 | Ivory Bill Woodpecke… on Episode 16: Public Speaki… |
| Ivory Bill Woodpecke… on Episode 16: Public Speaki… |
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| Ivory Bill Woodpecke… on Episode 16: Public Speaki… |
| Ivory Bill Woodpecke… on Episode 16: Public Speaki… |
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| Propertius on Episode 16: Public Speaki… |
| jmac on Episode 16: Public Speaki… |
| Propertius on Episode 16: Public Speaki… |
| Propertius on Episode 16: Public Speaki… |
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Paul Krugman: Conscience of a Liberal
The Confluence
Suburban Guerrilla Ian WelshJeralyn Merritt found this video of John Mellencamp at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It was only 4 years ago that we celebrated our roots. Oh, how the times have changed…
Here’s the original video:
Let’s give a shout out to Etters and York Haven, PA where my sister and brother live. Yeah!!!!
Tell us about your small town.
Filed under: Politics | Tagged: Etters, John Mellencamp, Small Town, York Haven |
Corrente (Lambert) Avedon’s Sideshow
The Confluence 
I’ll go first: The longest time I ever spent in any school system was four years in Ballston Spa, NY, home of Abner Doubleday and the location of The Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper. This small town is located in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains and is fed by natural mineral springs. See that gazebo in the picture over the old iron spring? I used to buy ice cream for my little sister and brother there in the summer just before we walked up Fairground Hill to our house. I learned to ice skate on the flooded and frozen playground of the elementary school. We watched the kayakers race down the Kaydeross creek in the spring and attended Saturday matinees of the New York City Ballet at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in the summer. (nope, no culture there)
Obama: Big Ego, Big Mouth, Big Trouble = Unity Ticket??
I say, “not so sure….”
Tell us about your small town?
Arden, North Carolina
One exit from the Parkway and some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. IMHO!
My daughter went hiking this past weekend to looking glass falls (you can walk behind them).
We love this small town! It’s mostly a BURB of Biltmore Forest. Just beautiful smiling happy people! Polite and personable!
http://www.cityofpt.us/ my small town/hometown
Port Townsend, WA on the Olympic Peninsula…my mother’s hometown to which the family returned when my father retired from the US Army. I was 10. With Fort Worden’s 400 acre Army post dominating the northside and a paper mill on the south side, except for the incredibly beautiful natural setting and a collection of Victorian-era architecture from an early boom, it was unremarkable as small towns go.
Then, mid 50s, the Fort was deactivated and sold and we were just a paper mill town. Grim. Later, the state bought the fort which is now a gorgeous state park and the center of cultural, educational and social activity, transforming the town and the entire area.
Town size doubled in past 50 years…still, fewer than 9000 within city limits but surrounded now by developments of mostly retired folks who volunteer like crazy and make the town function beyond its numbers.
It’s a tourist mecca (Victorian seaport, etc.) but if you plan to move here, bring money. Real estate has skyrocketed and affordable housing the big issue.
Tip of the peninsula, surrounded on 3 sides by saltwater…midway between Seattle and Victoria BC (yes, we take ferries!)
Great town…leans liberal now…boaters’ paradise and bikers/hikers love it too. All the weather you want…4 seasons…snow and hail last week (didn’t stick) but will hit 70 today! Go figure…
Email me if you’re coming over…the coffee’s on and I DO know how to make a martini. (Better bring the olives…I tend to eat them all if the jar’s open, so I’m probably out).
nora@olympus.net
My small town doesn’t really exist anymore. My mother’s parents moved to Marin County, CA in the 1920s to a small fishing village on the bay. And when I was a kid everyone I was related to lived there.
My family lived in Lucas Valley, a tiny cluster of houses between two gigantic hills. In those days it was a very different place than it is now. For one thing, the houses were built to be affordable — but they aren’t exactly that today. For another, it was a mostly Republican town — Marjorie Morganstern (and you can imagine the grief she took for that name) and I were always the only two Democrats in our class.
It was paradise though. We kids had total freedom to wander around the hills and creeks. It was beautiful and safe.
The houses we lived in still exist. But things have totally changed since then. Back then the county was clusters of unsophisticated small towns. They’re nothing like that now.
Small town was Middlesboro KY. My father’s home town and we moved there after he retired from the Army. Not much going on, a few coal mines, a mobile home manufacturing plant and a plant that made particle board.
We left after about 5 years and move to SE Louisiana where my two 1/2 siblings lived.
Mr. Obama doesn’t have a good record on small towns does he? I mean, he took that money from the Pritzker (sp?) family who shut down the Maytag plant in a small town. Guess the folk there got pretty bitter…
Riverdaughter,
Ballston Spa is beautiful. I clicked on the links and they made me want to visit there. Small towns are nice in many ways. One thing that many people forget is that many small towns ARE influenced by big towns. The county that I live in approximately 75% of the residents commute outside the county to work, lots of them to Atlanta, hardly what I would call a “small town”.
Dawnelle,
I have been to Arden. I grew up not to far from there in upstate SC. Very pretty place.
Lots of small towns in my background. I think as you get older you start to appreciate small towns more, or at least I do, than when you are younger. I wanted the city life in my twenties but now that I’m in my fourties small towns don’t seem so “backwards” to me. The quiet is nice. Aw, I guess I’m no longer “cool” or part of the “smart set” for my appreciation of them!
As a kid, I lived in several small towns. I was born in Fargo, North Dakota, which is a city, but still small–about 100,000. After that we lived in Grand Forks, ND; Sheldon, Iowa; Lawrence, Kansas; Athens, Ohio; and Muncie, Indiana, also a city, but only about 90,000 people. We lived in college towns, because my dad was a Professor. I love Boston, but I want to move back to the midwest eventually. I’ve grown tired of the city. I want to retire in a small town.
http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/2008/04/your-turn-bruis.html#comments
BagNewsNotes posts this Village Voice cover of Hillary–and I’m not sure whether to be furious or horrified or disgusted.
I am taken aback, definitely. The image is just off in so many ways–the Chuckie eyes, the jawline just smudged enough to make her hair look a bit like…a beard.
The indications of being hit, but also perhaps giving as good as she got. However, it lacks…humanity?
What were the VV editors thinking?
Breaking: Obama will give a barn breaking speech about “Small Town America” next week. He will lecture us about that sorry part of our living habits.
The pundits are already soiling themselves and have gushingly declared it to be the “greatest speech since The Sermon on the Mount.”
Developing…
MaBlue: Isn’t THAT a relief! Another problem solved via teleprompter.
I really hope you are kidding.
I haven’t been able to pick myself up off the floor with the small town comments as well as the pro-wrenching-moral-choice comments.
I think I feel a bitterness attack coming on – you know I do get those periodically…
Oh, family from Greer, SC and Fayetteville, NC- for many generations. Mom and Dad came to Washington for a Boeing job and I was born here.
My home town (Las Cruces, NM) has had an estimated 16% population increase since 2000. It was even smaller when i was there (6 – 18 y/o). I did spend a few years in a town much smaller, Silver City, NM.
If Obama had a clue, he’d know that most Americans in bad times think along these lines. This wasn’t a gaffe as much as a fundamental misunderstanding of us yokels. Many liberals are always trying to explain why people vote certain ways. Spend some time with them and you might find out, and you’ll probably be surprised. It’s not rocket science.
I was born in Arlington VA and lived my whole live in northern Virginia until a few years ago when we moved to Birmingham AL. Birmingham seems like a small town compared to the D.C. metro area.
I did go to college in Emmitsburg MD and in Shippensburg PA. Emmitsburg was definitely a small town and I loved it. I might have even stayed there if I could have found a job. I loved knowing everybody (and everything about them!) and hanging out at the local bar (not the college bar). I haven’t been back there in years but I remember that town and the people there so fondly.
I’m from a small city in Mississippi, where let’s face it, it ain’t easy being gay (I moved away), and it ain’t easy being a Democrat. My family is still there, all Democrats. And they are all Hillary supporters. They turned out along with a paltry crowd of about one hundred to hear Bill Clinton speak in their home town, just before the Mississippi primary.
If Obama is the nominee, many of them have said they will vote McCain, or not at all, primarily because of Jeremiah Wright’s words about “God Damn America” and his theory that HIV was created by government to eradicate black people. My parents are people who love their gay son, who have taken the time to learn about HIV, and who love America, despite the homophobia and prejudice. They are also people who threatened to leave their church when anti-gay words were uttered at the pulpit (why would Obama not do the same in response to some of the things Rev. Wright said, they wonder).
If Obama is the nominee, I have and will continue to encourage them to vote for him. But his words and attitude make it harder and harder.
One last thing: though they are Southern, my parents are people who the media and some Obama supporters might paint as Archie Bunker types. They are not. They have struggled all their lives to get past the prejudice they were raised with, and I am proud of them.. But they will not be bullied into voting for someone that they do not believe would make the best president, whether that makes them feel “liberal guilt” or not. If they vote for Obama, it will be because I encouraged them to vote for the Democrat, so that at least there will not be an avid homophobe and ant-choice Republican in the White House.
FYI, the Scotsman reports that Carter and Gore will be the ones to pressure Hillary to concede.
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/It39s-Obama-stupid-Carter-and.3976738.jp
Yeah, that’s right, the two white guys are going to muscle in on the woman to quit.
If this happens, I will never vote for a Democrat again.
1st and 2nd grade in Moorhead MN, 30-some-000 souls across the Red River from Fargo. Played in the snow, played in the mud, played in the weeds, played in the leaves, kept our eyes out for wet cement.
Wobegon spoken here. Prairie Home Cemetery is the reputed namesake of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion.
(Wonder how Obama’s remarks register with Keillor, an Obama endorser.)
3rd thru 7th in Williamsport PA, 30,000 souls on the Susquehanna River (West Branch), which is older than the surrounding upthrust and downweathered mountains! Home of Little League Baseball. Once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere. (Now I live in a breeding ground for billionaires.)
Good folks, good fun in forests, fields and streams, climbing trees and daring each other to climb out over the railroad tracks. Still had steam engines running freight in busy season.Ice skating, xmas caroling, AM radio. Square dancing meets rock’n’roll. Boy scout jamborees.
Current developments – an 8-plex will bring first-run movies to town for the first time in years.
I’m going to bore you with an addendum to my comment: the worst thing about Obama’s recent statement and the attitude of his supporters about small-town Democrats, is that these are people who have kept or embraced many progressive values in spite of the prevailing conservatism around them. In states like Mississippi, which are overwhelmingly Republican, perhaps they can be discounted as a matter of bottom-line political calculations (and they know that). But in places like Pennsylvania and in the West, it is political suicide for Obama to make these remarks. It’s as if, while trying to avoid “refighting the fights of the 90s” (paraphrase), he also avoided the lessons of the 80s and 90s.
Politics aside, Obama is discounting some of the most courageous Democrats and progressives. Let’s face it — it’s easy and natural to be a Democrat on the Upper West Side. If a member of the “creative class” even wanted to go to church, they would not have to face doing what my parents did. They would not feel driven to leave the church where their own parents attended, go to another church, encounter the same homophobic opinions there, and return to their only after confronting the preacher about their son’s homosexuality.
I do not believe Hillary Clinton is beyond political calculation — far from it — but I believe she has learned, as well as any driven (and likely ego-driven) politician can, that everyday people are the people to listen to, and that you cannot help them or win their votes unless you respond to them with solutions rather than rhetoric. And, it really doesn’t matter to most people whether a President fights for them out of self-interest, principle, or some mixture of the two, so long as she is fighting for them.
Joel, not boring at all….interesting. your parents are great! how fortunate that they are so supportive.
as I said above, I moved from D.C. to Alabama, and progressive politics are a whole ‘nother ballgame here. the good thing is, progressives are easy to find. they are very vocal – they have to be – and very committed.
yes, of course Hillary is a politician. results are what matter, not motivation. I would think she is a mixture of self-interest and principle, but I don’t actually know that, or need to know it. I just think she will work for the results I’d like to see.
back to your parents, the whole church thing in the south has been amazing to me. the fact that they would buck that system to support you is wonderful. people who haven’t experienced the southern-religion obsession may not understand how incredible that is. I sure wouldn’t have until a couple of years ago.
when I lived in D.C., people *might* ask (but probably wouldn’t) “do you go to a church?”…..down here. it’s “what church do you go to?”
Thanks, kiki. I live in DC and go to church — and that has been a bit of an odyssey for me. The thing is, being a Christian is truly a part of who I am — practicing gay and all — and it is also (apparently) paradoxically what led my parents to accept me, as well as become more and more liberal as they get older.
I understand fully the critiques of religious people, as unthinking or superstitious. And, as long as those views are stated respectfully, I’m not offended.
It’s also ironic that a preacher like Wright should have such an impact on my parents’ views of Obama. I have no doubt that Wright’s expression of his religion, which is in part a product of being an African-America — might make my white, Southern parents less immediately receptive to his views. But it is interesting to note that, in the end, what they cannot accept is not Wright himself, but Obama’s judgment in apparently sticking with him. And, in the end, my parents can get past the “God damn America” anger, but they cannot get past the sheer idiocy and insensitivity to gay people, to claim that HIV is a disease aimed at destroying black people, when it of course wiped out half a generation of gay men.
My parents are not important in themselves, But to me they represent the incredible problems an Obama candidacy would present in the general election.
I have to run, but thanks for answering me. Hope to talk later, Kiki.
I’m from a small town in Maryland, the Appalachian part. Working class area mostly, fairly poor I suppose though I never realized it growing up. Some beautiful historic parts of town, used to be an important transportation center by road/rail when there was still industry up through the rust belt. All the factory jobs are mostly gone now since the 70’s to late 80’s. the mountains are beautiful and I miss them more and more.. not a lot to do for young people (except partying), so it was hard during high school once I realized there was a lot going on elsewhere that seemed so much more cool and interesting. (Thanks, MTV.)
Ha, RonK I didn’t know you were Minnesotan. Half of my immediate family is from rural MN, but Iron Range, around where Bob Dylan grew up before he bailed the heck out of there. Grandfather worked for Minntac in the ore mines his whole life.
Current developments back home, incidentally, are pushing tourism (both historic areas and just spending time in the mountains) and artists moving in to some beautiful loft buildings downtown that went unoccupied for years. lots of studio space. trouble is.. already due to economic hard times.. tourist dollars start to dry up.. some people are having to close down their small businesses now. other major employment opportunities besides minimum wage jobs @ service industry and Walmart and such, would be the local hospital system, and sadly.. the prison industry, which is always growing.
Excerpts of Clinton’s speech in Indiana today. Amazingly on point re Obama’s misstatements and beautifully phrased to transcend various levels of this discussion. Boy, did Hillary nail it in this one. I put this on par with BO’s Speech. By the way, I see Hillary’s comments as the commencement of her campaign to reveal to America what we really are getting in Barack Obama.
I recently read a news story about a new walmart opening somewhere and there were something like 600 jobs available and over 3000 people showed up to apply. walmart isn’t a particularly good employer, and certainly isn’t going to save small towns. I’m of two minds about them – I was kinda boycotting but then realized that where I live, a lot of people can only afford to shop there. I hate what they’ve done to mom & pop stores. I don’t actually know how I feel. I say I boycott but then I go there because they are more affordable. I’m a bad progressive. or maybe just a poor one.
“small” town, Melrose, Massachusetts. 30,000+ in 4 square miles, 10 miles north of Boston w/ access to 3 major highways and public trains. Gas lit main street, glorious victorians, young families mix with spunky seniors. Culturally rich, lovely Melrose.
I grew up in a truly small town of 350 people in northeastern South Dakota. Several of my great-great-grandparents settled the area when they arrived in this country from Norway, and some of my great-grandparents, three of my grandparents, and both of my parents grew up either in the town or in the immediate area. My great-great grandfather Magnus built many of the homes in the town, and my great-great grandfather Thomas built several of the buildings on main street.
It was a wonderful place to grow up. I knew and trusted everyone in the town, and everyone knew and cared about me. I did grow up in the church, and my faith has always been a huge part of my life – not, as Hillary Clinton said, because we were “materially poor”, but because we were “spiritually rich.”
There are few jobs in the area, and the jobs that exist are no good. But my parents wanted my sisters and me to live in the town where they had been raised, and I think we’re better off for it.
(And yes, I and my family support Hillary Clinton.)
I grew up on a farm just outside Rome, PA. It’s not so much a town as a cluster of houses along the road with a Dandy Mini Mart in the middle. Lived in Phoenix for 3 years after graduating HS in 1986, then came back to Bradford County and I’ve been here ever since.
I’ve been living right on the NY border in Sayre PA – pop. 5,585 – for the past 12 years. Wonderful little town! Friendly people and beautiful scenery in the hills surrounding us. During the summer, we have free concerts in the park every Wednesday evening. Just bring a blanket!