Every now and then, in some culture war argument, somebody will point out that despite what Red America says it believes in, rates of social dysfunction — divorce, out of wedlock childbearing, etc. — are higher in Red America than in Blue America. Typically this is seen as an example of Red-American hypocrisy.

In my post earlier this morning on country music and conservatism, the really excellent comments thread produced the following observation by Edward Hamilton. I thought it was so insightful I wanted to break it out:

That idea, that the music is aspirational — either by critiquing personal behavior with confessional language reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets, or by presenting a vision of an ideal world that seems more like Christian apocalyptic visions of a post-parousia utopia — makes a lot of sense of why poor whites are so willing to be “irrational” in their values, embracing value systems that don’t resemble their actual lifestyle. They’re aspirational rather than practical because that’s the message they absorb from immersion in their artistic medium. If rap music purports to say “That’s how I am, that’s how society is, and we just have to accept it”, then country music says “That’s how I am, and often it’s ugly, but this is how I wish I could be”.

Poor white voters are bound by a strong sense of the teleological. Marriage “ought to be” this sort of thing. Families “ought to work” in this way. That’s an element of most religious traditions, and country music is transmitting that concept of teleology even for underclass whites who are disconnecting from religious participation, as a sort of folk catechesis.

Angelina Stanford:

We disconnect ourselves from everything and everyone who gives our lives meaning and then suffer the modern (or postmodern) affliction of isolation and alienation.

The church has responded to this peculiar modern affliction by emphasizing the need for Christian community.  But all too often that means Christians looking at the map, trying to find a Christian community to move to instead of trying to build one right where they are.

As a classical educator, I strive to instill in my students a love of the old ways. Now I’m also trying to nurture a love for the old places.  Instead of trying to inspire them to change the world, I now try to encourage them to tend their own gardens, to change their neighborhoods and communities.

Rather than talk about when they are going to graduate and go off to college (as if the leaving is the thing to look forward to); I talk about the return.  When they will buy houses and start their families right in this community.  When they will be the next crop of church and civic leaders. When they will continue the work of building God’s kingdom that their parents have begun. When their own children will both reap the benefits of the community we have built and expand it far beyond what we could imagine.

And they get really excited. And they want to stay. They want to change the world by changing their own communities.

My dad told me the other day that he wanted me to be on the board of the Starhill Cemetery Association. “We’re getting too damn old to be doing this,” he said, speaking of himself and his friends on the board. “It’s time for you young folks to get involved.”

So I went to a meeting of the board the other night, and saw several guys my age, including one I’d grown up with. I thought, Wow, it’s on us now. We’re the keepers of the community’s graves.

Here’s a neat story about how a group of artistic types in search of cheap housing and workspace are reviving abandoned parts of a small Mississippi town. Excerpt:

“All through Mississippi there are these beautiful little towns,” Mr. Ownby said, “and too many of them, sadly, are empty storefronts and decaying housing. A few of them, like Water Valley, have had a revival because of a good idea or a few good ideas. Artists moving in is one option.”

Mr. Howley, a former history teacher and shrimp boat captain, and his wife, Annette Trefzer, a professor of American literature at the University of Mississippi, arrived in 2002. They are the third owners of their 1906 house, which sits on two acres, has four fireplaces and a wraparound porch and cost $80,000. When they opened an art gallery and artists’ collective on Main Street in 2008 — called, winningly, Bozarts Gallery — there were 18 empty storefronts.

Now there are six, but even that figure belies a healthier reality, Mr. Howley said. Two of those six buildings have recently been purchased and restored, and are awaiting tenants. It is worth remembering that during the same period, the rest of the country has been mired in a recession. Water Valley’s stories are running counter to the national narrative.

More:

Mr. Williams, 80, said later that he had lived in Water Valley for 57 years. He described himself as an avid cheerleader for Ms. Fussell and her sisters on Main Street, and an expert in the ecosystem of small-town businesses, having run a clothing store and an insurance agency through the “Walmarting of America,” as he put it.

“I think right now in Water Valley, it’s the greatest opportunity since I moved here,” he said with gusto. “If I was younger, I’d be buying property. These young girls, they’ve got spunk, they’re going to make it.”

He added: “So I was at Coulter’s art opening. She sold 15 of those framed hair pieces. This is unheard-of to me. My wife even bought one. These girls, they are jumping on the tide, they are adjusting, finding a niche, they’re opening eyes. Even a month ago, if you had told me my wife would have bought a framed hair piece at an art gallery, I would have thought you were crazy.”

A dozen or so years ago, a woman opened a small coffee shop in downtown St. Francisville. I noticed it on one of my visits home, thought it was great, but figured it was probably not going to make it. People here don’t go to coffee shops. Today, that shop, Bird Man, is a social hub in the town. It moved to a bigger space, and does a great breakfast business. Everybody goes — young people, old people, everybody. People seem so glad to have a place like this. So you never know.

I almost never listen to country music, and when I do, it’s usually country music that’s so far outside the mainstream it has nothing to do with anything going on today (e.g., a week or two ago, I listened to Willie Nelson’s “Red Headed Stranger” album, from 1975). I tell you this to point out that I know nothing about contemporary country music, and don’t have an opinion about any of what you’re about to read. But it sounds really interesting to me, and I want to put it out there for you readers who do listen to and enjoy country, to see what you think. This gave me new insight into why my late sister and I never saw eye to eye. More on which later. Here we go.

Will Wilkinson wrote an essay about country music and the culture war. Excerpt:

In the car, I listen to country music. Country has an ideology. Not to say country has a position on abortion, exactly. But country music, taken as a whole, has a position on life, taken as a whole. Small towns. Dirt roads. Love at first sight. Hot-blooded kids havin’ a good ol’ time. Gettin’ hitched. America! Raisin’ up ruddy-cheeked scamps who you will surely one day worry are having too good a hot-blooded time. Showing up for Church. Venturing confused into the big wide world only to come back to Alabama forever since there ain’t a damn single thing out there in the Orient or Paris, France what compares to that spot by the river under the trembling willows where first you kissed the girl you’ve known in your heart since second grade is the only girl you would ever truly love. Fishin’! How grandpa, who fought in two wars, worked three jobs, raised four kids, and never once complained, can’t hardly wait to join grandma up in heaven, cuz life just ain’t no good without her delicious pies.

Last night, on my way to fetch bok choy, I heard Collin Raye’s classic “One Boy, One Girl,” a song that takes the already suffocating sentimentality of the FM-country weltanschauung and turns it up to fourteen. The overwhelming force of this song’s manufactured emotion led me unexpectedly to a conjecture about conservative psychology and the stakes of the “culture wars.”

When I read that first paragraph, I felt instinctively defensive, because the tone of that writing is massively condescending. But I had to admit that this description, however snotty, is an accurate description of the way my sister Ruthie saw the world, and how lots of folks where I live see the world. I bristle at the snotty tone, because I know how good and true these people are, and I don’t like people like Will Wilkinson talking down to them. You might feel the same way, and if you do, I encourage you to keep reading Wilkinson’s piece, because there are some interesting insights into how and why country music appeals to many conservatives. It’s something that rings very, very true to me, based on my experience with my sister, who was a big country music fan, and though entirely unpolitical, one of the most profoundly conservative people I’ve ever known. More after the jump.

Wilkinson’s essay then draws on scientific research exploring the different psychologies of self-identified liberals and conservatives. He points out that generally speaking, liberals are the sorts of people who are more open to different kinds of experiences than are conservatives — a point that seems intuitively true. And Wilkinson — who is, if you don’t know, a libertarian — points to other research showing that country music listeners tend to be culturally conservative. What’s the connection between the ideological stance of country music, as he describes it, and this psychology? Wilkinson cites that story about rural Washington, Okla., that I wrote about last week (“Sad Town Lacks Vibrancy”), in particular a quote from a local who says he wants to preserve the town as it is for his children. Here’s Wilkinson’s commentary on this:

But why would you want your kids to grow up with the same way of life as you and your grandparents? My best guess (and let me stress guess) is that those low in openness depend emotionally on a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible. What high-openness liberals feel as mere nostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. [Emphasis mine — RD] If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. [Emphasis mine — RD] And what kind of monster would want that?

Country music is a bulwark against cultural change, a reminder that “what you see is what you get,” a means of keeping the charge of enchantment in “the little things” that make up the texture of the every day, and a way of literally broadcasting the emotional and cultural centrality of the conventional big-ticket experiences that make a life a life.

I think he’s on to something here, and not just about country music. Conservatives may not be able to articulate why they are against gay marriage, so it gets written off as mere bigotry (because if you can’t explain it, then it must be prejudice, right?). And obviously a lot of it no doubt is just flat-out hatred of homosexuals. But I think Wilkinson’s essay gets closer to the emotional and psychological truth of the matter. To make a major life milestone like marriage into a contingent event is to undermine one’s sense of cultural solidity and unity. Liberals tend to be fine with that sort of thing, because they are more open to it. Conservatives, however, don’t like it, for reasons UVA’s Jon Haidt discusses at length in an essay well worth your time. 

Here’s a conjecture from me. One the big mysteries I was hoping to solve in doing this book is why my sister was so defensive about me. The best answer I’ve been able to learn in interview with  people who knew her was a sense that by moving away, I was breaking faith with the family, and our way of life. The way of life Wilkinson describes in his snide first graf — that’s how it is here. That’s what Ruthie loved. It celebrates the values of the people in my culture. I never liked country music, at least not mainstream Nashville country. If Wilkinson’s conjecture is correct, the fact that I was raised here and moved away and built a successful life, rather than doing the expected thing and marrying and building a house and raising a family in the community where we grew up might have been experienced to Ruthie as a profound threat in ways she couldn’t articulate, though felt deeply. The idea is if I can be raised in the same house as she, yet have very different tastes and feelings about openness to experiences, the nature of our difference was destabilizing of the worldview she embraced. My leaving wasn’t just me going off to find my way through life; it was false consciousness, or perhaps a flat-out rejection of the things she valued. And it would make our children’s generation strangers to each other. Finally, our inability to coalesce on questions of ultimate meaning must have worried her. She had such a Confucian view of life — the idea that everybody had his place and his duty in the hierarchical order. I had refused my place at home, thereby violating the order of things.

My problem is that I probably have a liberal psychology, re: openness, but conservative convictions.

I can’t say anything about country music, but fans should take a look at Erik Kain’s complaint that it has become like conservative politics:  “easy and unthinking. No depth, all surface. Superficial and insular.” True?

The answer to every question you ever had about anything is explained in this 1970 Werner Herzog film clip involving a German midget and a camel:

UPDATE: Oh, and Lieselotte Bindl, the hauntress of Brother Theodore’s dreams:

Tweets Charles C.W. Cooke:

We live in a world in which people tweet at me about which contraception they use, how much it costs — and then say “get out of my bedroom.”

Behold, my lunch today: the best shrimp po-boy I have ever eaten. And I have eaten more than a few shrimp po-boys. I got it at Hot Tails, a great roadside joint in New Roads, a Cajun town on the other side of the river. They have a terrific selection of ice-cold Louisiana craft beer on draft, too. Below, the view from my table. Can’t wait to go back. Seriously, I’m thinking about heading back over there for dinner.

Latest headline on The Atlantic’s website:

Rush Limbaugh’s Latest Verbal Victim Feels

Derided, Dismissed

Oh for frack’s sake. Do you know what she’s complaining about? That he called her a “babe” in dismissing her work (a book that, to me, sounds really interesting and significant, and like something I’ll end up buying). From the Atlantic:

“It’s been really interesting to have somebody be that openly dismissive of my work strictly based on the fact that I’m female,” McMillan told The Atlantic Wire. “There’s no other way to think about it except that Rush Limbaugh just doesn’t think women count.”

Good grief, grow a thick skin, willya? I think Limbaugh is almost certainly wrong about Tracie McMillan’s work — in fact, look at the transcript; I can’t figure out his argument, except that he thinks McMillan is some sort of effete liberal snob who probably voted for Obama. But to complain to the media like this because a gob like Rush Limbaugh calls you a babe is beyond pathetic.  Camille Paglia, let ‘er rip.

That’s a 13-minute film about a fairly stunning Moscow exhibition of Orthodoxy’s revival in Russia. I recommend it even if one isn’t Orthodox — though you can skip the first three minutes, which show the erecting of the exhibition — for the reason that Jim Kushiner cites:

What is most moving about the video, perhaps, is the inclusion of footage of Communist church demolitions, and the shocked looks in the eyes of onlookers, especially children.

25 years ago the scene in this video, right in Moscow, was unthinkable. Things do change. How and why? The Soviet Union was not invaded by an enemy, but somehow 70 years of Communist repression of the church, including the executions by the atheists of tens of thousands, if not more, because they were Christians, ended almost overnight with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and today one is free to worship and build churches. Before, believers risked arrest and death in the camps by even hanging an icon in their homes; now people openly cross themselves in public whenever they choose, and many do by custom whenever they pass by a church. I honestly thought I would never be able to visit Moscow and openly practice my faith, but last June I was able to do so.

This is a miracle. Here is the Russian language website for the exhibition. Here is a gorgeous clip of a four-man Orthodox choir chanting the Our Father in Russian, polyphonically.