(This started out as an e-mail reply to a Good Folks newsletter about the author's hopes for "slow activism in rural areas." For those who don't read the Good Folks newsletter, it often promotes the work of writers, artists, and musicians who happen to be "gay." As with any demographic, some of that work also happens to be good, which is the primary reason why people subscribe to the newsletter.)
Must supporting things that matter to rural people, to oneself as a rural person, always mean going Republican? I hope not. It would help if Democrats had more to say about the interests of rural people as distinct from those of rich Eurotrash who want to "preserve resources" by criminalizing rural life.
Example: Appalachian Power wants to sink money in "a small nuclear reactor" in rural Wise County, Virginia. Wise County is worked-out coalfields, Not only could a nuclear reactor built there not possibly be safe, it would also contaminate drinking water from the Virginia-Kentucky border to New Orleans.
Typical R position: "Youall want jobs, don't you? A small nuclear reactor would create jobs, right?"
When I was young we would have expected the D party to be the ones saying, "Wait a minute. Appalachian Power should first invest in the community by putting solar collectors where people want them, letting those people pay for the collectors and thus keeping them paying APCo for a few more years, and give Wise County and other coalfields counties a chance to export something healthy for once. "
Now look at the Democrats in power. What do they know or care about this kind of thing? They're too busy spouting the line their European owners are feeding them. "Ban guns, ban all aspects of rural life, make Wise County unlivable, tell people we're giving the good land back to the bears as we herd the people into apartment towers in cities where they'll die faster, and get people like Schwab controlling the rural land in the U.S. just as they are in Europe, so they can turn North America back into the kind of mess Europe is."
I want APCo to give older people like me and my neighbors the "job" of exporting our sunshine. I think of that as a "liberal" idea, and so you may be sure do some big influences in the Republican party. But today's Democrats are too busy screaming about gun bans and abortion being a "right" (for women over 50, yeah RIGHT!) to support anything that actually works for rural people. When they notice that we exist, they're screaming that our existence is racist. (I'm biracial myself, and duh, solar collectors would work for Black home owners too, and did you see anything about their not working for "gays" or Muslims or any other demographic group?...but the Loony Left has apparently decided that just being home owners is "racist." Stay in those housing projects in the slums where you belong, proles! Achievement, freedom, privacy, even good health are racist things for YOU losers even to WANT! Anyway why aren't all these people over 50 dead, as they would be in Europe?)
As a lifelong registered Independent I want what works for me and others like me, and don't care which party picks up those ideas...but it looks as if Terry Kilgore, the hardcore "conservative" Republican, is more likely to be more helpful to rural people here than Democrats like Tim Kaine.
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It's important to note here that I don't hate Europeans.
I hate the fantasy of "global governance" that makes it possible for people to take political sides in countries where they don't live. There is a Muslim version of that fantasy, but currently the people who subscribe to it and are meddling in U.S. government are Europeans. They're also bigots, and they get their notions about what's "racist" and "anti-Semitic" straight out of their mirrors. They're also sexists and Socialists. The craziest part of their bigotry is that their tribal hate, which is also strong, shifts overnight. Basically they still seem to think of themselves as tiny feuding tribes, not even Hungarians-as-opposed-to-Italians-in-Europe as Huns-as-opposed-to-Magyars-in-Hungary, and they'll be ready to go to war with any other tribe in minutes. I think those Saturday morning cartoons probably got it right. It may be true that "everybody wants to rule the world" in moments of moral weakness, but all people who seriously try to rule the world are villains, and detestable.
Ordinary sane Europeans who come here as visitors, your typical exchange student, exchange teacher, diplomat, tourist, etc., I've almost always liked. Their history is instructive, and their cultural traditions of art, literature, architecture, and so on, such as have survived their wars, are impressive. As individual people they usually seem pleasant to know and interesting to talk to. The world needs no more bigotry and no more war.
The more advanced civilizations on this continent do, however, need to remain aware of and consistently beat back any further incursions of the toxic European ideas our ancestors left behind. There ought to be a specific name for those ideas, more specific than "tyranny" or "totalitarianism" or "bigotry" or "warmongering" or "elitism," although those words usually apply to the specific bad ideas as they appear, and ideally more separable from any idea of people than "European," although I think it is helpful to note where the toxic ideas are coming from. It would be helpful if the people promulgating these bad ideas all belonged to one party, whose name would then be the proper name for the bad ideas.
Until a better name suggests itself, this web site is stuck with "European" as the name for the most toxic ideas floating around these days. When talking about people, books, music, etc., which we usually do in a favorable way, usually it's possible to identify them with specific countries that happen to be in Europe. And we will be talking favorably about British, Swedish, Greek, German, Ukrainian, etc., etc., people and their work, because, loathsome as these European political ideas are, we have nothing against the plain people of Europe.
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