Try That In A Place That Hasn’t Opioided Or Woked Itself Into A Living HL Mencken Essay
By Mitch Berg
I 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…).
July 26th, 2023 at 11:09 am
This post is ripe for a peeve-y drive-by.
July 26th, 2023 at 11:16 am
Aldean doesn’t have any actual small town nostalgia to share. He didn’t grow up in one and didn’t write the song.
It’s all virtue signaling — or a “lack-of-virtue” signaling, more precisely.
July 26th, 2023 at 11:19 am
“It’s all virtue signaling” chirps Emery the Depraved Pedophile
July 26th, 2023 at 11:29 am
Most Americans don’t live in small towns, by pretty large percentages. 80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas. The small town obsession is just a mythology that gets perpetuated by populist demagogues.
July 26th, 2023 at 11:42 am
emery, you depraved pedophile;
and yet you’re here touting the joys of life in Hackensack MN obviously promoting the mythology you decry
July 26th, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Where I spend half the year doesn’t really qualify me to say I’m from a small town. Washington County is where I raised my family and own a home.
July 26th, 2023 at 12:05 pm
Pig, rAT and the boys in HaCK would not put up with any looting blacks or smelly hippies parading around, no sir.
They’d all meet up at the NAMBLA HQ (aka Butts N’ Buns BBQ) pool their disability checks and do some SERIOUS, deep drinking.
July 26th, 2023 at 12:12 pm
HAcK has a population of around 500.
Within that tiny population, there are 5 registered sex offenders! No wonder rAT loves it there.
Searching for Sex Offenders in 56452 Hackensack, MN
Top Offenses:
Second-Degree Sexual Assault of a Child
REGISTERED AS A RESULT OF OUT-OF-STATE CONVICTION
Third-Degree Sexual Assault
First-Degree Sexual Assault of a Child
ISP9999 – FELONY CONVICTION AFTER 7/1/2011
Which one is you, rAT?
July 26th, 2023 at 12:21 pm
I’m unsure how much “high trust” enters into it, as “high traditional value” environment does.
Back when BurnLootMurder was going full steam in Mpls, the wacko Demonrats in Hudson tried to import “activists” and organize protests and block streets, etc. But the first time the protestors blocked the streets they got shipped off to the county klink that Friday afternoon. However, in St. Croix County, trials are very, very rare on Fridays and the judges tend to leave early afternoon. Unlike Hennepin County where the system likes to promote wacko activism and runs daily, when the judges were asked to come back to get the “activists” released they declined and said they’d be back Monday as usual. Strangely enough, that stopped the “protests” almost instantly when they realized it isn’t catch-and-release in a “small town.” And I have no doubt that if the even more numerous anti-protestors had misbehaved they’d have suffered the same fate.
So trust isn’t so much an issue as enforcing traditional values like respect for and equality of the law, and proper behavior by a citizen. It’s when you get to “deconstructing society” and apologizing for adherent and abhorrent behavior that you get what you deserve.
(And yeah, don’t get caught violating the law enough to warrant jailing over the weekend in St. Croix County. Sometimes a judge will be in over the weekend, but not always.)
July 26th, 2023 at 12:22 pm
You *know* you’re in a classy area when you’ve got 5 registered sex offenders (2 child molesters) within an 8 mile radius!
No wonder all the ShacKs on the milfoil pond look like miniature versions of Boo Radley’s house.
July 26th, 2023 at 12:26 pm
Say rAT? Did they catch you and your ER nurse/Free clinic sex worker/daughter at it on the Berkeley Horse, or what?
tia rAT!
July 26th, 2023 at 12:42 pm
It is OK to starve that man, I don’t like his political opinions.
And it’s okay to deny the other man medical treatment, I don’t like his business practices.
Better hope to God the pendulum never swings back, Emery.
July 26th, 2023 at 12:44 pm
Wrong thread. Oops.
July 26th, 2023 at 12:49 pm
Aldean lives in a mansion in Nashville — is that a small town?
I have shirt-tail relatives in a very small Appalachian town where drugs are rampant and theft is everyday (usually to pay for drugs). 200+ families need food assistance and there may not be enough teachers to open schools in August. Aldean needs to live in a real small town. And they all have guns but mostly shoot each other.
For many on the far right (which is virtually the entire GOP) it’s all about a fantasy of grievances that only gets more outrageous and less connected to reality as time goes by. The rural crime rate is now actually higher than the national average, and while republicans posture and falsely complain about how Democratic mayors have mismanaged cities into a supposed epidemic of crime, rural America has become inundated in drugs and economic hopelessness.
If this were a Monty Python sketch you would say it is too far fetched. Yet this is the reality of our politics. An entire party unencumbered by facts.
July 26th, 2023 at 12:51 pm
“Aldean lives in a mansion in Nashville”
Who cares?
July 26th, 2023 at 12:53 pm
Aldean doesn’t have any actual small town nostalgia to share. He didn’t grow up in one and didn’t write the song.
Took you long enough to get and repost the talking points, Emery.
And the response is: So What?
In other news, Johnny Cash never did time in Folsom Prison. Might have something to do with there being no body and no witnesses to him killing a man in Reno. Also, I heard he never got into a fight with his father in Gatlinburg, TN, over being named Sue. Nor did he ever work at GM and steal a Cadillac a piece at a time from the assembly line.
July 26th, 2023 at 1:01 pm
^^ It’s actually Leiper’s Fork, a very tony enclave of country singers, a place manicured to look like a small town. Just what he wants.
July 26th, 2023 at 1:11 pm
Dionne Warwick was not born and raised in San Jose. John Prine was not an old woman. Bob Dylan did not work on a fishing boat right outside of Delacroix. Jay Ferguson did not ride the storm out on Thunder Island. But they all made bank singing about it. Not sure why we demand exactitude out of Aldean and not the others.
July 26th, 2023 at 1:14 pm
I hate country music and never heard of Jason Aldean until the boycott
the song doesn’t say a small towns are utopia, the song says try rioting and burning down a police station in a small town. see how that goes for you. It won’t go well because by and large. people In the small towns still have respect for law and order Even if it means helping law enforcement themselves, as good citizens should
he’s right. And liberals know it which is why they must lie about the song and therefore we get Emery posting idiocy
July 26th, 2023 at 1:20 pm
Earlier this morning, a SITD post addressed the problem of “debanking”, ie. canceling bank accounts for non-criminal reasons to punish people for their opinions.
Try that in a small town.
Sure, some small town banks are just branches of large national banks and some are branches of regional banks, but the small town bank is still a thing.
In our town of 1,500, Jim the banker, drives around every fall and delivers sandwiches to the guys driving combines, carts and grain trucks. He is not the kind of guy who is going to cut off your account — and I am sure as the sun rises in the east, that if he were pressured into it by the feds, he’d give you a heads up before it happened.
July 26th, 2023 at 1:36 pm
We spend a lot of time in a small town where our getaway place is located. Drugs are a problem. Small mindedness is a problem. Poverty is a problem, just like in the city. And then there are the country brahmin who lord it over the lesser folks. Living more simply just means these folks deny much of the reality of the modern world. They are ideal republicans in that regard. Nice folks but mostly clueless.
July 26th, 2023 at 1:41 pm
MBerg, you don’t understand how modern academics think.
What you call “social trust” is ALWAYS the product of repressing all the non-white people and the females. A quiet small town in middle America is the most oppressive place on earth. Riots and crime are the normal expression of oppressed people, unless they are repressed by the dominant group.
This idea is at the foundation of modern American pedagogy.
Aldean’s song is seen by progressives as praising this repression.
You can’t argue that Aldean’s song is simply praise for traditional small-town life without addressing this.
July 26th, 2023 at 1:45 pm
BTW, there is no reason, other than bigotry, to believe that a person in a big city can pass judgment on people in small towns, but people in small towns can’t cast judgement on people who choose to live in a big city.
July 26th, 2023 at 1:52 pm
My Cass County property taxes have doubled over the past two years. We pay for the local schools and various other amenities for the city/County . Now — I’m not complaining one bit. But when a few of the local crabbers complain about people from the “shittiesl” I find it humorous….
July 26th, 2023 at 2:16 pm
“We spend a lot of time in a small town where our getaway place is located. Drugs are a problem. Small mindedness is a problem. Poverty is a problem, just like in the city”
Yes, rAT. We know you live in a shitty little town of 500 that features 5 registered sex offenders.
So, tell us; is it the cheap housing, the Indian c@sino, the good business opportunities for your Athlete free clinic sex worker/daughter, the drugs or the companionship of lots of fellow pedophiles that attracted you to HAcK?
tia, rAT!
July 26th, 2023 at 2:18 pm
” But when a few of the local crabbers complain about people from the “shittiesl” I find it humorous….”
Bet they would trade whatever tax you pay for that crappy little shACk to rid their town of 1 of the 5 registered sex offenders/pedophiles that have made HAcK their home.
July 26th, 2023 at 2:21 pm
⬆️ 70 + years old and still shot-posting on the internet—well done sir….
July 26th, 2023 at 2:23 pm
Emery, you depraved pedophile,
You claim to own land in Cass County MN. As I’m sure you’re happy to admit that land “was stolen from the Indians” (Anishinabe and the Lakota before them). Question – why won’t you give that land back to the people it was stolen from?. Don’t you have a moral obligation to do so and thus help end their oppression?
July 26th, 2023 at 2:24 pm
Searching for Sex Offenders in 56452 Hackensack, MN
Top Offenses:
Second-Degree Sexual Assault of a Child
REGISTERED AS A RESULT OF OUT-OF-STATE CONVICTION
Third-Degree Sexual Assault
First-Degree Sexual Assault of a Child
ISP9999 – FELONY CONVICTION AFTER 7/1/2011
Which one of these is you, rAT?
July 26th, 2023 at 2:30 pm
Why would a town of 500 need it’s own methadone treatment center?
Methadone Treatment Clinics in Hackensack, MN
At our Hackensack Minnesota Methadone location, we combine methadone maintenance therapy; individual, group, and family counseling; relapse prevention; and support groups to provide the most effective form of opiate addiction treatment possible. Our Hackensack, MN Methadone Clinic location is open 5:30 AM – 4:00 PM on Monday – Friday, and 6:00 AM – 9:30 AM Saturday and Sunday.
Pedophiles and drug addicts…what a shithole.
Fun, fun fun in the Northland, right, rAT?
July 26th, 2023 at 2:32 pm
Tom — did your sister ever forgive you for not protecting her from your alcoholic father’s late night visits to her room ??
July 26th, 2023 at 2:38 pm
Must be something— to have to live with that …
July 26th, 2023 at 2:42 pm
Jezuz
Following Prostitution Sting, Hackensack Moves To Enforce Stricter Regulations On Operating Requirements For Massage Parlors
A massage parlor in Hackensack was shut down after an undercover police officer found employees were offering to perform sexual acts for money, authorities said.
Is this why your daughter plies her trade in the ditch behind Floyd’s Quicky mart and Town Pump, rAT?
What a fucking shit hole you live in.
July 26th, 2023 at 2:49 pm
The sad decline of Hackensack, MN, is illustrative of what happens when wholesome little towns are infiltrated by leftist drug addicts and sexual predator’s.
It was probably nice back in the 50’s and 60’s. Now, it a haven for registered sex offenders like rAT, prostitutes in the ditches in Summer and out on the ice in Winter, and has it’s own methadone treatment clinic. Poor town can’t even afford to do anything about the invasive milfoil the completely envelopes the shore of lake HAcK.
Eel pout fishing has suffered.
July 26th, 2023 at 2:57 pm
BN
Emery, the depraved pedophile, likes living in a county named after one of his heroes; Lewis Cass, a Democrat, a slave owner, and as Sec of War was one of the primary executors of Jackson’s Indian Removal policy. Also along with John C Calhoun he was instrumental in proposing the Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty that led in no small part to The War Of Northern Aggression.
This hero worship of a slave holder is why Emery won’t give the stolen land he “owns” back to the indians.
July 26th, 2023 at 3:22 pm
Pig, if you compared the lives of black slaves to the life of rAT’s poor, homely, drug addicted daughter I think most people would have way more sympathy for the ER nurse.
Forced to sell her body to maintain not only her drug habit, but to keep her alcoholic, incestious, pedophile father in cheap vodka and c@sino slot tokens.
#Sad
July 26th, 2023 at 3:22 pm
Pig, if you compared the lives of black slaves to the life of rAT’s poor, homely, drug addicted daughter I think most people would have way more sympathy for the ER nurse.
Forced to sell her body to maintain not only her drug habit, but to keep her alcoholic, inc3stious, pedophile father in cheap vodka and c@sino slot tokens.
#Sad
July 26th, 2023 at 4:04 pm
That woman is a treasure, Blade.
July 26th, 2023 at 5:45 pm
Emery on July 26, 2023 at 1:36 pm said:
We spend a lot of time in a small town where our getaway place is located. Drugs are a problem. Small mindedness is a problem. Poverty is a problem, just like in the city. And then there are the country brahmin who lord it over the lesser folks.
That is not what the song is about and you know it. Nobody in your little town set fire to the police station. Nobody in your little town looted the five-and-dime. Nobody in your little town throws molotov cocktails at cars.
That shit happens in deep blue Democrat cities because Liberals insist on letting it happen.
July 26th, 2023 at 6:15 pm
Which. By the way, is explicitly racist. Black people do not have to obey the law because of slavery. Huh?
How are people today excused by events 100 years ago? Never stated but the implicit reason is “Black people cannot be expected to act like civilized human beings. They are ignorant savages who don’t know any better and shouldn’t have to learn because people long ago were mean to one another.”
Soft bigotry of low expectations. Liberal racism. Blue cities.
July 26th, 2023 at 6:26 pm
I grew up in a small town. Worse yet, I worked as a LEO in one for a number of years.
On the positive side, people in small towns typically live quiet dignified lives. It is the life they chose. Everybody knows everybody. People take care of their neighbors.
On the minus side, everybody knows everyone. It is the most insidious surveillance state you can imagine.
Small towns have all the same problems as big cities. That neighborhood surveillance state keeps things to a manageable level.
July 26th, 2023 at 9:04 pm
“Small towns have all the same problems as big cities.” Really?
Watch the video. Tell me about the scenes from the video that occurred in your small town. The flames. The riots. The looting.
Links to news acvounts would be appreciated.
July 27th, 2023 at 6:17 am
Well Bot Boy, when your whole county is run by DemoCommies, you get what you deserve.
And speaking of slavery dip stick, since you support people that have familial slave ownership, including our worthless AG Hakim Ellison, you are obviously a racist. But, funny! The one person that has been labeled a racist so much that it’s lost its meaning, Donald Trump’s family never did! Make sure you hand over your Cass county property to the tribe and write out your reparations checks. Put your money where your lying mouth is, dip stick!
July 27th, 2023 at 6:45 am
One thing worth mentioning in this back-slapping of small towns and their culture is the insidious efforts of homegrown Lutherans, specifically Lutheran Social Services, to sabotage them. There has been some talk lately about how “red” North Dakota is and maybe it is as a whole, but Fargo?
The blackout of the Fargo terrorist attack obscures a broader concern in small-town America Sounds like the Seven Corners area.
July 27th, 2023 at 6:58 am
jdm.
In addition to LSS, you can add Catholic Charities. They have both become criminal enterprises, trading services for illegal aliens for sweet government cash. Two friends, that contributed to CC, almost religiously, pulled their contributions and told them why. Didn’t get the exact wording, but they both told me that the excuses were unbelievable.
July 27th, 2023 at 7:35 am
boss, one of the interesting things from Liberal Fascism is the role that ostensibly mundane organizations like LSS or CC have played in sorta greasing the skids for socialism in general. I think you can add wokeism as well.
July 27th, 2023 at 7:36 am
moderated
boss, one of the interesting things from Liberal Fascism is the role that ostensibly mundane organizations like LSS or CC have played in sorta greasing the skids for s@cialism in general. I think you can add wokeism as well.
July 27th, 2023 at 7:39 am
moderated twice before
boss, one of the interesting things from Liberal F@scism is the role that ostensibly mundane organizations like LSS or CC have played in sorta greasing the skids for s0cialism in general. I think you can add w0keism as well.
July 27th, 2023 at 7:41 am
Man. Boss, I give up.
I have a response but the censor has moderated all three attempts to publish it.
July 27th, 2023 at 7:54 am
boss, CC was the other “doo-gooder” fingered by Berry for ballot harvesting. Fuck’em all. Not a dime to charities unless you know EXACTLY what they are doing and why. All our charity cash goes to Camp Hope.