From driftglass:
Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.
As I have mentioned before, the Beltway media’s hot new genre is something I call Magic Ruralism.
…just as Thrilling Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly were in the business of cranking out hard-boiled crime genre fiction for the titillation of their readers, so have The New York Times and the Washington Post gone into the business of cranking out True Tales Of Rust-Belt Trump Murricans! for the titillation of their readers.
Of course, for those of us who actually live in Middle America and who have been actively yelling for decades about the monster factory the GOP has been building, this development is as pernicious as it was predictable. Because rich city folks live a million social and economic miles from the actual Middle America and because their lives are substantially untouched in any material way by the Republican madness abroad in the land, they are free to savor hair-raising tales (from today’s WaPo) —
White, and in the minority
She speaks English. Her co-workers don’t. Inside a rural chicken plant, whites struggle to fit in.
— of rural Murrican pity and terror (from yesterday’s NYT) —
How to Talk to a Racist
White liberals, you’re doing it all wrong.
— from a safe distance.
The relevance of the rural chicken plant story to general trends and experiences in the US is probably minimal because most rural whites don’t work alone among large groups of strictly Spanish-speaking Latinos, but I still enjoyed it. It’s a story of white decline and marginalization and how they deal with it.
I detest the romanticization of rural America and the attacks on liberal/urban elitism as if conservative/rural America doesn’t routinely exhibit any, but it is still important to bear in mind that these people do have different backgrounds, experiences, and concerns, not all of which can be reduced to bigotry and religious ignorance. There is much that non-rural people take for granted in their lives that is only possible because of where they live.