Worst of 2019 #9: Rural rout

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm

[‘Tis the season for lazy editorial decisions! So here’s my method for this series: I’m going to repeat all or part of something I wrote over the past year, and then recap and reassess in that valedictory top-ten way readers are supposed to enjoy and I hope you actually will. ]

From Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, Oct. 1, 2019, “Contagion of the Cities”:

Regular readers will be familiar with the conservative Contagion of the Cities shtick, which goes back to the bad old Son of Sam days of crime and disorder but persists even as American cities thrive and prosper. There is, for example, the Republican talking point about how cities like San Francisco are coated with bum shit, and the one about how everyone is fleeing New York, which explains why it’s so easy to get a cheap apartment there.

The latest variation (actually a revival) is about the perverse habit liberal cities have acquired of making sure its humblest workers get an almost-living wage. Here is Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, riffing off a New York Post story about how New York’s raising of the minimum wage so that tipped employees can get $15 an hour has caused restaurant jobs to “evaporate”...

In that edition I (or rather statistics) showed Shaw to be full of shit, which is usually pretty easy to do when conservatives try the old “New York is Dying” shtick. You can see plenty of these at alicublog, usually under the headline (inspired by an old Abe Burrows gag) “How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm After They’ve Seen The Farm?” Well, that’s a little mean, but no meaner and certainly much less destructive than the fantasies conservatives use to drum up ancient tribal hatreds against what Andrew Sullivan once called the “decadent enclaves” of the blue cities, because their non-urban constituents are eager to believe whatever scary Death Wish scenario of city life is sold to them.

Big cities have their problems, God knows, but they remain the economic mainspring of this country, as well as centers of culture. And as the $15 minimum wage battle showed, they’re also more inclined to help citizens who are short on privilege. Yes, my sorehead socialist friends, they are not as enlightened as we their citizens would like them to be, but they are getting better and furthermore, you only ever see people on the left pushing them to improve — conservatives bring up poverty, crime, and homelessness only as insincere junior-high “blar you say you care about black people but what about Chicago” taunts. It’s certainly not because they give a shit. They’d sooner murder a homeless person and bury him out by the rendering plant than spend any civic resources to relieve his misery that could go instead to a Republican crony’s no-bid private-prison contract.

Not only do they believe, as Jazz Shaw pretended to, that the cities are dying — they actually want them to die. If you don’t believe it, see how your suburban relations and country cousins talk about anyone in the cities who isn’t a blood relative.

And after the poison they’ve been pumped full of, you can see why they would feel that way. They see the big cities sopping up the economic gravy while they have to subsist on earnings from the Walmart (which, hey! Just upped sticks and said “Thanks for the tax abatement, suckers”) and whatever they can shake down black people for in fines and legal fees.

It just ain’t fair, they think — city folk are godless and harbor immigrants and let hobos sleep on the sidewalk, and they prosper, while the good, vicious Christians of Bumfuck just scrape by. And that’s why Jazz Shaw’s bullshit about how the city people are cutting their own throats by being over-generous to people they should (by the morality of the American Middle) ruthlessly exploit goes over so well. If I was running that place, thinks Jonathan Plainfellow, I’d work ‘em to death and get rich, the way God intended! Why, it’s like his morality was turned upside down.

That’s why they love Trump’s scary stories about how all big cities are covered in feces and needles and rats full of immigrants looking for white folks to murder. That’s why during the impeachment hearings Congressional Republicans, when they weren’t ranting and raving, put up a picture of the Democratic leaders with “NY”and “CA” over their heads with the caption “Coastal Impeachment Squad” underneath. Their followers find it easy to believe that people from blue states with big cities like New York and San Francisco are the cause of all the nation’s problems — because if they weren’t, on whom else could they blame them? The Sam Brownbacks who reliably run their governments into the ground? The corporations that strip their assets and leave their asses hanging? Or, God forbid, themselves?