Living in a small, white, conservative town, you have put your finger on it. They think "their way of life" was perfect. 1950's perfect, which was, be "normal" like us or get out. It's still like that. Change is hard.
It boils down to this: when you are used to having a position of privilege over certain other people, akin to standing on a hill above them, and then they start to enjoy the same rights that you do, and their position starts to rise towards yours, you think that you are actually sinking (because you’re a dumb fuck) and losing something, and your wee brain explodes.
"It’s not hard to imagine that if the same “trick” were to be played on the Left, we’d probably just have had some silly fun with it if we wanted to engage or just ignored it until things went back to normal. It would hardly be the end of the world or proof that people can only get along with other people who are exactly like them."
This is literally where Bronies came from: the old Penny Arcade forums merging the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic thread with a nerdcore thread for an April Fools gag wound up with a huge surge of new fans of the show.
My friend who was there at the time reminds me that the Brony Merge was between the MLP:FiM and Team Fortress 2 threads, for the sake of historical accuracy
That small-town demand for conformity is vicious. I knew a guy, a pretty big bigwig in a Small American Town. He owned the local hardware store. After he got married, his father-in-law set him up in the biz, and he turned out to be very good at it.
One of the conditions of both marriage and business opportunity was that he had to change his last name. It was a little too ethnic for someone who was going to marry his little princess.
I won’t allow it. We have too many small towns already. I will go to the pawnshop and buy two boomboxes and blast old school rap on high, all day long. I will get audiotapes of all the banned books and blast them too. I will buy all the Jesus Saves signs, build a billboard with them, stick it in my yard, and spray paint rainbows across it. I’ll get a crowdfund going to purchase taco trucks to place as a strategic map for a culturally diverse neighborhood. All the foreign food smells will be intentionally blown outward all day long. Basically, I will plaster my region with all the urban things I love and that I know they hate. I will make them truly understand what is “urban sprawl” when it’s done well.
The problem is that there’s no way for immigrants from Asia or Central America or Haiti to assimilate. Not in any way that would satisfy MAGAts. They could all convert to evangelical Protestantism and give up all of their cultural foods and traditions and just celebrate white Jesus Christmas and it still wouldn’t be enough. Because they all have the “wrong” skin tone and facial features.
That’s why they don’t give a shit that some of the people scooped out in the immigration dragnets were just makeup artists or soccer players or even just fathers.
Their existence here “poisons the blood” of der Vaterland.
Once when I was in my local small-town diner enjoying a good ol' fashioned meat loaf dinner, the radio was tuned to the local shitty Froggy "country" music station. A song started playing, sung by some Nashville "flavor of the week" bemoaning that some local woman had left their beloved small town and found herself a boyfriend that drove a sports car instead of a pickup truck and wore nice clothes instead of the same pair of dirty jeans every day. And now when she comes back she orders a salad instead of a burger. The guy was whining that he bets her new boyfriend doesn't take her fishing, or to that nice meadow they used to go to. All she does is enjoy herself in the big city.
Nowhere in that song was there even a hint of irony. It was just some small town yokel whining that some girl he may have dated in high school (or maybe just had a crush on, hard to tell) had the nerve to leave and make a better life for herself without his approval.
Some of these people were never really taught to envision true equality. Now that Trump has attacked education, they never will. And White privilege dictates they don’t have to.
Nailed it. Small American towns are all about conformity, big old ugly fish in tiny ponds, and utter paranoia over anyone who ain’t from around here, are yuh.
I grew up in a town that had a huge celebration when it put up a second stoplight. About 20% to 30% of longtime residents lived in a state akin to Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” with all the good stuff in the past and shitty stuff in the present with worse stuff in the future.
Suppose you won something—a prize, a grant, two one-way tickets to Dublin—and you wanted to go out to celebrate.
Your options included: a pizza joint full of teenagers; an ice cream shop full of teenagers; two bars, one with hard liquor and full of men and women of depleted dreams, and one serving beer and wine and full of dying retirees with depleted dreams; and a motel restaurant where the chicken-fried steak was your best bet.
Failing that, you were left with a high school sportsball game (where the floors beneath the bleachers were forever slippery with tears and other bodily fluids). The movie theater had turned into used retail, and nobody could remember when or why the drive-in shut down.
A lot people, particularly under the age of 30, instead opted for that long, twisty, two-lane road leading out of town, and they never came back.
It was a horrible fucking way to live and/or die, and a lot of people were doing both simultaneously, clinging desperately to an America that never existed.
We still don't have our first stoplight! There's a flashing yellow at the school crosswalk, and a flashing red one for the general ped xing. I don't know why the school crossing only rates a yellow light, but in today's USAmerica, it makes sense.
Living in a small, white, conservative town, you have put your finger on it. They think "their way of life" was perfect. 1950's perfect, which was, be "normal" like us or get out. It's still like that. Change is hard.
Outstanding explanation for the MAGA Cult Membership. Now, how to break the spell…
It boils down to this: when you are used to having a position of privilege over certain other people, akin to standing on a hill above them, and then they start to enjoy the same rights that you do, and their position starts to rise towards yours, you think that you are actually sinking (because you’re a dumb fuck) and losing something, and your wee brain explodes.
"It’s not hard to imagine that if the same “trick” were to be played on the Left, we’d probably just have had some silly fun with it if we wanted to engage or just ignored it until things went back to normal. It would hardly be the end of the world or proof that people can only get along with other people who are exactly like them."
This is literally where Bronies came from: the old Penny Arcade forums merging the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic thread with a nerdcore thread for an April Fools gag wound up with a huge surge of new fans of the show.
My friend who was there at the time reminds me that the Brony Merge was between the MLP:FiM and Team Fortress 2 threads, for the sake of historical accuracy
That small-town demand for conformity is vicious. I knew a guy, a pretty big bigwig in a Small American Town. He owned the local hardware store. After he got married, his father-in-law set him up in the biz, and he turned out to be very good at it.
One of the conditions of both marriage and business opportunity was that he had to change his last name. It was a little too ethnic for someone who was going to marry his little princess.
He changed his name.
The joke was a dig at DOGE - Department of 4chan Efficiency shut down boards. Nothing to do with immigration: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1jp4a9q/4chans_dogeinspired_april_fools_prank_leaves/
Wasn't the reason they said it was, but the reason they are saying it was now?
I’d add that in many parts of rural white America, there has been an uptick in immigration with native Spanish speakers and others moving in.
They’re mad because their small towns have some diversity, and they see their old world of conformity slipping.
I won’t allow it. We have too many small towns already. I will go to the pawnshop and buy two boomboxes and blast old school rap on high, all day long. I will get audiotapes of all the banned books and blast them too. I will buy all the Jesus Saves signs, build a billboard with them, stick it in my yard, and spray paint rainbows across it. I’ll get a crowdfund going to purchase taco trucks to place as a strategic map for a culturally diverse neighborhood. All the foreign food smells will be intentionally blown outward all day long. Basically, I will plaster my region with all the urban things I love and that I know they hate. I will make them truly understand what is “urban sprawl” when it’s done well.
The problem is that there’s no way for immigrants from Asia or Central America or Haiti to assimilate. Not in any way that would satisfy MAGAts. They could all convert to evangelical Protestantism and give up all of their cultural foods and traditions and just celebrate white Jesus Christmas and it still wouldn’t be enough. Because they all have the “wrong” skin tone and facial features.
That’s why they don’t give a shit that some of the people scooped out in the immigration dragnets were just makeup artists or soccer players or even just fathers.
Their existence here “poisons the blood” of der Vaterland.
fascinating insights, well written as usual. thanks for this.
Once when I was in my local small-town diner enjoying a good ol' fashioned meat loaf dinner, the radio was tuned to the local shitty Froggy "country" music station. A song started playing, sung by some Nashville "flavor of the week" bemoaning that some local woman had left their beloved small town and found herself a boyfriend that drove a sports car instead of a pickup truck and wore nice clothes instead of the same pair of dirty jeans every day. And now when she comes back she orders a salad instead of a burger. The guy was whining that he bets her new boyfriend doesn't take her fishing, or to that nice meadow they used to go to. All she does is enjoy herself in the big city.
Nowhere in that song was there even a hint of irony. It was just some small town yokel whining that some girl he may have dated in high school (or maybe just had a crush on, hard to tell) had the nerve to leave and make a better life for herself without his approval.
Some of these people were never really taught to envision true equality. Now that Trump has attacked education, they never will. And White privilege dictates they don’t have to.
Nailed it. Small American towns are all about conformity, big old ugly fish in tiny ponds, and utter paranoia over anyone who ain’t from around here, are yuh.
I grew up in a town that had a huge celebration when it put up a second stoplight. About 20% to 30% of longtime residents lived in a state akin to Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” with all the good stuff in the past and shitty stuff in the present with worse stuff in the future.
Suppose you won something—a prize, a grant, two one-way tickets to Dublin—and you wanted to go out to celebrate.
Your options included: a pizza joint full of teenagers; an ice cream shop full of teenagers; two bars, one with hard liquor and full of men and women of depleted dreams, and one serving beer and wine and full of dying retirees with depleted dreams; and a motel restaurant where the chicken-fried steak was your best bet.
Failing that, you were left with a high school sportsball game (where the floors beneath the bleachers were forever slippery with tears and other bodily fluids). The movie theater had turned into used retail, and nobody could remember when or why the drive-in shut down.
A lot people, particularly under the age of 30, instead opted for that long, twisty, two-lane road leading out of town, and they never came back.
It was a horrible fucking way to live and/or die, and a lot of people were doing both simultaneously, clinging desperately to an America that never existed.
We still don't have our first stoplight! There's a flashing yellow at the school crosswalk, and a flashing red one for the general ped xing. I don't know why the school crossing only rates a yellow light, but in today's USAmerica, it makes sense.
🤡😎
Immigrants are to trumpsters what Jews were to Hitler. Sadly, it tends to work.
I'm waiting for the chance to as one of those "we need to have our own homogeneous northern European culture" people if they have ever had a taco.
of course they have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yrSCoEsmqA