Country Livin’

Recently, I got dragged to a theater to see an insufferable kids movie.

Normally, I have nothing against films for kids, and I will catch a showing of Paddington 2 with you anytime.

But this movie sucked. The only reason my family attended was because we had to accommodate the youngest member of our group, who inexplicably wanted to see a movie that was too childish even for the children in the theater.

I won’t identify this film, because then this site becomes a movie-review outlet, and that’s not exactly my forte. Although I will say, once again, that Goodfellas is the greatest movie of all time.

The kids movie I had to endure was no Goodfellas. Although a kids version of that Scorsese masterpiece is interesting to ponder.

In any case, it wasn’t just this film’s dull story, heavy-handed dialogue, cringy humor, and hammy acting that annoyed me. Those were all factors, but the chief reason for my antipathy was more thematic.

You see, the plot of this particular monstrosity was that a married couple lose their jobs in the loud, crowded, obnoxious big city. So they move their family to the rural countryside, where they literally live in a barn.

After a period of adjustment, complete with kooky locals and quaint rural customs, the family falls in love with their new home. The movie ends with the family dancing in joy as their new neighbors surround them and clap along in glee.

I’m not exaggerating. This fucker ends with our main characters literally dancing in sheer happiness at their new life. The scene is in slo-mo, no less.

Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I am from Wisconsin. Although I grew up in an urban environment —Milwaukee, home of the major league-best Brewers — I’ve spent more time in the Wisconsin countryside than most Latinos, progressives, or college-educated elitist libtards (whichever category you want to jam me into).

So I can tell you that rural America is not a place where people dance in slow motion, bursting with exuberance at their heavenly existence. It is a place, quite frankly, that is suffering.

Don’t take my first-hand experiences for it. Acres of studies and piles of books have documented this issue. You know that phrase “deaths of despair”? Yeah, it’s about people who don’t live in cities.

By most measurements, rural America has a worse quality of life than urban America. People who live in the country have shorter lifespans, higher poverty, less education, and fewer cultural or economic options. You are more likely to see meth heads taking over barns than a grateful family doing a jig because they escaped the city.

But despite wretched kids movies like the one I had to endure, and all those romcoms about city women ditching their lives for a hunky man who works on a farm, we all know, deep down, that it is ineffectual propaganda.

Several small towns will give you free land if you move there. A basic rule of economics is that if you have to give something away for free, it’s because nobody wants it.

And it’s not just America. Rural areas of Japan, Italy, and other countries are emptying out fast because humans around the world have decided that cities are superior, or at least more conducive to survival.

So why do we continue to glamorize the country life? Why do we insist that everybody would be better off if we lived outside a small town, away from the concrete and crowds of the big, scary city?

Part of it is our ongoing insistence that rural Americans are the true patriots, the ones whose voice and votes matter more than the rest of us. The fact that rural Americans are synonymous with “white conservatives” is a coincidence, I’m sure.

I’m not saying that cities are paradise. But portraying rural life as nonstop joy and the key to happiness is more than disingenuous. It is an insulting lie.

Also, if we kill this particular trope, I won’t have to go to any more shitty kids movies.

A Different Type of Paranoia

Recently, I discussed how doomsday preppers — often white men who hate the government — frequently view an apocalyptic meltdown of society as a good thing. Many of these heavily armed guys dream of hanging out in their fortified complexes, free to do whatever they want and immune to the threat of immigrants and drag queens and vaccination campaigns. It’s their fantasy.

But let’s be clear. There are other types of people who are also prepping for the end of the world.

For starters, you have your classic evil billionaire. These oligarchs are “buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create.”

Sure, some of them are living out their dream of becoming a Bond villain, but for many of these money-hungry sociopaths, Armageddon is the predictable endgame of their “selfish and isolationist outlooks.”

This is a new worldview for the uber-wealthy, who traditionally have focused on indulging in extravagances and procuring status symbols. Never before “have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unlivable for everyone else,” and neither have they ever had “the technologies through which to program their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society.”

Basically, for these tech bros and crypto schemers, it is no longer about living in a mansion with a fleet of expensive cars and weekends on the mega-yacht. It’s about surviving civilization’s destruction in relative comfort and “exercising control over the rest of us.”

The good news is that the “probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim.” So all those smug rich dudes who think they’re going to ride out the chaos and destruction that they have instigated? Yeah, if society implodes, they’re probably going to die miserable deaths in those bunkers.

So we’ll have a happy ending after all.

In any case, there is another type of prepper, one not nearly as loathsome as the people whom we’ve discussed so far. And that is the ethnic minority and/or liberal who is “waking up to the reality of needing to be prepared.”

Some experts say the number of preppers has doubled in the last decade, with “much of that growth from minorities and people considered left-of-center politically, whose sense of insecurity was heightened by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, the pandemic, more frequent extreme weather, and the 2020 racial justice protests.”

To the surprise of right-wingers, “a new breed of Americans is getting ready to survive political upheaval and natural catastrophes, a pursuit that until recently was largely associated with far-right movements such as white nationalists.” 

As I said, I’m not a prepper. But if one of my fellow Latinos is gathering supplies and firearms because he believes America is going to crumple into an authoritarian hellhole, well, I get it.

Lots of progressives and ethnic minorities are taking courses in survival tactics, picking up guns, and preparing for the worst. As a result, prepper culture (if that is the correct term for it) is diversifying “amid fear of disaster and political unrest.”

So for all those white supremacists who thought DEI was over, and that the future belonged to Aryan thugs in camouflage, the joke’s on you.

Even in an apocalypse, you can’t stop diversity.

Notes on the Apocalypse

An acquaintance of mine recently suffered the loss of her husband. The man collapsed of a sudden heart attack, and then he was gone.

In the aftermath of this crushing, unexpected calamity, my acquaintance scrambled to get her late husband’s affairs in order, and her digging into bank accounts and recent activities delivered another shocker: She discovered that her husband had a secret life.

No, he didn’t have a mistress, work as a double agent, fight crime superhero-style at night, or anything sexy like that. It turned out that the guy was a prepper.

He had spent about a hundred grand of their retirement money on a bunker, guns, provisions, and the necessities of a Mad Max existence.

And the man never told his wife about this, for reasons that he quite obviously can never provide (you know, because he’s dead). All my acquaintance knows is that she has $100,000 less in her retirement fund because her deceased hubby was convinced society would soon collapse and wild-eyed marauders would be on the hunt.

I’ve written before about preppers, those incredibly paranoid and/or prescient doomsayers who spend a huge chunk of time and money getting ready for the day when a nuclear holocaust, unstoppable virus, or zombie uprising destroys this pathetic façade we call civilization.

As I stated then, and still believe, these hardcore preppers aren’t just getting ready for Armageddon. They are actively rooting for it, because if it doesn’t happen, they have wasted an enormous portion of their lives on crazy nonsense.

But there is more to this disturbing mindset than a subconscious wish for complete chaos.

Preppers are overwhelmingly male and white. This is not just because white men have the most money to spend on underground vaults and piles of freeze-dried lasagna that can last 25 years (eww). It is because a societal collapse appeals to the white male fantasy of freedom.

Keep in mind that Americans “have been urged and trained to prep as children in various scouting organizations, as homesteaders given a plot of land by the federal government in the colonial project of ‘taming’ the West, and as steady, patriotic citizens prepared to survive nuclear attack to keep the US alive in their bunkers.”

In all of those scenarios (or mythologies if you prefer), the hero is a white man protecting his family. The image that we have been sold about these lone cowboys of ruggedness never includes women or Muslims or Latinos.

It’s always a white guy who believes making plans for “survival in the absence of state support is not being a doomsday prepper but simply being a reasonable, prepared citizen.”

And that brave individualist, who just needs the government to get off his damn back, doesn’t care if 911 goes offline or the streetlights stop working or the hospitals are overrun. When and if America implodes, he will finally be free to do whatever the hell he wants. 

Think of it. No stupid job with a stupid boss. No stealing of their hard-earned tax dollars (that are just going to lazy welfare cheats anyway). Not even any complaints to turn down the music, because the neighbors will be too scared (or too dead) to argue with the heavily armed king in his castle.

That sounds like paradise to many strong, gun-toting white men.

And there has never been a better time to embrace the fantasy. Our incompetent, corrupt government is not exactly reassuring its citizens that America will persevere. I’m not just talking about the shaky economy, unraveling international relationships, and botched wars that have become the hallmarks of this flailing administration.

The conservative mindset encourages “a bunkerized society [in] a permanent state of readiness … as a condition of living in the hollowed-out shell of a state that does not take infrastructural stability and basic need satisfaction as a right but as a good one must supply for oneself.”

It’s the ultimate libertarian endgame. The only thing better than small government is no government at all.

The American Dream, whatever that was, now costs far more than most people will ever earn. To many Americans, the odds of raising kids, buying a home, and achieving other traditional milestones are equivalent to the chances that the nation will fall into cannibalistic anarchy. So why not invest in a concrete alcove with a steel door that will be your personal kingdom, free of governmental interference and ethnic minorities?

And it certainly has felt like end times ever since November 2024, when the US chose fascism over boring competence.

To a large segment of America, the coming apocalypse is not something to be feared. It is an opportunity to start over, and to live one’s best life, and to shoot off as many guns as you damn well desire. These guys are looking forward to the collapse. 

So always remember: Your dystopia is someone else’s utopia.

Who’s Sorry Now?

Back in 2024, even if you weren’t repulsed at the GOP’s horrifying plan for rounding up dark-skinned individuals (and you should have been), taking just two minutes of serious thought would have informed you that deporting millions of people en masse would require a fascistic approach to civil liberties. 

And yet some people are still surprised. 

For example, a septuagenarian Trump voter in Texas is loudly proclaiming to media outlets that Trump is “destroying families,” which again, is not news to anyone who has been paying even a micron of attention. This white conservative now says he regrets his vote because ICE had the temerity, the gall, and the chutzpah to arrest his fiancé, a Latina who no criminal record.

She has lots of company in ICE detention centers, which are chockablock with innocent people who got nabbed by armed masked men with insecurity issues. But until his girlfriend was handcuffed, this guy was all for stuffing people into vans and shooting unarmed citizens.

The shocker isn’t that people like this exist. The ICE armada is so massive that many shortsighted, easily duped supporters of this policy were bound to get caught up in its jackbooted thuggery. Eventually, authoritarianism comes for everybody.

No, the mystifying aspect is that these buffoons are willing, even eager, to go on camera to simultaneously reveal their selfishness, disdain for humanity, and obliviousness that borders on the delusional or idiotic. Hey, if I had fucked up this badly, I would keep it to myself.

There is also the disturbing truth that thousands of Latino activists have been pointing out the cruelty of ICE’s gestapo tactics, with limited media coverage. But one old white guy shouts, “I got something to say about this,” and everybody listens up.

But speaking of people who should have known better, please note that one-quarter of Latino voters who supported Trump in 2024 now say “they would not vote for him again.”

This is a high percentage of regret, although still far short of the 100% who should apologize on a daily basis for their groveling before white supremacy. 

For those three-quarters of Latino GOP voters who are still MAGA supporters, they might want to listen to the conclusion of political experts who say, “Trump has now passed from being a stubborn narcissist to a cocooned authoritarian.” This phrase refers to “leaders who have become so trapped by their own self-regard, so isolated from the outside world, so imprisoned within their own sense of infallibility that they refuse to consider any arguments or information that conflicts with their beliefs.”

This means that “Trump’s irrationality could create other, even more perilous situations” because “like other authoritarians before him, the president has retreated, irrevocably, behind the walls of his own Forbidden City of the mind—a place where he is the emperor, his judgment is always right, and his commands must always be obeyed.”

So if that regretful Trump voter in Texas is waiting for our cocooned authoritarian of a president to apologize, he will be waiting until approximately the end of time. 

Until then, it’s only going to get worse.

Fault Lines

In the off chance that you are a MAGA supporter reading this, let me assure you of this:

None of the chaos engulfing America is your fault.

Just because you voted for a felonious rapist who is dragging the country toward autocracy while enriching himself and unleashing misery on the entire world, well, you are not to be held responsible for your choice to return a demented old racist to the White House.

How do I know this?

Well, as far back as Trump’s first election, commentors were falling over themselves insisting that liberals created this mess. The general argument was because progressives dislike racist jokes, all the salt-of-the-earth Americans had no option but to embrace fascism. It really was that simple.

This assumption — that millions of decent Americans were pushed into supporting right-wing insanity because of the woke mob— is still a popular viewpoint.

And it’s not just conservatives who are saying that.

Our old friends the moderate Democrats are insisting that Trump never would have won except for that meddling Bernie Sanders. If only the crazy old man had shut up about wealth inequality and oligarchs crushing us, everything would be great.

Just great. Yup.

The latest form of blaming the left for all things Trumpian presupposes that liberals are wrong to protest or advocate for progressive causes because we come across as too self-righteous or shrill. But we are also wrong to appease or normalizeMAGA demands, because that just encourages them to become more extreme.

OK, got it.

What about using humor to point out the absurdity of this disastrous authoritarian regime? No, we shouldn’t joke either, because that undermines how serious the situation is. But don’t be so serious either because of that first point about coming across as self-righteous.

So don’t say anything. But also reach out to MAGA types to educate them because they deserve our total respect no matter how much they would love to punch us in the face. How we reach out without saying anything is unclear to me.

In any case, the important principle is that progressives are always wrong. Whether we’re using facts to support our case, pointing out the consequences of the GOP agenda, or just asking for police to not shoot unarmed citizens, it’s our fault.

MAGA supporters are not responsible for their own actions, or for the often-sadistic behaviors they gleefully embrace.

It’s those darn leftists who keep pushing conservatives to be more extreme.

Of course, it’s strange that this argument doesn’t work the other way. The many excess of Trump (far more egregious and harmful than anything a liberal politician has proposed) are not carted out as an excuse for progressives moving farther left. Apparently, those liberals who are dabbling with democratic socialism are just whiny babies, and by the way, they are making millionaires feel unloved.

Now, it’s true that no other demographic of adults are ever given this sort of free pass on bad behavior. It’s similar to how struggling white men are never told to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and instead are reassured constantly that the nation will do whatever it can for them (while at the same time telling everybody else to fuck off).

But MAGA is special. Because no matter how much they cheer for the destruction of democracy and the establishment of a fascistic theocracy, it’s an understandable reaction to those real villains: college-educated people who advocate for universal healthcare.

Trump supporters simply have no choice.