Try That In A Place That Hasn’t Opioided Or Woked Itself Into A Living HL Mencken Essay
Wednesday, July 26th, 2023I may be the last person in America to comment on the Jason Aldean song.
But this is right in my wheelhouse, so I’m going to do it anyway.
I grew up in what was a big city in rural North Dakota; Jamestown is around 15,000 people – sort of that awkward stage where people from big cities think they’re in Mayberry, and people from smaller towns get nervous about traffic and crime.
I don’t romanticize small towns. I left Jamestown for a reason; there was literally no opportunity for me there. IAnd as much as North Dakota has evolved, there still isn’t (although if I were 22 today, Fargo would be an option); the town managed to avoid all that unseemly oil money to the west and big tech money in Fargo. And it surprises outsiders (!), but there is no privacy in a small town; everyone knows your history, going back a couple of generations. Even when I was 20, that was claustrophobic for me.
Beyond that? Ugly things happen in small towns. Small-time hoods wind up dumped in rivers after running afoul bigger-time hoodlums. Even if you leave out opioids and meth, which have ravaged many small towns that’ve been passed by economically, the same social patterns that *can* make so many small towns such stable and accountable (and infuriating, Lake Wobegon-like) places can also make for some pretty entrenched miscreancy.
But those same social patterns that drove me so crazy as a kid help enforce something that’s absolutely mandatory for a functioning democracy – the “high trust society”. If you trust that your neighbor isn’t trying to stab you in the back (figuratively – or maybe literally), you can spend that time and effort doing something useful.
If you leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition and go to bed, is your car going to be there in the morning? When everyone around you knows everyone and everything they’re doing, and the peer pressure is strong enough, probably, yeah.
And if the Sheriff knows he’s going to be going back to the highway patrol if he screws too many people over? You’ll have a well-behaved, ethical, *trustworthy* sheriff.
My favorite example: during Covid, I listened to some of Governor Walz’s press conferences. He sounded like he was hectoring a bunch of kids in a gym class. It was insulting. Then, I drove across the border and caught Governor Burgum giving a similar address. The difference was night and day; he sounded like he was addressing…adults. Equals. People who he knew would be bending his ear out on the streets of Bismarck if he got too big for his britches.
That’s not *entirely* a function of smaller towns and states; Salt Lake City and Boise and Plano Texas all do really well by those measures. But all of them have social cohesion and a high trust culture in common.
So if I were to do an edit on the Aldean song, I may go with something like “Try that in a place with high-trust area with social cohesion”.
(On the claims that the song is “racist?” That’s just moronic; you presume social disorder and crime are “black” things? And as to the courthouse used in the video having been the site of a lynching 100 years ago? Take that up with the Tennesee Film Board, which markets filming locations to production companies; many videos, and 2-3 movies (including the “Hannah Montana” movie and a Lifetime Christmas film) have been shot at that same courthouse. Oddly, the Tennessee Film Board doesn’t talk about lynching history any more than Duluth’s Chamber of Commerce does…).







