The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.  Karl Marx

Neon signs, motels, express highways bringing death or disorder or smog – no, sir, you can have them. And modern-type buildings without any feeling of life in them – you can have all that junk too. I like a town that has peace and dignity and beauty, where you can walk down the street and breathe deep and shout, “Man! Am I glad I live here!”  Bill Zacha

Neither the “idiocy of rural life” nor the “peace and dignity and beauty” gives a complete picture of what it’s really like to live in a small town. Let me tell you a story.

I grew up in Arbuckle,. a small Sacramento Valley town in Northern California. Less than a thousand people at the time. My parents were divorced. I lived with my mother and older brother and our wire haired terrier Torchy. Our house was across the street from the grammar school where there were basketball hoops, swings, a high jump pit filled with sawdust, a broad jump pit filled with sand and a dirt running track. From a big shade tree in our back yard I could see the whole town spread out below if I climbed up near the top.

There weren’t many stores and shops but there were enough. There was McFarland’s 5 & dime store that sold an eclectic mix of candy and toys and various kitchen and home items, Stinson drugstore owned by LaMotte Stinson who invented the Lemon Mist flavor sold at his soda fountain, Dawley’s Shell gas station with a lunch counter that offered ice cream, sandwiches, hamburgers and fries.

I worked at the local grocery store from the seventh grade through high school. Outside town farmers grew rice, barley, alfalfa, safflower, sugar beets, apricots, almonds and other crops. I did some farm work but I was not cut out to be a farmer.

It was a great place to grow up. There was even a local movie theater but it was converted to a skating rink by the time I reached high school. My father owned the Arbuckle movie theater for a short time when he lived in Arbuckle but that was long before I was born. There was a swimming pool at the high school with diving boards, a golf course designed by LaMotte Stinson (the drug store guy) nestled in the foothills, churches, bars and various halls where dances and other local events were held. Picnics, fishing and boating along the Sacramento River, street dances, and barn parties in and around town, deer and pheasant hunting were a few popular pastimes.

After high school I left for college in the San Francisco Bay Area. I lived for eight years in Palo Alto and Berkeley. After college I settled in Mendocino California, a very different small town from the one I grew up in. I’ve lived there ever since. For a few years I kept a studio apartment in San Francisco and spent some weekends and holidays there to get my city fix.

I guess you could say I’ve looked at life from both sides now like Joni Mitchell but it’s not the illusions I recall. It’s the illusions I want to dispel. As someone drawn to the pristine nature of country living I also value the freedom and energy of urban cosmopolitanism. There’s an upside and downside to both.

As I understand it, the saying “city air makes you free” refers to the medieval custom that “if you could evade your manor lord for a year within the city walls, you were free.” However, a more modern interpretation is that the plurality of cultures in a modern city allows you to disassociate from your family and insular clan to form new bonds transcending ethnicity and narrow beliefs. Today it is exactly this freedom that is under attack by the MAGA right. They give every indication of wanting to re-associate with family and insular clan, purify ethnicity and return to the narrow beliefs of a fantasied past. On the other hand there is a warped view by some urban liberal elites that rural America is “a basket of deplorables” (Hillary Clinton) who “get bitter” because of economic hardship and job losses and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or [express] anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” (Barack Obama).

In some ways I understand  and even sympathize with the desire to withdraw from a complicated world especially as I’ve grown old. I feel a greater need for solitude and the quiet peace of nature. But, there is a danger in this, a danger of descending into a narcissistic bubble. It’s the same danger posed by social media and AI and a cyber world that sorts all of us, rural and urban combined, into bastions of groupthink . Turn on, tune in and drop out is not a path to cooperation or a means of fostering a healthy democracy.

Some of the best writing on how and why we hold illusions about what it’s like to live in a small town has been done by Sarah Smarsh (Bone of the Bone and Heartland). For example:

If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself – say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonald’s bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy – then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.

In one of her essays (Poor Teeth) in Bone of the Bone she explains that poor teeth, rather than being a problem of personal responsibility as they are often judged, are more commonly a failure of policy:

Poor teeth, I knew, beget not just shame but more poorness: people with bad teeth have a harder time getting jobs and other opportunities. People without jobs are poor. Poor people can’t access dentistry—and so goes the cycle.

[I can’t help but mention here Valeria Luiselli’s The Story Of My Teeth. The book is off topic but is a great and funny read and provides a whole new perspective on teeth, personality, perception and more.]

In Dangerous Idiots Smarsh dispels many of the myths we hold about small town folk, the prejudice of classism. Some examples: small town America elected Trump, it didn’t; poor whites are more racist, xenophobic and misogynistic than the rest of us, they aren’t; small town folk are less savvy than the rest of us, they’re actually smarter about things that impact them.

Suburbanization increased steadily after WWII. Before World War II, just 13% of Americans lived in suburbs. By 2010, however, suburbia was home to more than half of the U.S. population. Cities are places where you are more likely to meet strangers unless you isolate inside your immediate neighborhood. Suburban residents are more likely to self select by homogeneous groups. To some extent this is also true of small towns but it is not a small town problem, it is a choice problem known to economists for quite some time. Thomas Schelling won a Nobel Prize in part for a theory that explained why neighborhoods naturally become segregated. Daniel McFadden, one of my U. C. Berkeley professors, along with James Heckman won a Nobel Prize for additional research on self selection. Self selected segregation seems to be fairly common in both urban and rural areas given human nature. Hanging out with your own is not unique to small towns.

There are so many quotable passages in Bone of the Bone that it’s hard to stop. For example, from The Butcher Shed:

From there, near the bottom of the proverbial social ladder—where women drove tractors and people of all races lived in single-wide trailers—I began to see through the many false narratives of supremacy that govern our world. That men are better than women. That White people are better than everyone else. That the rich are better than the poor. Even, yes, that human beings are better than animals … But in general, I observed more environmentally conscious behaviors among the rural working poor than in other socioeconomic spaces I’ve inhabited.

Today an estimated 99 percent of the meat in the United States comes from factory farms, barbaric places that leverage the selfish, amoral paradigm of human supremacy for immense capitalist gain. Industrialized agriculture has made meat, eggs, milk, leather, cheese, wool, and other animal goods readily, cheaply available to the modern consumer but at a terrible cost—both to the animals, who endure savage cruelty, and to the low-wage laborers, many of whom are immigrants of color, who suffer injuries to body and spirit.

In The Shelterbelt she writes about how her home state Kansans voted down antiabortion legislation even though they supported Trump in the same election. In For My Lover she writes: There are places in this country, though—poor places, Black and Brown places—where the criminal justice system is often immoral, and the accused, incarcerated, or fleeing are less the perpetrators of wrongs than the victims of structural inequality. Or in In Defense Of Populism she points out accurately that populism comes in many forms:  at the very least, journalists and commentators should provide an ideological qualifier when tossing “populism” around: “right-wing populist,” “progressive populist.” The more precise word for describing leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump, though, is not “populist” but “demagogue.” The latter is by definition disingenuous, exploiting social fissures, manipulating media, and misleading the electorate in pursuit of selfish gain. A demagogue may use populist strategies to win support but has little or no concern for the masses.

Rural life is not all roses: Knowing firsthand the punishing labor of agricultural life, the particular dangers of an isolated location, and the social disadvantages of being rural, I am not one to sentimentalize country life. While bountiful with pleasures, it is not a happy pop-country song about a pickup truck and a young woman in cutoff shorts. It is a reality, rather, where a pickup truck slides off loose gravel and kills the teenage girl driving it, as happened to my high school classmate.

While there are real benefits to small town life, it isn’t for everyone. Jonathan Reed makes the positive case for small towns in AcreageLife (The Truth About Small Town Life): When you live in a small town or move to one, a few things about small town life become apparent. Abundant wildlife, peace and quiet, fresh air, and a slower pace will lower your blood pressure. You can see stars at night. People share garden produce in the summer, and plow each other’s driveways in the winter. Add in quick access to hunting and fishing and views that city people envy (and visit), and it’s clear that small town life is maybe the only life worth living.

Much of what Reed says in his article  is correct but as someone who has lived in two small towns his entire life my take is that small towns are like people, every one is different, individual with a particular history, location and culture.

Let me go back to my personal story. I’ve lived most of my Iife in two California small towns: Arbuckle and Mendocino. In some ways they are polar opposites. Arbuckle is a valley farm town, Mendocino, once a lumber and fishing village, is now primarily a tourist town. But, there are similarities. Both are predominantly white and Hispanic, the latter group more recent and working class. Many young people move away after high school for college, jobs or more excitement.

I’ve spent over fifty years in Mendocino, most of my adult life. For the first fifteen I ran a popular local restaurant with a coffee shop, dining room and bar with live entertainment. Loggers, fishermen, artists, shopkeepers, school bus drivers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, farmers, dope growers, vagrants, inn keepers, shop employees, tourists, trust fund babies, musicians, journalists, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, contractors, preachers, postal workers, tradesmen, and even a few schemers and loafers sat side by side and carried on civil although sometimes heated conversations. Conservative or liberal, gay or straight, rich or poor, black or brown or white or local Pomo, Christian or Buddhist or Wicca or not, it didn’t matter. They all drank coffee, ate eggs and hotcakes, cheeseburgers and homemade pie, steak sandwiches and sometimes oysters, sweetbreads, and Chicken Kiev. We sold fifty or more daily specials at lunch. It was a special time and while there have been changes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose as the saying goes.

After the restaurant I spent over thirty years as an investment adviser. I had an eclectic group of clients very much like the list of restaurant customers listed above, in some cases the very same people.

During my years in Mendocino I served on several government and nonprofit boards where I was able to meet new people that I did not encounter in my business ventures. Some have become good friends. Small towns, especially today, offer more diversity and wisdom than they get credit for. Do they offer all the benefits and opportunities of the cities or the suburbs? No, but neither do they have big city problems. They have their own problems. There is no utopia out there where “livin’ is easy fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high.” Nor would I want there to be. That would be too boring.

Living in a small town is both the same and different than living any place else. I’m reminded of a joke I heard about two carpenters, Tony and Luigi, who had lunch together. Luigi opened his lunch pail and complained: “Oh no! Not tuna fish again. I hate tuna fish!” Tony looked at Luigi and said: “Luigi, for goodness sake, tell your wife not to make tuna fish sandwiches anymore.” Luigi, perplexed, responded: “But, I make my own sandwiches.”

[For a somewhat different view of small towns take a look at Romanticizing Rural Life Does Not Improve Rural Life by Len Epp. Mr. Epp harkens back to an earlier age when small towns were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” in the manner described by Thomas Hobbes. He is not altogether wrong but my personal experience since the 1950s has been as I described above with the qualification that I provided: small towns are like people, every one is different, individual with a particular history, location and culture.]