Under the Dome: Life in our small towns
On this morning’s news show — and again this afternoon on All Before Five — you can hear my conversation with Verlyn Klinkenborg, the New York Times’ leading writer on rural affairs and agriculture policy.
He’s a fascinating guy, soft-spoken but full of deeply-considered views on every aspect of small town life and in possession of one of the biggest megaphones in journalism.
He spoke eloquently about the sorrow of seeing his own native small towns, in Iowa, decimated by changes in the farm economy and the wider culture.
“That was a landscape that used to be much more integrated…and it’s totally broken now,” he said. ” The result is, I often make the comment that Iowa’s two chief products are rural poverty and crystal meth.
People think I’m joking, but there are towns where that’s not a joke at all. It’s the absolute, hardcore truth.”
At risk of cheapening Klinkenborg’s observation, I couldn’t help thinking of a book that I’ve been reading this summer in my spare time: Stephen King’s doorstop of a page-turner called “Under the Dome.”
King is a far less considered and thoughtful a writer than Klinkenborg, by any estimation. But in a peculiar way, their subject matter is the same.
From his home in Maine, King has written for decades about rural life, about the blessings and horrors (literal and figurative) of small town existence.
In “Under the Dome” he posits a scenario where a small Maine village is somehow trapped under a huge and mysterious dome, cut off from the influences and resources of Greater America.
What’s more, the major Black Hat of the piece is a meth dealer and the apocalyptic turn of the novel (there is always an apocalyptic turn in a King novel) involves a meth lab.
King also plays around with the very real Babbitry and small-mindedness that can derail or dead-end small towns.
(Sometimes this stuff goes to far even for trash summer reading. There is a minstrel-show, Barney Fife quality to some of his rural caricatures: the evil small-towns sheriffs, the wicked used car dealers, and the homicidal high school jocks.)
Still, it’s an irony that most urban Americans who have spent any time learning about the intricacies and challenges of modern small town life have probably done so not through Klinkenborg’s articles, but through King’s potboilers.
And both are wrestling, at least in part, with the ways that our very different culture co-exists with (and distances itself from) the vast cities and suburbs glowing on the horizon.
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Another great short story you should read is “The Dome” by Steven Millhauser.
It is great story I heard Alec Baldwin reading it on selected shorts a few years ago.
I don’t think it has much to do with small town life but it is a must read. It only takes about 20 minutes.
Or listen to it here:
http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/2010/may/09/
Going slightly off subject – How about the view of rural south in HBO’s True Blood? It’s hard to tell who is the dumbest citizen in any given week. Great fun if you don’t have a problem with sex, blood and general goofiness.
And let’s not forget Deliverance the movie for some really scary backwoods shenanigans.
Okay, since we’re doing the book show I have 2 picks on rural life.
Driftless, by David Rhodes about extraordinary ordinary-ness in rural Wisconsin.
World Made by Hand, by James Howard Kunstler, Saratoga area based writer about post-Apocalyptic distopia/utopia in Washington County, NY.
Brian, your last line shows the disconnect between the rural culture and the urban culture. I don’t want or care to see “the vast cities and suburbs glowing on the horizon.” You speak of them as though they are somehow preferable to our rural landscape, in fact most of the NCPR writers seem to have a fascination for “night life” since I see it mentioned often. At any rate, from my perspective those “the vast cities and suburbs glowing on the horizon.” are the problem, not the answer. No bonds to the land, no appreciation of the earth beyond the eco-Gia inspired cultish worship of “nature” and anything “Green”. They visit, they drive through and absorb “nature” at 60 mph from the comfort of the leather interior of the Lexus and complain wildly when they smell whey or liquid manure and dodge the horse droppings in the road with manic intensity, as though that little bit of poop would soil their souls. They hike the mountains by day, swearing at the black flies and protecting themselves from the little buggers and the sun itself by coating their bodies with poisons and hurrying back to the resort and it’s familiar comfort, all while giving lip service to the wonders of nature and secretly damning nature for making them sweat and bleed. They return to their concrete and asphalt and take comfort in the normalcy of the steel and glass, the elevators and escalators that whisk them up and down, the malls and sportsplex, the clubs and bars, the grocery where food is magically produced in sterile containers that never mooed, clucked or sucked nutrition from cow manure and dead bugs. This is civilization after all, this is normal.
No, there’s no magic in the city and suburbs. Just people living their lives of quiet desperation, paying homage to what they think nature is by buying a Prius to supplement the Escalade and Beemer, turning the AC up to avoid “offending” anyone with smell of themselves and learning all they need to know about rural life from “Deliverance”, “Witness” and “The Dukes of Hazard”.
Sad, truly sad.