WAGNER, S.D. — Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the greatest rural snob in history, argued that cities are as useful to a republic as sores are to a human body.
Ever since, town and country have been pitted against each other in American politics, with a somewhat unfair rule seeming to govern their duel: It’s acceptable for the country to sneer at the town, but not the other way around.
And yet the border between town and country is blurring in America. Urban farming, methamphetamine use, the local-food movement, the global commodities boom, the diverging family structures of the educated and less- educated, and various other things are making town a lot more like country and country a lot more like town.
When you land in Mitchell, S.D., and make the hour’s drive to Wagner, here is what you see. First, a burial-vault business outside the tiny airport. Then the Kongo Klub strip joint. And then, for miles and miles, farms that coat the rolling hills, wind tickling the green leaves and the leaves trembling with laughter.
But the scenery can be deceiving, because here you are in a place deeply linked into the supply chains of cut- throat globalized commerce — while in the cities, skepticism of such commerce is on the rise.
You will notice, for instance, that there isn’t much of a variety of vegetables on these farms. It’s soybeans and corn, over and over, because the prices for such commodities are good and machines can do the work — and, in the case of corn, because people love their Pepsi and Fanta, sweetened with corn syrup.
While in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, the restaurants contort themselves to serve “farm to table” fare, many in this agrarian community still eat as Americans did decades ago — iceberg lettuce, industrially processed salad dressings, Cool Whip imitation whipped cream, meat that could be from anywhere. Though cattle is a major industry here and cows are everywhere, step into restaurants like the ScoreBoard Pub & Grille, reputed to serve Mitchell’s best burger, and they have no idea where the beef is from. Meanwhile, in New York City, ever more people are raising chickens in their backyards.
Then there’s the question of social order. American cities, with some exceptions, have largely reduced crime. The New York City of crack vials crushing under feet is fading into memory.
Meanwhile, in places like Wagner and Mitchell — or, say, Stephenville, Texas, where I found myself just before South Dakota — a kind of rural chaos is taking hold. The people who live in these places will usually tell you what drug they think is causing it: crystal meth, heroin, OxyContin. Fracturing families, bad schools and mass incarceration are involved, too.
When you walk through these towns, you can feel a darkness that belies the imagery of country towns. Street life has all but gone as the young and the educated leave; many businesses open only a few days a week; young men drive around in low-slung cars, giving vengeful looks and, on a recent morning in Wagner, barking and making menacing hand signals at a visiting stranger. (Was it a gang sign or an attempted shadow puppet of a depressed goose?)
Rural dwellers might look down on the promiscuous, amoral cities, but reality challenges their prejudice. For example, when the Pew Research Center looked at the likelihood people in different states were to be married three or more times, more agrarian states like Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama topped the list, while more urban places like Minnesota, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey came at the very bottom.
Even that most enduring of rural self- images — that of sturdy self-reliance — stands on shaky ground. In American politics, it’s poor, dark-skinned urban dwellers who are so often cast as hopeless wards of the government. But the states that, on balance, receive more from federal government spending than they pay out in federal taxes tend to be the more rural ones: at the top of the list, New Mexico, Mississippi, West Virginia, Montana, Alabama and North Dakota.
What are the rural snobs to do? If Thomas Jefferson lived now, perhaps he would quit Monticello and become a chicken farmer in New York.
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