An Unforced Error in a Small Town

David Thornton

David Thornton is a freelance writer and professional pilot who has also lived in Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia and Emmanuel College. He is Christian conservative/libertarian who was fortunate enough to have seen Ronald Reagan in person during his formative years. A former contributor to The Resurgent, David now writes for the Racket News with fellow Resurgent alum, Steve Berman, and his personal blog, CaptainKudzu. He currently lives with his wife and daughter near Columbus, Georgia. His son is serving in the US Air Force. You can find him on Twitter @CaptainKudzu and Facebook.

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40 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    I think that the eternal problem is that we have two very different cultures warring a silly culture war and what Culture A finds offensive, Culture 1 doesn’t (and vice-versa) and they regularly pull the old “CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT THE OTHER CULTURE ISN’T OFFENDED BY THIS? THEY THINK IT’S GOOD!”

    To wander away from something as silly as music for a second, I think that the best example is the old “abortion/death penalty” can’t believe.

    “Can you believe that they are against abortion but actively *CELEBRATE* the death penalty? Pro-life, my hind end!”
    “Can you believe that they don’t think that murderers should be killed but have no problem with killing babies means that they should be called pro-criminal, not pro-choice.”

    Can you believe it?

    To wander back to music, I’m not sure that pulling the old Tipper Gore will make the Democrats look hip any more than last time.

    The best criticism of the song that I saw was a fun tweet that had one of the Uvalde cops singing the song. But that particular criticism seems to get to the nut of the problem. The problem isn’t that some artist out there is making some offensive song (heaven forfend!), it’s that the wrong people are listening to this song and feeling puffed up for a few seconds.

    Gotta deflate them!

    And that turns into a knock-down drag out fight over who does and who does not get to feel puffed up for a few moments. Which turns the debate into a really, really weird one.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

      “[W]e have two very different cultures warring a silly culture war and what Culture A finds offensive, Culture 1 doesn’t[.]”

      See, I don’t think that’s actually true.

      I think that Culture 1 absolutely finds the stuff offensive.

      The issue is that they like seeing Culture A offended more than they care about doing something they find offensive.

      And they honestly don’t understand why this is seen as Normalizing The Offensive Thing. Because that’s not why they did it. They just wanted to make you mad. They didn’t mean for you to do it too.

      Like, brigading someone off the internet, that’s offensive, that’s bad, but sometimes one must hold one’s nose and do distasteful things when you’re dealing with internet transphobes.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

        I think that there might actually be a for-real disconnect at play. Like, they cannot comprehend the mindset of a different culture. They can only comprehend their own.

        Which is kind of funny, if you remember the old stereotypes.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

          I assumed you used Culture A and Culture 1 to make them interchangeable. But this most recent comment indicates you had A and 1 designated.

          I don’t see any reason to think that either culture genuinely finds the other’s values less offensive. Some confirmation bias will always make us remember the bad things about our opponents and the good things about our side, and if unchecked it will lead to something that functions like hypocrisy. But that said, the differences in principles and standards of acceptability are real.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Pinky says:

            I was hoping to avoid the “Why is Team Good Culture 2?” conversation. That’s all.Report

          • DensityDuck in reply to Pinky says:

            “I assumed you used Culture A and Culture 1 to make them interchangeable. But this most recent comment indicates you had A and 1 designated.”

            (It’s a ‘Futurama’ reference.)

            I included the example at the end because I was pretty sure that certain commentors would otherwise take it as an opportunity to say “YEAH THAT’S JUSt WHAT THOSE DARn CONSERvavTIVES ARE LIKE YOU KNOW THEY alwAYWSA WANT TO BE JERKS JUST TO b E JERKS!!!!”Report

        • Slade the Leveller in reply to Jaybird says:

          “They”Report

  2. Chip Daniels says:

    Someone should make a cut of his song overlaid on video of Jan 6.Report

  3. Pinky says:

    2019 FBI crime stats (per 100,000):
    Metro areas versus nonmetro areas
    Violent crime: 395.2 versus 207.5
    Murder & non negligent manslaughter: 5.1 versus 3.9
    Rape (revised definition): 42.0 versus 38.3
    Robbery: 91.5 versus 11.2
    Aggravated assault: 256.5 versus 154.1
    Property crime: 2187.5 versus 1034.1
    Burglary: 337.2 versus 304.9
    Larceny – Theft: 1615.8 versus 618.6
    Motor vehicle theft: 234.5 versus 110.5

    https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-2#:~:text=The%20violent%20crime%20rate%20was%20390.8%20per%20100%2C000%20inhabitants%20in,per%20100%2C000%20inhabitants%20in%202019.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to Pinky says:

      In the US, there are about 1,200 cities with population 25k-100k, and 300 with population > 100k. Only 40 with population > 500k.

      In fact, only four of the ten cities on that list (Bessemer, Monroe, and Pine Bluff, and Saginaw) have populations 25k have population < 100k. Detroit and Memphis both have populations over 500k, making up 20% of the top 10, despite the fact that less than 3% of eligible cities have populations over 500k.

      Small cities aren't more violent on average; they just have a larger pool from which to draw outliers. Also worth noting that every city on that top ten list is at least 40% black, and eight are majority black. Ignoring the predictive power of race for violent crime rates is basically lobotomizing yourself. You can't even begin to think intelligently about crime, especially violent crime, in the US without accounting for it.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        People always want to find some skeleton key which unlocks an understanding of human behavior, and always fail.

        There is a “predictive power” of poverty and violent crime too, but its really just a statistical correlation.

        Causation is still unexplained, and often deliberately so because it befuddles the priors and makes the skeleton key worthless.Report

  4. DensityDuck says:

    “[N]ot rushing to defend everyone accused of racism would be a good start.”

    And obviously all accusations of racism are inherently correct, philosophically so in an original-sin sense if not actually factually true, and therefore questioning an accusation is equivalent to a defense of the accused.Report

  5. InMD says:

    I hate to go all meta but I think this tempest in a teapot shows how dead social media, and in particular X-Twitter, is. Every time I see one of these things pop up it’s hard to escape how 2020 every one of the flash points is. It’s possible we aren’t scaling our new mountain of controversies and zeitgeists just yet but we are way closer to the foot than we are to the peak of this turd mountain.Report

    • Slade the Leveller in reply to InMD says:

      The killer part of this is he didn’t even write this song. He’s just parroting someone else’s words. At least Merle Haggard (and Willie Nelson) wrote the words he was singing in Okie from Muskogee.Report

      • InMD in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

        Heh, true story. Though if we’re talking tunes about the state of redneckery I always thought the below was a better one. Maybe a little more honest too.

        https://youtu.be/EBBvXcpMzhkReport

      • Ever since I was a little kid in a small town in Tennessee, small town people have been terrified of the big city, convinced that they’re sure to be mugged, car-jacked, or murdered within minutes of entering even the safest of cities. I hear it all the time from people back home, or to make clear that it’s not just a Southern thing, from my partner’s mother, who’s lived her entire life in a small Connecticut town, and is terrified of every city from Austin to Paris. So it’s no wonder that someone from a small town (as I assume the songwriter is) would try to confront these fears by writing them out with a false bravado. Perhaps their therapist suggested it as a form of treatment for a phobia.Report

        • CJColucci in reply to Chris says:

          Some years ago, my wife and I were vacationing on the Maine coast. After a few days in Portland, by far the largest city in Maine, very nice, safe, and civilized with a cultural scene that punches well above its weight, we stopped in Rockland (where we have stayed multiple times since). We stopped at a store to pick up a few things and mentioned to the woman at the checkout that we had just come up from Portland. Her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, and she said, in all seriousness, that she would be afraid to go to Portland.Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to Chris says:

          “Ever since I was a little kid in a small town in Tennessee, small town people have been terrified of the big city…”

          similar to how some people are utterly convinced that if they’re stopped by the cops in a small town they’ll be dragged out of the car, beaten until they admit that they’re queer, and then executed.Report

          • Chris in reply to DensityDuck says:

            Huh… Never heard that one.

            Now, I know some big city folk who are anxious about being in extremely rural places, and I know plenty of big city folk who think small towns and the country are filled with backwards-ass people, and I know there are big city people who, for that reason among others, wouldn’t want to live in a small town, but I don’t know any city folk who are afraid of small towns generally, or who avoid small towns generally.Report

            • CJColucci in reply to Chris says:

              Neither does anyone else.*

              *Standard disclaimer: there are 350-odd million people in America, many very odd indeed, so there is bound to be someone.Report

            • DensityDuck in reply to Chris says:

              “I don’t know any city folk who are afraid of small towns generally”

              *shrug* then you haven’t been paying attention to the queer people in your life.Report

  6. Richard Hershberger says:

    “Urban” as a euphemism for “Black” is so standard as to be a cliché. Using it in a context such as this doesn’t not inspire me to confidence. At best it is a “stupid or evil?” question. In my old age I find the distinction less useful or interesting than I did in my youth. Combined with the location it was shot? That would be a hell of a coincidence. To complete the picture, the result was a mediocre generic song became far more lucrative than it otherwise would be.

    As for the Republican “unforced error,” I have also learned in my old age to embrace the idea that when someone tells me who they are, I should believe them. This is unforced only in that the Republican base is very bad at hiding who they are.Report

  7. Anne says:

    I’ve lived mostly in big cities OKC, Louisville, Denver, NYC and DC. and one small town Bolivar WV. In three of the big cities I lived in the so called bad side of town and really never had any problems.

    Here is reporting from a small town area that I love to go visit but I sure as heck do not want to live there after hearing this https://t.co/n5QztSqtPgReport

    • Slade the Leveller in reply to Anne says:

      Yikes. Meanwhile, here in the big city, a woman has just filed a wrongful conviction suit over being railroaded into prison. A suit she will no doubt win. A-hole cops are a-hole cops the world over.

      Meanwhile, conservatives piss and moan about a biased press when all they want to do is sell some papers by covering juicy stories.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Anne says:

      Did anything bad happen to you personally in that small town area while you were visiting it?Report

  8. Ben Sears says:

    I’m about ten miles from Bessemer right now. If I drove there, there would be no break between towns. Bessemer is administratively a small town, but it’s small designation in a metropolitan area and in other respects part of a city.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Ben Sears says:

      But, surely, when you cross the border from metro to small town, you notice that the young men wear their ballcaps forward, and hitch up their trousers, and say “Yes, Sir”, “No, Ma’am” and “Hell yeah I’m “Merican”.Report

    • DavidTC in reply to Ben Sears says:

      If we’re talking about what city is really a small town, Aldean is from _Macon_, which isn’t a small town in any manner at all. It’s the center of the major metropolitan area of over 200,000 people that is directly south of the Atlanta metropolitan area. It has two airports and is only an hour from the Atlanta Airport. If you’re going there from Atlanta, you’re going down the interstate, driving past offramps pointing at Atlanta suburbs until, at some undefined point, those signs are pointing at Macon suburbs instead.

      And then the second you past Macon, you’re in Warner Robins, an _equally_ large city and new metropolitian area!Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to DavidTC says:

        I think it’s pretty well-understood that Aldean himself is a bro-country dude, the type of city boy with an immaculate hat and a fancy pickup truck with the dually rear axle whose flatbed has never held anything dirtier or heavier than a large-screen TV still in its box from the Sam’s Club warehouse.Report