"Few precisely like what we have, I suppose, but how does one escape it?
Perhaps they don’t sense exactly what it is they want to escape, and anyway
there is nowhere else to go. In noise-ridden cities smelling of exhaust,
crowded, where the stars languish obscured by smoke, the rivers run
semi-poisonous and much of the populace can barely read, how can anyone think
beyond the stock market and the next empty copulation?"
If you don't read Fred you really should. If everyone read one article by Fred Reed everyday, folks would understand what is going on in our brainwashed PC world. The only thing better would be reading one chapter of the Bible daily. Which I have so far failed to do, and I am more motivated than most. Anyhow I digress. Back to the above quote.
It expresses perfectly what I think of "Urban" and "Suburban." I am sick of it. I really yearn for rural. I am tired of the nattering nabobs pretentiously pulling out their iPhones and texting their tawdry lives to the other posturing punks masquerading as men. I want to be around bubba. Folks who will compliment me when I crank one. Men who can actually explain the general way that an internal combustion engine works.
As I navigate the suburban Norfolk region, with its gangrene of blubbering feminized yet self-esteeming soccer boys being begged for obedience by their Blue-Tooth clad metrosexual Brads, I feel slimed by the disgusting ooze of the urban/suburban world. It sticks to me. I so long to hear just one man say "Boy, you better shut up!" The only ones allowed to say that today, apparently, are black single mothers from the hood. Somehow black women are the most manly men out there now. As a man from the middle class on the other hand, you are fully expected to get your ass handed to you daily by a four year old. All of suburbia needs to be slapped.
I have to mention a few heroes of rurality (no, I don't know if it really is a word) before I get so irritated that punch my computer.
Hero 1. The guy that rents my farm. This man drives a 2-wheel drive F350 with nauga-hyde seats because he knows that real trucks do work. He recognizes that leather in a truck is a pretentious ornament that screams that you bought the truck to affirm that you really are a man since you secretly question that basic fact given that your man-parts remain safely tucked as you hamster wheel your existence in Cubicle World. He knows how to drive in mud without 4-wheel drive, whereas there are apparently many around my town that seem to think it a necessity on asphalt. I guess they think that one day they might take that Mercedes SUV muddin'.
Hero 2. Bob Summers. This man showed that at 60+, he could still pitch hay right alongside me when I was 16. He showed me how to get out of the way of a monster Santa Gertrudis bull. He allowed my family to hunt his property and asked nothing. Yet, when we would cut a little firewood for him or fix the dam on his pond, he still tried to pay us. He knew how to grow the sweetest watermelons and made gallons of homemade cider out of apples that he squeezed from a cider press that looked over hundred years old. The guy had a law degree but chucked that life so that he could live the rurality rather than work for partner. Oh yeah, I never heard him lie or equivocate either. I never got to thank him right; I wish he was still alive.... Fred talked about Milne and Donne in the above quoted article, but Bob's life was poetry.
Hero 3. My real estate agent. I know what you are thinking. How could one have a real estate agent for a hero? That is like having a used car salesman or a Pakistani telemarketer as a hero. I was providentially brought to the only honest real estate agent I have ever met when I bought my farm. The guy is actually honest. He is neighborly. Nearly everytime I see him, he tells me to go in his barn and use his tractor if mine breaks down. He tried to do all the real estate work when I purchased my houses for free. His reasoning was that I was in Iraq at the time; and he didn't really need the money; and anyway I was a neighbor. He tells people not to buy houses that he is selling if he sees that they don't have the money, even if the republicratic ownership society subprime Alt-A variable rate loan comes through. He also has the capability to explain the general way that an internal combustion engine works.
Fred Reed doesn't beleive that our society can recover from our current path of degeneration. I am not really that optimistic either. I am certain that if it does, we are going to have to look to places like West Tennessee and South Georgia to find decent brood stock. It isn't going to come from the urban/suburban Parents Magazine digitized group therapy session that is going on amongst those in the population centers.
(I was informed by one who read my previous post that I poorly punctuated it. If any of you English majors want to critique this one feel free. I have tried to rightly write the Kings English but I may have missed the mark.)
