I haven't been posting due to being on the road. I went on a cross-country journey to my Nebraska homeland, where we wrapped in a trip with my parents to the Black Hills. I wrote about it in a Substack post that I am pretty proud of, and would like you all to take a look. I used my own hometown to discuss the realities of these places, not the mythical versions we encounter in pop culture.
I muse a lot about politics, and I will offer an insight here that I did not include in the original article due to its growing length. While I was there, I noticed that Wal-Mart was one of the few crowded public places. I also noticed how so many people had a worldview shaped by Fox News, and I see a connection. Small-town America used to be much more varied and diverse. Small towns in different regions could be wildly different from each other. While each town is different, national institutions like Wal-Mart and Fox have created a kind of national small-town culture. This new culture has replaced the small-c conservatism of my town with the usual MAGA stuff. That terrible Jason Aldean song speaks to the self-narrative of this newly nation-wide small-town culture.
As I write about in my piece, however, there's a lot more than this going on in my hometown. Give it a read!
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