What Just Happened

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2020, books, Charles Finch, COVID-19, politics, What Just Happened

“What just happened?” is a response that I think many millions of people can identify with. Over the past half-decade, I’ve greeted the evening news with variations on that phrase day after day, as events, statements, mob scenes, and bizarre behavior seemed to tumble out daily, each one more insane than the last.

What Just Happened is also the title of a book I’ve been reading lately, an interesting effort to capture that craziness in real time, a book in the form of journal entries from the beginning of the COVID pandemic to early 2021.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to relive 2020, a year that undoubtedly marked one of the low points of American history. A deadly virus came to the country and millions of people both in the government and in private life tried to pretend it wasn’t a threat. Video recordings of police officers killing black people in a variety of sketchy circumstances became an almost weekly occurrence. A presidential election was held, in which the person who lost by nearly eight million votes declared without evidence that the election had been stolen and (shortly after the new year) urged a mob to storm the Capitol during the certification of the outcome.

But I found myself drawn in to this book. Its raw accounts of the panic and anxiety he felt as the disease swept ashore in the early part of the year reminded me of my own. His horrified description of watching the George Floyd killing on TV, over and over again, brought back my own reactions. Even the parts I couldn’t personally connect to had interest. Charles Finch, the author, lives in Los Angeles, a city I’ve never felt particularly involved with. But his depictions of people’s pandemic responses, which like everyone’s were both highly individual and yet predictably patterned, had a universal feel.

Not that the book is objective, or tries to be. It’s a personal record, with all the personal obsessions, concerns, anxieties (lots of anxieties), and moments of victory that such a record demands. But as long as you read it with that understanding — that it’s not trying to be a comprehensive account, but rather a single individual’s record of a year that revealed much that is dark and troubling about America — it’s a compelling document.

Even after finishing the book, I still don’t get what he hears in Taylor Swift’s music that’s so great, but whatever. I’ll take his word for it.

Back to ‘Hillbilly’

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Appalachia, documentary, film, hillbilly, politics

I last wrote about the concept of a ‘hillbilly’ five years ago, an eternity in Internet time, but the viewing of a sensitive and thoughtful documentary on the subject, available on Hulu, returns the topic to my mind. Sally Rubin and Ashley York’s film looks mainly at eastern Kentucky, with a few segments in West Virginia, but also broadens out to include a wider examination of the stigmatization of rural people everywhere.

Most provoking for me was the segment that showed popular comedians, one after the other, using the “hillbilly” stereotype as fodder for cheap laughs. Not to mention the famous Hillary Clinton “deplorables” comment, which pretty much sealed her fate with a lot of rural voters. I found it instructive to listen to that comment today, when we can hear it in retrospect and recognize just what a condescending, self-congratulatory remark it was, as compared with 2016, when Clinton supporters felt compelled to downplay how tone-deaf it was during the heat of the campaign.

If progressive activists and politicians want to win back rural voters — and let’s not forget, the entire progressive movement began as a rural movement — they need to re-learn how to listen to those voters and not stigmatize them as backward losers who couldn’t get out of rural America like their smarter counterparts who moved to the cities and suburbs.

Oh and by the way, here’s an image from the other movie entitled “Hillbilly” that came out last year:

Yeah, I’d say we have a long way to go in the struggle to avoid rural stereotyping.

That Second Cross-Missouri Trail

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Columbia Daily Tribune, conservation, Conservation Department, Conservation Federation of Missouri, legislature, Missouri, politics, Rock Island Trail, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Nice piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this morning about the prospects for a second cross-Missouri trail.

It’s easy to see from the Post’s map that this proposed trail would have much less traffic than the Katy. It doesn’t connect or run near major population centers, as the Katy does. So a nay-sayer might complain about the cost-to-people-served ratio.

But the role of state parks is not always to serve the largest possible number. The map also tells us that this trail would give a much more Ozarks-flavored experience than the Katy; it travels through rougher and more forested territory, and thus would appeal more to the backpack-and-tent crowd than the winery-and-B&B types. So it would have fewer hikers and bikers. So what? Is popularity the only value for a park?

Park advocates (including myself, sometimes) have become habituated to using economic arguments to justify them. But the logical trap to that argument is that people who are swayed by economic arguments can always find a more profitable use for parkland. A recent op-ed in the Columbia Daily Tribune from the head of the Conservation Federation of Missouri argued against a proposed bill in the legislature that would allow nonresident landowners to obtain free hunting licenses. His criticism focused on the cost to the Conservation Department – about $500,000 – and included a list of dire consequences if that money were lost. But seriously, $500,000 in a department whose annual budget is nearing $200 million is not much of an argument. I agree that letting nonresident landowners get free hunting licenses is a bad idea, but not just because of the cost. It’s a bad idea because it perverts the original intent of the resident landowner exception, which was to make sure that farmers and other rural residents could hunt on their own property without too many government-imposed hoops to jump through. It’s a bad idea because it opens the door to abuses, with distant landowners finding off-the-books ways to profit from those free licenses. And it’s a bad idea because it’s yet another legislative run at the independence of the Conservation Department. As with the Rock Island Trail park, the value of an independent Conservation Department can’t be measured in dollars and cents. In fact, measuring the accomplishments of government in dollars and cents is the opposite of the point. Government is not supposed to act like a business, where dollar value is the highest priority. Government is supposed to act in the public interest, broadly defined, and serving the widest variety of citizens falls into that category as far as I’m concerned.

Great parks, like great schools and great highways, are valuable on their own merits, not on what they yield economically. And the proposed Rock Island Trail would be a great park.

More Parks

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Ava, Branson, Bryant Creek, Eleven Point, Ozarks Symposium, politics, state parks

So the Missouri Governor’s Office has announced the creation of three more state parks in the Ozarks: Ozark Mountain, about a thousand acres northwest of Branson; Bryant Creek, almost three thousand acres in the deep forest southeast of Ava; and Eleven Point, more than four thousand acres in Oregon County, near Alton.

I’d heard of the Eleven Point acquisition already, and in fact I spoke about it (and the Echo Bluff State Park acquisition) at the most recent Ozark Studies Symposium. The local officials who opposed acquiring the Eleven Point land were, in my opinion, coming more from a political position than one focused on the long-term benefit for their county; as any county official in the Ozarks can tell you, parks draw tourists, and tourists spend money, with the added sales tax revenue more than making up for the lost property tax revenue. But you can bet that there will be a fresh chorus of opposition after this announcement.

Part of it will come from the timing. The announcement has an in-your-face quality to it, given that the term-limited governor will leave office next month. His successor didn’t win office based on policy proposals; his main argument for election was that he used to be a Navy SEAL. But his general tenor was of the small-government variety, and it’s hard to imagine him authorizing the aggressive acquisition of new parkland for the state.

The other part of the criticism will come from the source of the money. As the governor’s press release puts it with convenient vagueness, “Money for the purchases came from settlements reached with mining companies that had operated in the state.” More precisely, that money came from settlements that were supposed to mitigate the environmental damage caused by lead smelting operations in the southeast part of the state. Although the use of that money for these purchases is probably legal in the strictest sense, it’s stretching the definition of environmental mitigation about as far as it can be stretched to include the purchase of some scrubland north of Branson. Representatives from the Lead Belt regions will complain, and rightly so, that the money was supposed to be used in their area.

Still, it’s worth remembering that the Missouri state park system is just about the best in the country. Legislators who gripe that “we can’t take care of the ones we’ve got already” (I can hear it now) should remember that they are the ones who cause that lack of funding by their own decisions and party agendas. Although the details of this particular announcement make me sigh for the days when lawmakers from both parties would work together on a decision that was advantageous to the state overall, I have to recognize that we are not living in such times. I hope that a generation from now, people will take delight in these parks and leave the bickering over how they came into being for the footnotes of the historians.