"Will It Play in Peoria?"

"She checks out Mozart while she does Tae Bo 
Reminds me that there's room to grow"

Train - Drops of Jupiter


I got a haircut today, and the shop was full of chatter as usual. I will never understand why trimming a bit of excess keratin is presumed to entail so much conversation (or why "just shorten it" apparently sounds like Sanskrit algebra to hairdressers and requires endless explanation and details, but that's a whole other topic.) Anyhoo, one of my fellow victims a few seats away was commenting on this latest little pandemic China has so thoughtfully provided (they really do manufacture everything these days) and complaining "we all out here's payin' for it" concerning the preventive measures being put in place in large cities.
Relax.
This isn't yet another commentary about COVID-19, or about hairstyling. I take some pride in generally being neither topical nor stylish. His phrasing "out here" amused me because despite its quasi-rural trappings, our abode happens to abide very near the center of the United States of America.

It seems one of America's odder oddities that it lacks a true cultural core. Unlike most countries which (at least in the modern age) spread outward from some socioeconomic trendsetting population center surrounded by provinces and provincial attitudes, the U.S. has its various capitals split along both coasts, framing between them a continually provincial "flyover country" dotted by only a few cities cosmopolitan enough to boast a respectable art or natural history museum. Instead of diffusing outward, America's provincialism sinks inward and condenses, seething into a slurry of watered-down beer and sugared-up meat. While geographic and cultural gradations don't necessarily coincide, maybe this uninterrupted stream of unconsciousness at least partly explains why the backwood ignorants of 48 different states feel a closer kinship to each other than to their nearest cultural centers. And, people in this "out here" at the core indeed feel left out and lash out against the increasingly alien others at their periphery. Bill Maher ran a "new rule" segment last year commenting on the tech sector's need to invest in the cultural development of the nation's forgotten provinces, because the alternative is increased cultural, legal and physical vandalism by its abandoned relatives.

There's a problem with that idea. It reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with an online acquaintance who tried countering my anti-Midwest rhetoric by reminding me that many of the creative minds in New York or Los Angeles were born and raised in small midwestern towns. At the time I failed to voice the correct retort: "yeah, and the point is they left." Cultural centers become such by the accumulation of intellect(s), and for any future intellects who wish to develop, the solution is to move to the place which can provide intellectual interaction, furthering the shift. I've been appalled over the past couple of decades to hear of my birthplace's anti-intellectual backslide into primitive superstition, wondering how my own generation could degenerate so badly as to build new churches instead of turning the old ones into astronomic observatories or gastronomic dispensaries, or really, anything other than monuments to charlatanism. Then it hit me: here I am, an atheist born there... and I'm not there. I'm here. I left.

Still that doesn't quite describe the process, because small provincial towns (anywhere in the world, not just the U.S.) put a great deal of active effort into driving out any intelligent, creative individuals from their midst, cleansing themselves of the infection of mental superiority. Bill Maher wants tech companies to bring some class and culture to Podunk, but Podunk doesn't want class and culture. It wants to be paid both money and compliments for remaining the same cultureless vacuum it was a century prior. In a small town, to espouse an appreciation for any pursuit (be it Wagnerian opera or LARPing or meditation) other than the handful ratified by the lowest common denominator of mass appeal is, much like Aristides, to sign one's own ostrakon for the perceived crime of superlativeness. For a company to move its headquarters to Podunk doesn't just mean its owners and investors might take an irrelevant hit to their profit margin. You're asking dozens or hundreds of educated, urbane individuals to relocate to a place where if they're not actively shunned and harassed, their only acceptable interests will be reduced to church rallies, football rallies and rally beeg truhcks. Neophiles leave Podunk in the first place because it leaves no room for creativity. Their return will not usher in a golden age, except inasmuch as pitchforks and torches might be made of gold.

Moreover, there is no action without reaction. Even if one were to succeed in deliberately migrating modernity, this could only be achieved by impoverishing its source. The majority of the vermin are simply not capable of advancing. Drag all the musicians out of Seattle and Seattle's left with nothing but occasional banjo duels. How bountiful a crop do you think your educational system has managed to harvest that you assume suffices to seed the continent?

Chaff, dross, jetsam, dregs.
Humanity.