odd, oracular reply that Kim Basinger’s character at the end of “L.A. Confidential” says she’s moving there.
I lived there for a few years myself ... fascinating place ... all the canyons and the old mines, and the old miners. There's a couple of neighborhoods around completely hidden by mountains of copper mine tailings. They kept moving the houses around to make the hole bigger. I was working at a coffee shop in Albuquerque and a customer recommend Bisbee as a place to see, so I moved there. lol...there's a fantastic book, "Going Back to Bisbee," about the history of the place. I rented a tiny apartment for $150 a month on top of a cliff from some kind of artist (this was 1992!, wow!) but eventually I moved on to Tucson, you know, for grad school and jobs and stuff, as you would. When I was there it was about 60% ghost town. Haven't seen it in years. Chris should pay it a visit, stop at Tombstone, which is a real place after all, and then look at the border towns of Naco and Douglas. The Wal-Mart in Douglas is right on the border -- people were catapulting bales of marijuana into the parking lot at night. lol. Other cool AZ towns are Ajo and Jerome. But I don't think anything feels as weird as Bisbee.
Bisbee has gotten a bit too much and expensive. I wouldn't want to live there (kinda place where everybody knows everyone else's business) but, I've always had a really good time whenever I visit.
Oracle AZ is a great place - some Californians, but not too many and they ask for forgiveness when you first meet them. Unlike Bisbee it is not urban and has a good mix of rednecks, miners, hippies, artists and old farts (me). Dollar General and kinda run-down mobile home park when you first drive in keeps out a lot of folks with more refined sensibilities. Its in Pinal County which, due to our based Sheriff, Mark Lamb, is a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary County, so heck ya!
This story is poignant and yet inadvertently funny to me.
We have some friends, who when COVID hit decided to head for the hills. He retired and she continued in her high powered highly connected finance job, but based now in a tiny burg in Wyoming versus coastal big blue California. He’s politically bright red. She’s pure green, as in greenbacks.
They told us this place was cool. “It’s an artist colony!”. “It’s right near Jackson! “ “ A lot of stuff is coming in!!”
Uh.... not so much. We decided to drive out and see it last time we were in Jackson. Let’s see. It’s in BFE. I mean middle of nowhere. Very rural with scattered homes. Some are nice. Some working farms. They had a big fire a while back and the hillsides are charred like peppers on a grill. Do not a lot of forested beauty. There’s almost zero commercial activity and no town center. There are 100 people in the valley. There’s a gas station with a restaurant.
It’s colder than a witches tit in the winter. You could do The Shining in your own living room.
They couldn’t just flake out. They had to make it sound cool. If they just said, “We think the world has gone crazy and we are getting the fuck out of Dodge.” I would have respected that and perhaps been envious. Instead they had to market it it’s a socially acceptable choice. I guess they figured it’s so off the beaten path nobody they knew would ever be in the neighborhood. I think they’ll make it another couple of years before they return to something closer in.
There’s nothing wrong with small town America.
People there aren’t idiots. They like many of the things people in big cities like. They just prefer a slower pace of life and a safer, more closely knit community without all the insanity of the big cities. They’re willing to give up some amenities and conveniences for a better quality of life and a better place to raise kids.As more people flee big cities, small towns will be the beneficiaries and victims of the transplants. Thus trend will not abate for the foreseeable future. Technology will continue to facilitate the exodus from the cities.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Rasmusson) says he's 30, went to Harvard, worked for Bain Capital--now he's a Republican state politician in western Minnesota, close to the Dakotas, probably about 500 miles due north of Humboldt.
It looks exactly like nearly every other small town main street that I've seen in my days. But it's fine -- you don't need a town that's open until midnight in the first place. Especially not one that wakes up with the sun.
Jul 27, 2023·edited Jul 27, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
I spent one summer after freshman year at college (way back on the 70's) in Forgan, OK and McPherson, KS salvaging old railroad lines. Hard work. Met some wonderful folks and one young (at the time) Iady I continue to stay in touch with. I met some other folks as well. While in Forgan stayed at an old hotel (not a dump, just old). The owner was an old timer that had lived through the depression and his family lost their farm. I was fortunate to have some interesting conversations with him. During the summer in the OK panhandle you can actually feel The Grapes of Wrath come alive. It produces hard working folks that become the backbone of flyover country.
In the parceling out of America it was, at the time, the last big chunk of land that could be grabbed by settlers was what ultimately became Oklahoma. Everything else in the U.S. had already been allocated, bought up, or stolen by real estate speculators and land barons. When they finally, after many years of fighting and negotiations and ripping off the Indian tribes, , and opened the land up to settlers in 1889 to homestead as a US territory, it was all grabbed in about 24 hours. 50,000 people waited to grab the 12,000 parcels of land under the Homestead Act. The history is interesting. The dust bowl was only forty years later, so slot of the original settlers and their kids were still there when it kicked off.
There’s nothing wrong per se with bringing in the types of stores and shops people in deep blue cities are used to having. Small town red staters like coffee and food and things like that, too. The problem arrives when the importers expect the red state residents to change into the hipster paradigm like changing a set of clothes. There’s also a need for a customer base to support the establishments. They are found in large cities for good reason.
Transplanting blue state expectations into the middle of rural red states and expecting them to grow is a variation of the “magic dirt” theme, whereby millions of third world people are expected to transform into productive citizens in a first world technological society by virtue of having been ushered across the Rio Grande. This verse will usually fail, just like forcing lenders to put poor people who had never owned a home into a house they could neither afford nor maintain did. It’s not a failure of intent, it’s an abject failure of understanding cause and effect.
That's another problem with the snotty blue people coming into small towns in red states. They expect to get paid CA prices in places where people don't make CA salaries.
As soon as I saw that picture I understood. It doesn't fit there. Neither the Northeast snob OR the Midwest reverse snob in me would set foot in a place like that. You need a critical mass of Arlington/Brooklyn/new Seattle types to support it.
Interesting observations. I've seen similar cases in the areas around where I currently live, which isn't as small as Humboldt, but still less than 40k people. There's a lot of ambitious individuals with grand ideas who are right leaning, but they rely on money from blue-state tourists and transplants to keep the economic engine going with the momentum it's been set at. A lot of out-of-staters come in with California money and then muscle out mom and pop places by catering to the blue crowd, setting up shop in more valuable real-estate, and general appealing to trendy urbanite tastes. It doesn't help there's a lot of locals who resent their working class, small town roots and would have fucked off to somewhere like Seattle and Portland, if they could, but since they can't, they frequent these places to facilitate Seattle and Portland coming to them. This is really only in the immediate city, though. Surrounding communities look a lot like the one you posted. Lots of half-finished projects and half-realized dreams. Empty shop-fronts. Shuttering businesses. The biggest city in the county (the one I live in) seems to be slowly sucking the life out of the surrounding communities as they all contract inward around this one, urban center, as locals either A) have to move closer to where the economic opportunities are, whether that be to open up shop or work at one, or B) they're priced out entirely and are forced to move to another county, which is happening more and more as property values continue to skyrocket.
I feel like reversing the brain drain and depopulation of Rural America is key towards a prosperous (and just plain functional) future, but I'm just not sure how to overcome the obstacles standing in the way.
The place where this REALLY worked, to dark effect, was the Berkshires. Industrial region, lots of paper mills and other manufacturing, beautiful working class mountain area. Factories close, decline begins.
New Yorkers discover dirt cheap real estate and rural beauty, and it becomes Retirement Manhattan. But the new arrivals are horrified by how backward and rightish-yucky the place is, and they vote to raise property taxes over and over again to support progressive programs, while also driving up real estate prices through demand. Working class locals driven out, so success! Revival! Lots of microbreweries and arts festivals!
I’d be heartbroken to see this happen to Branson. The natural beauty surrounding this area (Big Cedar Lodge area, Table Rock Lake, etc) is absolutely breathtaking and the people are wonderful!
What if it's our entire cultural model and beliefs?
How do social networks take root and grow, when the entire culture is object/individual/node oriented? Public spaces are what used to be called, "the commons."
You did your share and earned rights, not rights being ordained and responsibility optional.
All this left, right, red, blue shit is just deck chairs on the Titanic, because debt doesn't matter, until it does.
Then that mother of all reality checks arrives in the mail.
Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. To the Ancients, monotheism was monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
Greek religion grew out of fertility rites. The son born the spring, of the old sky god and the earth mother, but by the Classical Age, tradition prevailed over renewal and Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus, so the story of Jesus, crucified and risen in the spring, had fertile ground to grow.
Though by the time the Romans adopted it as state religion, tradition had prevailed again. So the Trinity was obscured and it was all about the Big Guy Rules. Which was to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic. Divine right of kings. Rulers good, people flawed.
Martin Luther tried pushing the reset button, but was only fighting the political corruption, not the underlaying premises.
When the West went back to populist forms of government, it required separation of church and state, essentially culture and civics. Which is about as schizophrenic as Descartes' distinction of mind and body.
A spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Ideals are like truth, beauty, platonic forms, the village alter, while absolutes are foundational and elemental essences from which forms arise, like thoughts arise from consciousness. When every ideology, creed, political brand, etc. has to claim universality and all the rest are flawed and evil, it's endless war.
Like epicycles, it's patches all the way down.
This wave has crested and we are going to have to accept it's an ocean out there.
Nodes in the networks, like galaxies in space. Synchronization versus harmonization.
for a really good take on the conflict inherent in germanic peoples adopting (rather: being forced under threat of war to adopt) a semitic-latinised worship-the-leader cult in total conflict with their own cultural tradition.
The wikipedia-article is in english, and Heine's text should be linked to by it.
Thanks. That is interesting to see. I have to admit I could never much get into Continental philosophy, as it was far too obscure for what I was looking for. So I tended toward eastern philosophies and basic physics, to make sense of reality.
Here is a draft I wrote out, as the crazy goes parabolic, but still not sure anyone is really wanting to look deep, so I haven't posted it;
It’s a little sad that Red State Americans do not appear to have the funding or ideas to revitalize their communities to serve their communities. It sounds like Boulder Humbolt was being built for California transplants, who would likely ruin Kansas the way they ruined California.
I don't think it's all Californians, and this morning I listened to the guy who cooked my awesome breakfast talk about growing up here. But I can't parse the balance between natives and parachutists.
It may have been my bias, but if the NYT is reporting on it, I assumed that the audience was blue state professionals looking at a small Kansas town as if it were Beacon, NY or Cape Cod.
Exactly. When I was growing up, our little home town of about 1,500 had three small factories. One did something with batteries, one crushed a particular rock, and one canned milk.
Now? Every single one of them is gone and we’re just a bedroom community for the larger towns around us.
It’s the death of a town when the production goes.
I can't imagine asking. My impression this week, based on the Republican funding texts that I get fifty times a day, is that Jason Aldean is a rural-seeming product being marketed to suburban conservatives. I can be talked out of this feeling.
Jul 28, 2023·edited Jul 28, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
The lyrics to that song are decent but it sounds like he may not know exactly what he's talking about. I love that song though! In AZ a sort of hobby with the Highway Patrol was pulling over speeders with CA plates. Good ol' boys didn't usually take no sh!t though. And you'd better not touch their trucks without permission! My brother is that way even though he doesn't live in Yuma anymore.
Quite honestly, I'd like to move to a small town. They're nice. Nosy, but nice.
Jul 28, 2023·edited Jul 28, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
Back in the 90’s, when Bruce Willis was at the height of his fame and married to Demi Moore, he suddenly took a liking to the small town of Hailey, Idaho and decided to “revitalize” it. He spent millions remaking it into just the sort of “must-see” destination that Humboldt is supposed to be. The residents eventually got frustrated with Willis’ constant meddling in local affairs and his LARPing as a pillar of the community; Willis eventually got bored, closed his businesses (putting a lot of Hailey residents out of work), and pissed off back to Hollywood. Everything old is new again.
I happened to be in Hailey once and it’s lovely! Your comment reminded me of the American Girl Dolls creator buying up real estate and revitalizing Aurora:
I LOVE people’s ambition in creating (business owners have real courage IMHO) & I find it fascinating how hard it is to change a little town... in a good way (everyone defines that differently!). There will always be pushback; folks resist change. Nostalgia runs deep.
I lived in Hailey before, during, and after the Bruce and Demi period. With Sun Valley only fourteen miles to the north, there were enough wealthy blue types to support Bruce's overcapitalized-dream, and us locals benefitted from some new, hip places to frequent. But, once Bruce was finished, they were not sustainable. I first moved to the area in 1988, and the hot topic was "affordable housing." Like most communities, nobody had the slightest clue how to accomplish that goal, and to this day the issue is still talked about. But, aggravated by the Covid demographic shift, home prices are even more unaffordable, while new transplants drive around in $100,000 Sprinter Vans clogging up the trailheads and live in multi-million dollar homes.
Three miles south of Hailey in the town of Bellevue was an even starker contrast. At one point there were three, new, happening restaurants a stones throw apart on Main Street, Bellevue. After getting priced out of Ketchum, and then Hailey, I moved to Bellevue thinking I was at the tip-of-the-spear of something new and exciting. In less than a year, two of those three happening restaurants closed. The one remaining did a good job of servicing the local clientele, but was nothing special. The minor blip of coolness didn't last long. After purchasing a home in Bellevue in 2006, I sold ten years later at a considerable loss. Not even twenty miles away from Ketchum/Sun Valley, and Bellevue still struggles to be anything more than overpriced, overflow housing.
Locals bemoaned the increase in the cost of living, and assumed "something has to change," because finding employees to work service jobs, etc. was extremely difficult. I've learned that the wealthy transplants that vote blue love nothing more than complaining to Buffy how long they had to wait for a drink or food at the local restaurants. The Sun Valley area has always catered to the wealthy, but had many long term locals of modest means. Unless those modest-income locals bought in the lull after the sub-prime lending fiasco, they are only in town for a short period of time before moving to a place they can survive.
Humboldt appears to be within 100, or 120 miles at most, of both Tulsa and the Kansas Cities. It isn't an unfathomably remote town on the wind-swept prairie. But, how many of the people who read or watch these features about Humboldt are going to visit the town?
I don't mean to say Humboldt is doomed, but that you can't base a rural county's economy on tourism.
Yes, and people have way different levels of patience in a culture based on immediate gratification. I imagine the New York Times telling people they HAD to go here, then the moment when people in Brooklyn and Ann Arbor and Georgetown sat down to actually think about how to get there....
Covid broke a lot of things and perhaps myself. As my family was forced to lock down in the hell hole known as Los Angeles I kept joking but being very serious about friends moving to some random ghost town in Wyoming and trying to make something of it. We went to SC for a week this summer and upon returning to the 3rd world LAX I noticed a horrid smell that I have not been able to escape. I think it's death... this place is dying and I am desperate to escape. This town seems promising.
Good luck to them, from small town north Yorkshire where local bureaucrats seem determined to kill the hopes and dreams of anyone with the temerity to try opening a small business.....
I’ve seen the same thing happen all over AZ and NM. Bisbee Az comes to mind: Californians turned the old jail into a B&B. Reopened the closed grocery store into a mostly useless candle store that closed after a year. That sort of thing. Now I’m in Vermont and a Californian couple (of course!) have opened a cafe that is great—when it’s open. Which isn’t nights or Sundays, Mondays or Tuesdays. Because they want more “work/life balance.” Sigh. People in the town want a place to get hot food after 4:30. But nope. And then people begin to wonder how the owners survive? Don’t they need money? Are they drug dealers? **
And then people get resentful (“they must be rich, coming here like it’s a playground!”) and stop eating there at all, and then it closes after a year. It’s the “Field of Dreams” syndrome, only the field isn’t open and players stay home.
**I knew some drug dealers who ran an antique shop in AZ that was never open and once a month moved drugs from the border to an LA swap meet, in amongst the old lamps, I suppose.
"If you build it, they will come."
"If you close it, they will leave. Dummy."
People may be leaving CA but unfortunately, they are bringing some of the bad/stupid parts of it with them. There's a bumper sticker that says, "Don't Californicate New Mexico." Thanks to the movie industry, regular New Mexicans can't afford to live in Santa Fe or Taos. Well Gov FUBAR lives there. She has Soros and her cartel buddies to help financially.
Great point. Santa Fe is beginning to seem like little San Francisco. And Gov FUBAR’s incompetent (or just malicious) underlings are decimating the Department of Cultural Affairs and Office of Archaeological Studies—which should be some of the premier institutions of their kind in the country, given New Mexico’s rich cultural treasures. It’s a shame, and now I’ve actually heard some Democrats around here start to sour on her because of it. Still, I doubt it will change their voting habits. As for Gov FUBAR herself—I’m sure she’s just looting the place and angling for a position in Washington for Biden’s second term.
Considering all the things we're working on for a referendum, you could say that the idiots have been very busy! They passed all of these idiocies: SB 397, HB4, HB7, HB207, SB13, SB180 were passed by the idiot patrol. I can't tell which link to use or I'd reference it. Yes, we now have "gender-affirming" mutilation, with or without a parent's permission or knowledge.
There is a lovely shop in the charming downtown of historic Norcross that sells...vinegar...and I have heard jokes about what they might actually be dealing.
Vinegar! Lol. It’s like those “olive oil” stores that are cropping up everywhere? Who needs that?
Prescott has also been Californicated.
Nooooo! I went to church camp there! A gazillion years ago. Learned many good TPing techniques.
LOL. So many lovely AZ places are gone. I’d peg the last days of Old Arizona around 1990.
That does what a vacuum cleaner does (sucks)! Yuma looks like parts of Phoenix. Unrecognizable! I had to be told we were driving past where my family lived before my parents split up. House looks a LOT different; so does the neighborhood. It isn't even weird there anymore.
can’t evaluate it economically in light of the Fed funds rate, tax base, etc. but will say Bisbee was my best weird stop on my last cross-country trip. I’m from urban So. Calif. overpass-land, not used to that sort of thing, though the nearby ironic-retro ghost town street overlooking the copper mine pit did vaguely resemble a studio tour backlot attraction (except for the giant open mine).
Mentioning it to someone back home drew the odd, oracular reply that Kim Basinger’s character at the end of “L.A. Confidential” says she’s moving there.
I lived there for a few years myself ... fascinating place ... all the canyons and the old mines, and the old miners. There's a couple of neighborhoods around completely hidden by mountains of copper mine tailings. They kept moving the houses around to make the hole bigger. I was working at a coffee shop in Albuquerque and a customer recommend Bisbee as a place to see, so I moved there. lol...there's a fantastic book, "Going Back to Bisbee," about the history of the place. I rented a tiny apartment for $150 a month on top of a cliff from some kind of artist (this was 1992!, wow!) but eventually I moved on to Tucson, you know, for grad school and jobs and stuff, as you would. When I was there it was about 60% ghost town. Haven't seen it in years. Chris should pay it a visit, stop at Tombstone, which is a real place after all, and then look at the border towns of Naco and Douglas. The Wal-Mart in Douglas is right on the border -- people were catapulting bales of marijuana into the parking lot at night. lol. Other cool AZ towns are Ajo and Jerome. But I don't think anything feels as weird as Bisbee.
Bisbee has gotten a bit too much and expensive. I wouldn't want to live there (kinda place where everybody knows everyone else's business) but, I've always had a really good time whenever I visit.
Oracle AZ is a great place - some Californians, but not too many and they ask for forgiveness when you first meet them. Unlike Bisbee it is not urban and has a good mix of rednecks, miners, hippies, artists and old farts (me). Dollar General and kinda run-down mobile home park when you first drive in keeps out a lot of folks with more refined sensibilities. Its in Pinal County which, due to our based Sheriff, Mark Lamb, is a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary County, so heck ya!
Racist liberals committing the crime of white flight. They should stay in the bed they shat in.
Ah but locusts must alight anew or perish
Let them perish.
This doesn’t happen on its own.
The Long Peace is Slow Death.
This story is poignant and yet inadvertently funny to me.
We have some friends, who when COVID hit decided to head for the hills. He retired and she continued in her high powered highly connected finance job, but based now in a tiny burg in Wyoming versus coastal big blue California. He’s politically bright red. She’s pure green, as in greenbacks.
They told us this place was cool. “It’s an artist colony!”. “It’s right near Jackson! “ “ A lot of stuff is coming in!!”
Uh.... not so much. We decided to drive out and see it last time we were in Jackson. Let’s see. It’s in BFE. I mean middle of nowhere. Very rural with scattered homes. Some are nice. Some working farms. They had a big fire a while back and the hillsides are charred like peppers on a grill. Do not a lot of forested beauty. There’s almost zero commercial activity and no town center. There are 100 people in the valley. There’s a gas station with a restaurant.
It’s colder than a witches tit in the winter. You could do The Shining in your own living room.
They couldn’t just flake out. They had to make it sound cool. If they just said, “We think the world has gone crazy and we are getting the fuck out of Dodge.” I would have respected that and perhaps been envious. Instead they had to market it it’s a socially acceptable choice. I guess they figured it’s so off the beaten path nobody they knew would ever be in the neighborhood. I think they’ll make it another couple of years before they return to something closer in.
There’s nothing wrong with small town America.
People there aren’t idiots. They like many of the things people in big cities like. They just prefer a slower pace of life and a safer, more closely knit community without all the insanity of the big cities. They’re willing to give up some amenities and conveniences for a better quality of life and a better place to raise kids.As more people flee big cities, small towns will be the beneficiaries and victims of the transplants. Thus trend will not abate for the foreseeable future. Technology will continue to facilitate the exodus from the cities.
"the beneficiaries and victims"
Exactly!
Tanto, you might want to read about this guy, Jordan Rasmusson, https://jordanrasmusson.com/
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Rasmusson) says he's 30, went to Harvard, worked for Bain Capital--now he's a Republican state politician in western Minnesota, close to the Dakotas, probably about 500 miles due north of Humboldt.
Interesting. You don’t typically get McKinsey types in a place like Fergus Falls. Probably a very bright fellow.
Don’t make it sound so appealing…. Seriously, I’d love somewhere like that.
It looks exactly like nearly every other small town main street that I've seen in my days. But it's fine -- you don't need a town that's open until midnight in the first place. Especially not one that wakes up with the sun.
You get it.
I spent one summer after freshman year at college (way back on the 70's) in Forgan, OK and McPherson, KS salvaging old railroad lines. Hard work. Met some wonderful folks and one young (at the time) Iady I continue to stay in touch with. I met some other folks as well. While in Forgan stayed at an old hotel (not a dump, just old). The owner was an old timer that had lived through the depression and his family lost their farm. I was fortunate to have some interesting conversations with him. During the summer in the OK panhandle you can actually feel The Grapes of Wrath come alive. It produces hard working folks that become the backbone of flyover country.
In the parceling out of America it was, at the time, the last big chunk of land that could be grabbed by settlers was what ultimately became Oklahoma. Everything else in the U.S. had already been allocated, bought up, or stolen by real estate speculators and land barons. When they finally, after many years of fighting and negotiations and ripping off the Indian tribes, , and opened the land up to settlers in 1889 to homestead as a US territory, it was all grabbed in about 24 hours. 50,000 people waited to grab the 12,000 parcels of land under the Homestead Act. The history is interesting. The dust bowl was only forty years later, so slot of the original settlers and their kids were still there when it kicked off.
There’s nothing wrong per se with bringing in the types of stores and shops people in deep blue cities are used to having. Small town red staters like coffee and food and things like that, too. The problem arrives when the importers expect the red state residents to change into the hipster paradigm like changing a set of clothes. There’s also a need for a customer base to support the establishments. They are found in large cities for good reason.
Transplanting blue state expectations into the middle of rural red states and expecting them to grow is a variation of the “magic dirt” theme, whereby millions of third world people are expected to transform into productive citizens in a first world technological society by virtue of having been ushered across the Rio Grande. This verse will usually fail, just like forcing lenders to put poor people who had never owned a home into a house they could neither afford nor maintain did. It’s not a failure of intent, it’s an abject failure of understanding cause and effect.
I bought a ten-dollar loaf of bread the the "breadery" today. It made me wonder.
Ba-dum-pum! Don’t forget to tip your waiter. Or am I reading an unintended pun into ‘wonder’ breading?
Unintended, but obviously my brain is accidentally clever.
See, you’re not really dead!
That's another problem with the snotty blue people coming into small towns in red states. They expect to get paid CA prices in places where people don't make CA salaries.
Still laughing at the word "breadery".
It needs a meatery next door.
Restaurants around here are starting to call themselves 'eateries', which sounds more like something that caters to livestock.
Butchery.
As soon as I saw that picture I understood. It doesn't fit there. Neither the Northeast snob OR the Midwest reverse snob in me would set foot in a place like that. You need a critical mass of Arlington/Brooklyn/new Seattle types to support it.
Beefery, chickenery and fishery.
And Vegatables and Fruitables.
Haha😁
Interesting observations. I've seen similar cases in the areas around where I currently live, which isn't as small as Humboldt, but still less than 40k people. There's a lot of ambitious individuals with grand ideas who are right leaning, but they rely on money from blue-state tourists and transplants to keep the economic engine going with the momentum it's been set at. A lot of out-of-staters come in with California money and then muscle out mom and pop places by catering to the blue crowd, setting up shop in more valuable real-estate, and general appealing to trendy urbanite tastes. It doesn't help there's a lot of locals who resent their working class, small town roots and would have fucked off to somewhere like Seattle and Portland, if they could, but since they can't, they frequent these places to facilitate Seattle and Portland coming to them. This is really only in the immediate city, though. Surrounding communities look a lot like the one you posted. Lots of half-finished projects and half-realized dreams. Empty shop-fronts. Shuttering businesses. The biggest city in the county (the one I live in) seems to be slowly sucking the life out of the surrounding communities as they all contract inward around this one, urban center, as locals either A) have to move closer to where the economic opportunities are, whether that be to open up shop or work at one, or B) they're priced out entirely and are forced to move to another county, which is happening more and more as property values continue to skyrocket.
I feel like reversing the brain drain and depopulation of Rural America is key towards a prosperous (and just plain functional) future, but I'm just not sure how to overcome the obstacles standing in the way.
The place where this REALLY worked, to dark effect, was the Berkshires. Industrial region, lots of paper mills and other manufacturing, beautiful working class mountain area. Factories close, decline begins.
https://www.masslive.com/politics/2016/01/in_pittsfield_general_electric.html
New Yorkers discover dirt cheap real estate and rural beauty, and it becomes Retirement Manhattan. But the new arrivals are horrified by how backward and rightish-yucky the place is, and they vote to raise property taxes over and over again to support progressive programs, while also driving up real estate prices through demand. Working class locals driven out, so success! Revival! Lots of microbreweries and arts festivals!
See also Branson, MO.
I’d be heartbroken to see this happen to Branson. The natural beauty surrounding this area (Big Cedar Lodge area, Table Rock Lake, etc) is absolutely breathtaking and the people are wonderful!
See also all of Vermont.
Yes! They ruin every single thing they touch. They, literally, should not be allowed in, but I know that's impossible.
Edited for typo. I swear I try to proof read.
What if it's our entire cultural model and beliefs?
How do social networks take root and grow, when the entire culture is object/individual/node oriented? Public spaces are what used to be called, "the commons."
You did your share and earned rights, not rights being ordained and responsibility optional.
All this left, right, red, blue shit is just deck chairs on the Titanic, because debt doesn't matter, until it does.
Then that mother of all reality checks arrives in the mail.
"...the entire culture is object/individual/node oriented."
Well said. This is where we're headed, but I hope not without a fight. And some of the apparent fights may turn out to be performative.
It runs very deep.
Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. To the Ancients, monotheism was monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
Greek religion grew out of fertility rites. The son born the spring, of the old sky god and the earth mother, but by the Classical Age, tradition prevailed over renewal and Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus, so the story of Jesus, crucified and risen in the spring, had fertile ground to grow.
Though by the time the Romans adopted it as state religion, tradition had prevailed again. So the Trinity was obscured and it was all about the Big Guy Rules. Which was to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic. Divine right of kings. Rulers good, people flawed.
Martin Luther tried pushing the reset button, but was only fighting the political corruption, not the underlaying premises.
When the West went back to populist forms of government, it required separation of church and state, essentially culture and civics. Which is about as schizophrenic as Descartes' distinction of mind and body.
A spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Ideals are like truth, beauty, platonic forms, the village alter, while absolutes are foundational and elemental essences from which forms arise, like thoughts arise from consciousness. When every ideology, creed, political brand, etc. has to claim universality and all the rest are flawed and evil, it's endless war.
Like epicycles, it's patches all the way down.
This wave has crested and we are going to have to accept it's an ocean out there.
Nodes in the networks, like galaxies in space. Synchronization versus harmonization.
Check out Heinrich Heine's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zur_Geschichte_der_Religion_und_Philosophie_in_Deutschland
for a really good take on the conflict inherent in germanic peoples adopting (rather: being forced under threat of war to adopt) a semitic-latinised worship-the-leader cult in total conflict with their own cultural tradition.
The wikipedia-article is in english, and Heine's text should be linked to by it.
Thanks. That is interesting to see. I have to admit I could never much get into Continental philosophy, as it was far too obscure for what I was looking for. So I tended toward eastern philosophies and basic physics, to make sense of reality.
Here is a draft I wrote out, as the crazy goes parabolic, but still not sure anyone is really wanting to look deep, so I haven't posted it;
https://johnmerryman.substack.com/publish/post/135326630?r=7aidy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
There is family history, as well, given my surname comes from the Christianization of the Goddess.
It’s a little sad that Red State Americans do not appear to have the funding or ideas to revitalize their communities to serve their communities. It sounds like Boulder Humbolt was being built for California transplants, who would likely ruin Kansas the way they ruined California.
I don't think it's all Californians, and this morning I listened to the guy who cooked my awesome breakfast talk about growing up here. But I can't parse the balance between natives and parachutists.
It may have been my bias, but if the NYT is reporting on it, I assumed that the audience was blue state professionals looking at a small Kansas town as if it were Beacon, NY or Cape Cod.
Its the factories returning that saves Red state, or whatever industry- not shops.
Exactly. When I was growing up, our little home town of about 1,500 had three small factories. One did something with batteries, one crushed a particular rock, and one canned milk.
Now? Every single one of them is gone and we’re just a bedroom community for the larger towns around us.
It’s the death of a town when the production goes.
Well, they don't have human feces or drugged out bums on the streets. That's already very appealing.
What do they think of Jason Aldean?
I can't imagine asking. My impression this week, based on the Republican funding texts that I get fifty times a day, is that Jason Aldean is a rural-seeming product being marketed to suburban conservatives. I can be talked out of this feeling.
The lyrics to that song are decent but it sounds like he may not know exactly what he's talking about. I love that song though! In AZ a sort of hobby with the Highway Patrol was pulling over speeders with CA plates. Good ol' boys didn't usually take no sh!t though. And you'd better not touch their trucks without permission! My brother is that way even though he doesn't live in Yuma anymore.
Quite honestly, I'd like to move to a small town. They're nice. Nosy, but nice.
As a speeder with California plates, I am quite familiar with the habits of the Arizona Highway Patrol.
I drove through from TX to CA in a Porsche. And kept the cruise control at 64 mph. I normally drove 80 mph in CA.
From my current vantage point in a small Florida town (nearest Starbucks is an hour and a half drive away - so really remote), I would tend to agree.
No feces or bums yet but give the Blue team time . . .
As Grady Judd put it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcW7ywLE95I
Grady Judd for president!
Yet. They don't have the bums, yet.
Back in the 90’s, when Bruce Willis was at the height of his fame and married to Demi Moore, he suddenly took a liking to the small town of Hailey, Idaho and decided to “revitalize” it. He spent millions remaking it into just the sort of “must-see” destination that Humboldt is supposed to be. The residents eventually got frustrated with Willis’ constant meddling in local affairs and his LARPing as a pillar of the community; Willis eventually got bored, closed his businesses (putting a lot of Hailey residents out of work), and pissed off back to Hollywood. Everything old is new again.
I happened to be in Hailey once and it’s lovely! Your comment reminded me of the American Girl Dolls creator buying up real estate and revitalizing Aurora:
https://www.curbed.com/2021/12/american-girl-pleasant-rowland-aurora-spa.html
I LOVE people’s ambition in creating (business owners have real courage IMHO) & I find it fascinating how hard it is to change a little town... in a good way (everyone defines that differently!). There will always be pushback; folks resist change. Nostalgia runs deep.
I lived in Hailey before, during, and after the Bruce and Demi period. With Sun Valley only fourteen miles to the north, there were enough wealthy blue types to support Bruce's overcapitalized-dream, and us locals benefitted from some new, hip places to frequent. But, once Bruce was finished, they were not sustainable. I first moved to the area in 1988, and the hot topic was "affordable housing." Like most communities, nobody had the slightest clue how to accomplish that goal, and to this day the issue is still talked about. But, aggravated by the Covid demographic shift, home prices are even more unaffordable, while new transplants drive around in $100,000 Sprinter Vans clogging up the trailheads and live in multi-million dollar homes.
Three miles south of Hailey in the town of Bellevue was an even starker contrast. At one point there were three, new, happening restaurants a stones throw apart on Main Street, Bellevue. After getting priced out of Ketchum, and then Hailey, I moved to Bellevue thinking I was at the tip-of-the-spear of something new and exciting. In less than a year, two of those three happening restaurants closed. The one remaining did a good job of servicing the local clientele, but was nothing special. The minor blip of coolness didn't last long. After purchasing a home in Bellevue in 2006, I sold ten years later at a considerable loss. Not even twenty miles away from Ketchum/Sun Valley, and Bellevue still struggles to be anything more than overpriced, overflow housing.
Locals bemoaned the increase in the cost of living, and assumed "something has to change," because finding employees to work service jobs, etc. was extremely difficult. I've learned that the wealthy transplants that vote blue love nothing more than complaining to Buffy how long they had to wait for a drink or food at the local restaurants. The Sun Valley area has always catered to the wealthy, but had many long term locals of modest means. Unless those modest-income locals bought in the lull after the sub-prime lending fiasco, they are only in town for a short period of time before moving to a place they can survive.
Humboldt appears to be within 100, or 120 miles at most, of both Tulsa and the Kansas Cities. It isn't an unfathomably remote town on the wind-swept prairie. But, how many of the people who read or watch these features about Humboldt are going to visit the town?
I don't mean to say Humboldt is doomed, but that you can't base a rural county's economy on tourism.
Yes, and people have way different levels of patience in a culture based on immediate gratification. I imagine the New York Times telling people they HAD to go here, then the moment when people in Brooklyn and Ann Arbor and Georgetown sat down to actually think about how to get there....
Them city folk will show em
Covid broke a lot of things and perhaps myself. As my family was forced to lock down in the hell hole known as Los Angeles I kept joking but being very serious about friends moving to some random ghost town in Wyoming and trying to make something of it. We went to SC for a week this summer and upon returning to the 3rd world LAX I noticed a horrid smell that I have not been able to escape. I think it's death... this place is dying and I am desperate to escape. This town seems promising.
Los Angeles is the past. California is the past. I feel it, urgently.
I think you may be right. They are certainly doing their best to destroy it beyond all survivable use.
Good luck to them, from small town north Yorkshire where local bureaucrats seem determined to kill the hopes and dreams of anyone with the temerity to try opening a small business.....