I grew up in the Midwest, and my father, who went to the University of Kentucky, was fraternity brothers with Ben Gish, and so growing up it was a name that I heard often when he’d tell stories from that time. I remember always being aware that a friend of my father had been framed for burning their family newspaper.
I live in New York City, now, and one evening found myself sitting at a bar in Brooklyn where my roommate, the bartender, was closing around 3am (at the time I worked a very late shift at the 24 hour Apple Store). The normal patrons had all gone, and myself, my roommate, and another man I’d never met were locked in having a last couple of beers while my roommate closed up. I had a long conversation with the man I hadn’t met before that eventually turned to where we grew up. It turned out that this man was Ray Gish (also mentioned in this article), the younger brother of Ben. Ray even recognized my father’s name, because Ben had mentioned him before.
Ray invited my roommate (whom he already knew well) and I over to his place for a last drink, and I vividly remember him playing “Street Hassle” by Lou Reed on his record player. It was the first time I’d ever heard that song.
Anyway—wildest coincidence that has ever happened to me. I see and say howdy to Ray every now and then when I find myself in that part of Brooklyn—one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.
This is barely an hour from me. Thank you for this. I'm moved by the dedication to free information, especially by my own countrymen in this special place. I think I'll buy a subscription.
It makes my day whenever eastern Kentucky content shows up on here. It's such a contrast to life in the valley and it seems like our homestate might be setup well for remote work going forward, or is that just the eternal optimist in me?
I grew up in Lexington, KY and Sharps Chapel, TN, but spent the last eighteen years in CA. I'm hoping to move back in the next couple of years. My parents are still out there. I hope to still be welcome.
You understand, you grew up here. As long as you don't try to change anything, I'll personally welcome you with open arms. I'm protective of the culture, not xenophobic.
I have read this sentiment elsewhere and I’m genuinely curious about what it is that the imports try to change. I’m a California native and have lived here most of my life. Any time I have thoughts of moving somewhere else, it’s usually because I’m drawn to the culture. So the idea of moving somewhere only to try turning it into the place I moved from just seems odd to me.
I know people move for other reasons, CoL being the most obvious one in this context. Even then I would expect people to choose a place where they would more easily assimilate rather than trying to change the existing culture.
Lastly, California is far from being a monoculture. Even in the famously liberal areas, there is still a great diversity of culture and ideology in my experience. Drive two hours in any direction from those areas and you may as well be in rural anywhere USA. I feel like the California hate is rooted in stereotypes that don’t apply to a majority of the population here.
I've watched many Californians move here over the past few years, and I've noticed a few things:
There's the obvious, stereotypival Californians. Whiny, entitled, generally bothersome people. Not a lot of them move here.
I know a couple families from conservative/rural Cali, and they're not too bad, although they just have a weird attitude. It's like their priorities are out of order compared to their surroundings. The air is different on the west coast, might be a part of it.
The biggest problem is the imports who move here because it's so beautiful and cheap (true), but they just want to change a few things. We don't want your progressive policies, gun regulation, or any of the other hundred nitpicks you have. Some of them may be fair ideas, but the reason we don't have them is partly to keep people like them out, and partly because they stem from the way of thinking that goes with living here; We take care of our own business, we take care of our families and churches, we don't idealize ambition, and we don't like changing things. If you're willing to actively adopt that mindset, please come here. If you aren't, stay the hell out.
If only California was as protective of its values against the many transplants who try and change its culture, the paradox of tolerance, I suppose. Sigh
If a trans person (or other minority) cannot go around your town unharassed, I don't understand why you'd want to keep that value instead of valuing humans as humans and treating them as such.
Why the fuck would I, being bisexual, move to such a place - where I can't be open about basic things? Why would I move somewhere that friends didn't have that option?
They wouldn't be harassed. They would simply feel estranged, because there's a comprehension barrier between the people here and the people who've made sexual identity their raison d'être.
Just because you wouldn't see it doesn't mean that they wouldn't be harassed. Harassment happens everywhere, but it is more in conservative areas that cling to outdated, selectively applied religious "morals".
Estrangement and shunning is a type of abuse and has the same sort of effects as actual harassment. They happen at the same time. Do you think this is an OK alternative?
Trans isn't a sexual identity, btw. Might try learning from people better spoken than I am - or even better, from someone actually trans.
> Estrangement and shunning is a type of abuse and has the same sort of effects as actual harassment. They happen at the same time. Do you think this is an OK alternative?
Yes. Freedom of association is perfectly acceptable, even if it makes people unhappy.
> Trans isn't a sexual identity, btw.
I'd disagree. It's strongly related to sexuality. I have also had two good friends who were trans, and both killed themselves, one due to depression from realizing they could never be their old self again, the other in a psychotic episode. I'm not anti-trans-people, I'm anti trans-as-the-first-solution for dysphoric disorders. Most people in my area simply don't get good vibes and therefore don't engage.
I work a few weekends a year at a manual labor job in a rural-bordering area on the east coast. I have heard at least a dozen different co-workers talking about wanting to execute the gays and trans people. And not once or twice, I'm talking just about every single time there's time to talk. There will be days I hear someone bring up "the trans" as the punchline of a joke every single hour of an eight hour day. I'm sure you aren't the one making death threats, but I guarantee you the people living there receive them frequently.
These people are consuming Fox News like it's a daily religious rite, and are convinced their troubles are caused by gay or trans people. This lives rent free in their heads, it's sometimes obviously all they think about. I'd guess it's probably 80% of the people I work with. Of course they're also extremely racist, and will make similar comments about anyone not lily white.
It's pretty exhausting, I love the work especially because it's so different from my normal jobs, but holy hell being around such toxic rage and hate really makes it not worth it.
The idea that you’d face any kind of threat to life and limb in a small town is an ignorant narcissistic meme.
I didn't say that. I said unharassed. I've personally been the victim of these things in small towns. I've personally been ostracized. Bisexual, athiest, and not really caring if my lover's skin tone matched my own.
Trans folk have it worse than I ever have.
If people in your town aren't pushing back against anti-trans laws and things like that, it isn't good enough.
And those things you mention? Yeah, meth is a big issue in rural America. Before production got moved to cartels, I've personally seen more than two buildings that were destroyed because of a home meth lab. Farmers used to find them quite often. Violence is everywhere, and I never said it was perfect. It still shouldn't prevent your area from accepting folks as they are and treating them well.
It isn't asking for a pedestal, just wanting to be treated like other folks.
Males should use a male bathroom if they decide to gender bathrooms.
Women should use the appropriate facilities.
Trans men are men, trans women are women.
Any person with bad intent can just walk into the other restroom right now. Trans folks aren't those people.
I also don't check genitals of folks in the toilet. I simply don't care as long as my stall is private. People shouldn't look between the cracks in the stalls present in the US to check, either.
The best solution is unisex toilets with proper, private stalls.
Many people, even those who are well aware that transwomen are men, are somewhat willing to turn a blind eye in bathrooms because, as you noted in your comment, the stalls are enclosed.
But other spaces are much more contentious. Perhaps a less abstract question gets to the point better: do you believe that male-sexed people have the right to undress and shower in a communal changing room with teenage girls?
Even progressives who believe that transwomen are women are usually quite uncomfortable giving an affirmative answer to that one.
> Perhaps a less abstract question gets to the point better: do you believe that male-sexed people have the right to undress and shower in a communal changing room with teenage girls?
Should older lesbians have the right to do the same with teenage girls? If you could identify lesbians - would you ban them from those spaces because they may get titillated or molest the kids?
The lingering puritanism is fascinating to witness, even as the US becomes less religious
I don't think teenagers should be forced to undress in a room with others, regardless of age. Everyone should be offered a private place to change.
Your questions are trying to bait folks and are purposefully getting people's genders wrong. It is clear from your language that you don't understand and haven't tried.
Luckily, your culture will die eventually through your youths anyway. It won't be this generation. It may not be the next. But there will come a day where everything you value within your own culture is gone. The accents will fade and the values will shift. It's the really beautiful part about the constant and inevitable internationalization of culture. It'll happen to Hawaii, it'll happen to Kentucky.
It may be sped along by transplants, making more money than Kentucky is willing to pay its citizens, rich in comparison after moving to cheaper areas, but, almost insidiously, the vast majority will just come from children deciding to join the rest of the world, in the same way entire languages have died, let alone American subcultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...
A really beautiful part of the process is how little you can actually change it. Regardless of whatever laws you push, regardless of any cultural loathing you have, Californication is inevitable. Your universities have thousands of international students, but if you get rid of them, children will still follow the trends of the rest of the world.
The most you can do is cross your fingers and hope that the inevitable doesn't lead to cultural "natives" being outpriced and left behind.
I'm not from California and I've never lived there; this isn't coming from a position of feeling scorned over not being welcome; I have spent less than a week in total of my life outside of the borders of states bordering Kentucky and Kentucky itself.
In person, it's unlikely you would see me as particularly distinct from your culture. I spent the day stitching wounds in myself and others from an accident that occurred while performing physical labor outdoors. Half of the people I talk to on a daily basis are tied intimately to their respective churches, one of them a pastor. I'm not particularly liberal. I frequently have dinner with neighbors, as conservative as they come.
It's just incredibly funny to see the death rattle of a culture; "stay the hell out" doesn't matter when your descendants a few steps down the line will be indistinguishable from Californians without a single Californian needing to enter your state at all. It's happening to the Indians, who had the same attitude and much more cultural distinction; it's happening to you.
This is a pretty tired set of barbs to throw, but if we die out, we'll die out as us, not as some sad imitation of culture that isn't ours.
The part that really makes me sad is your bubbling hatred. Who takes joy in a declining culture?
Either way, it's a pendulum, things change, but I'm not worried. The kids here aren't too bad, especially in the areas without cell service. Some of them leave, many don't, and many are more interested in their roots than their parents. Sorry to burst your bubble.
For context, me and my wife are from here, left upon adulthood because we felt opportunities calling, then realized that life outside our homeland wasn't very nice, so we moved back and got a farm.
My sister-in law did the same thing, and several other friends are in the process of doing exactly the same. It's not like existing here is difficult, but if you were raised in it, it's addictive. I'm unconcerned for my future and the future of my children. To quote a song that was written to make fun of people like us:
Your world view decries a youthful attitude to the lessons of history. The cycles of history ran before 1950...
The pendulum between attitudes to morales and conservatism does not always go in one, extinction-laden direction. Just look at the continuous rise and fall of conservative Christian views and norms, which has typically risen in times of scarcity and danger, and fallen with abundance. In the cycle of history, like Rome, wealth tends to grow as morales have reduced in their significance for managing society, only for the pendulum to be reset entirely by a populist figure or revolutionary, or through reforms that forcibly redistribute and tax wealth (as in the history of Rome). There is no single human force more powerful than fear meeting order, which is another description for the typical seed of conservatism.
A great example is Christianity in the UK: There were periods of persecution (hence many groups in the US now extinct in the UK), and periods of lax morales, largely driven by the economy and success of the local and world economy. Contrast that with Ireland which has similar religious dynamics except religion remains culturally important to the current older generation, which is about 3-6 generations from the famine caused by the UK there and which reinforced religion.
In chaos and lack of order, people turn to religion(faith that is unprovable). It can be a person, a deity, a system. This can happen in the west again. It happened many times in Rome with their sweeping reforms. The idea that culture in a place like Kentucky, which in its fundamental conservative essence, has much in common with countries spanning centuries, and in practice, implements a type of society with more secure order, ending up dominated by culture from the most progressive aspects of the US would follow a trend, but only in the short term of history in the last 70 years. Events that could easily reset the conservatism clock 30-100 years, according to history, include major wars, civil war, or inequality reaching levels where chaos enters the fray. Read about Tiberius, Crassus, Caesar and Gaius in Rome. Germany became more conservative out of a false fear, described in horrible terms of disease. But whatever the cause and speaker, it illustrates how a society losing order, whether through falling economically behind their peers or with a minority against whom to direct the anger of inequality, often turns to inequality. People in the grip of fear don't see logic. In the 1920s, Germany was amongst the more liberal of countries in many ways, ironically.
You should really read Will Durant - Lessons of History and the chapters on the rise and fall of civilisations, cultural transformations and how inequality almost always leads to significant (and generally conservative) reform to order. Maybe you will disagree with the examples, find those omitted, or you will find you can't comprehend how redistributing wealth often leads to a more conservative society obsessed with norms and order - but history is history. I suggest if you really care about the country and citizens of this country remaining safe, you would like to investigate how civilisations fail and end up slaughtering internally, and aim to avoid that fate for your country.
Actually, my view is extremely influenced by history prior to 1950. You cite Nazi Germany, but Nazi Germany was actually a new occurrence. It wasn't from tradition. Hitler was a modern politician, and fascism a new movement. It lends credence to my point, it doesn't take away. The culture that replaced the Nazis, too, was not representative of the culture prior to the Nazi government.
Languages have died prior to 1950. Internationalization comes for all.
Even the Catholic Ireland you cite is a relatively new concept, part of the internationalization of the region. Christianity has a rich history there, but it's only a relatively recent happening that they cared about Papal supremacy; it wasn't a great deal of generations ago that the Church of Ireland was by far the largest, and prior to that, papal supremacy never got that much of a foothold in the region. Presently? 69% of people in the Republic of Ireland believe in God. It's a plurality, but the trend is still down.
Cultures die; any view other than this is ahistorical. Prior to 1950, much of the dialects of French within North America were dead, or close enough that it didn't matter. Quebec is left, but Quebec is considered an oddity. There are a few dialects that are hanging on by a single speaker, but is that really a living culture? Those will be gone in a generation.
Wales was oppressed similarly to Ireland, and Welsh is on the path to dying, too; reactionary pushback won't save it. Try and save the language all you want; it will die. Scots will die, too, despite the pride stereotypical to the region. It's basically already dead; its Wikipedia was written in a fake pidgin of Scots for years, and it took years for anyone to notice.
The failing of civilizations and internal slaughter is inevitable. I agree with that. There's no avoiding it. I think it's funny when people try to avoid it. They will lose, inevitably. My position is without regard for the quality of culture, without concern for what culture is going into, but rather, with full enthusiasm over seeing things turn over, and the reactionary, exclusionary attitudes that come when cultures are near death.
A subculture that will survive for another century isn't filled with people trying to keep it small, it wins via numerical superiority. There's a reason that Latin is the basis of most language in most continents. Californication, in a century, may be known as a Mandarin Shift, or Hindufication. California isn't eternal, but tiny cultures being subsumed by larger ones is.
Certain conservative cultures will stay around, at least for a while. It's likely they'll get bigger, even. Geographically-insular ones rooted in exclusion rather than proselytizing won't, though.
I'm glad we are closer to a shared understanding, but loss of culture isn't what I was adamant against. Just that assuming Kentucky will only move to a California like culture is not sensible. The cycles of history illustrate how fear and chaos typically lead to a desire for order that many would consider right wing, regardless of prior politics.
I agree culture must die over time; any finite container with new input experiences that. But abstract culture doesn't, it cycles. Like the level of social order/norms, freedom and hierarchy in culture.
I'm glad you took up the Germany bit, as I wanted to compare there: What were the two most leftwards countries in the 1920s?
The attempt at democracy in Germany, and Russias liberalisation (e.g. the sexual liberalisation well preceding that in the USA with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_of_water_theory)
But today, one country is considered to the left - Germany - and one to the right - Russia?
How can that be if history moves in one direction?
Can it be the present condition or culture of politics has less influence in time than economics and cycles, and trends and ways of human behaviour that have been observed and commented on for thousands of years, like by Will Durant? Why did the Roman empire and Christian nations swing from liberal to conservative views largely with no truly extreme points in long term political mechanisms (relatively speaking) until in both cases their end of dominance, in the Christian case, birth control?
I simply suggest the abstract nature of culture, such as fear, social norms and order as reactions to recent generations experiences are far greater predictors of future political culture than time alone. And one usually sees societies over longer time scale cycle between the strongest norms and conservative attitude, to more liberal ones in times of abundance, and then back in teams of need for order.
You may find that if the population starved, like in history, a strongly social norm based low tolerance society would emerge rapidly. Think about the 90s in Russia or the dole issues. The enforced norms could be left or right wing, but by the lessons of history, they will be enforced absolutely, in a conservative, order-based or dictator-like manner. Freedom and freedom from norms tends to fall away in such times. I think you see part of this wider abstract view, from your last two paragraphs, but viewing history as shifts rather than cycles containing within them eras, is a choice you are making to fit your own vision.
Between the country that will throw you in jail for posting funny memes comparing the president to a cartoon bear, and the one where the newspapers are literally running headlines asking if the president has significant memory issues [1], I wonder which has more press freedom.
I've lived in China for the past 5+ years. The news here almost feels like instructions on how to feel and what to consider important. A lot of American media is click bait nonsense but the genuine article exists. This article is proof of that.
> I have to draw parallels between US and China here. Who honestly has a more free media
That's easy: the US.
It's not even close, unless you're one of those tankies that blinds themselves to anything bad about nominally socialist countries.
Easy litmus test: critiques of the current government. It's incredibly easy to find very harsh, even incendiary critiques of the current president/administration in the US. Whoever is president will be absolutely lambasted, ridiculed, etc. by different press outlets depending on who's in power. How much can you say that for Chinese press?
Or just look at controversial events like the Tiananmen Square massacre. Huge, recent-ish history that's suppressed and censored by the Chinese government for media and social platforms. Anyone can talk about the US doing horrible shit on Facebook, Reddit, etc all day long and nothing happens.
You could look at the RSF's Press Freedom Index if you want. The US should be doing better than it is at 71 points, but China is at...23: https://rsf.org/en/index
And the US' weaknesses in the index are mostly not about government censorship, but about media company consolidation or rises in partisanship. I wish it was doing better of course, it certainly has room to improve, but comparing it to China of all places as if it's a real question who's better on the issue is completely laughable.
Positive news = propaganda or state sponsored spin that shed a favorable light on things that suit the ruling class like “our struggles are our strength” not “man saves puppy” necessarily (though possible if fit into the political strategy).
The news here (US) is military propaganda. It's not that sophisticated, but people eat it up. The key to piercing it is knowing a few things about the targeted country.
I live in New York City, now, and one evening found myself sitting at a bar in Brooklyn where my roommate, the bartender, was closing around 3am (at the time I worked a very late shift at the 24 hour Apple Store). The normal patrons had all gone, and myself, my roommate, and another man I’d never met were locked in having a last couple of beers while my roommate closed up. I had a long conversation with the man I hadn’t met before that eventually turned to where we grew up. It turned out that this man was Ray Gish (also mentioned in this article), the younger brother of Ben. Ray even recognized my father’s name, because Ben had mentioned him before.
Ray invited my roommate (whom he already knew well) and I over to his place for a last drink, and I vividly remember him playing “Street Hassle” by Lou Reed on his record player. It was the first time I’d ever heard that song.
Anyway—wildest coincidence that has ever happened to me. I see and say howdy to Ray every now and then when I find myself in that part of Brooklyn—one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.