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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“That was a landscape that used to be much more integrated…and it’s totally broken now,” he said.\u00a0 ” The result is, I often make the comment that Iowa’s two chief products are rural poverty and crystal meth.<\/p>\n
People think I’m joking, but there are towns where that’s not a joke at all.\u00a0 It’s the absolute, hardcore truth.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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:\u00a0 Stephen King’s doorstop of a page-turner called “Under the Dome.”<\/p>\n
King is a far less considered and thoughtful a writer than Klinkenborg, by any estimation.\u00a0 But in a peculiar way, their subject matter is the same.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
King also plays around with the very real Babbitry and small-mindedness that can derail or dead-end small towns.<\/p>\n
(Sometimes this stuff goes to far even for trash summer reading.\u00a0 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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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