Sometimes in NYC among academic colleagues or fellow artists, I’ve mentioned my childhood in Appalachia; and unfortunately people’s only real frame of reference these days is J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. It seems that the experience of rural whites is under-represented in mainstream culture, and so distant from the lives of the folks derided as “New York City liberal elitists.” Maybe it is willful naivete but much of the country seems not to know, or not to want to know, what’s happening out in the sticks.

But as I brainstorm how to write about my upbringing in the middle of Pennsylvania, and think about how to describe the fascism of white rural culture, I think it might be useful for me to start keeping a running list of examples:

• For my eighth birthday, I received a gun. Learning to kill was part of the culture from a very young age. Side note: in sixth grade, one of my classmates killed his father in a hunting accident. Such incidents were quite common…
• My brother-in-law owns an AK-47.
• In the Boy Scouts, we burnt books. But this wasn’t exactly political. One of the Boy Scout leaders had found a stash of books at a yard sale and had brought them the Scout Hall to use as kindling in the woodstove that we used to heat the hall. Every week we burnt the books, I guess out of a sense that they just weren’t useful?
• Boy Scouts is obviously a proto-fascist organization and I experienced a lot of hazing and abuse. We were always having rock fights. Stick wars. Boys beating each other up and saying “don’t be gay.”
• My aunt lived in a town called Coatesville where Zachariah Walker was lynched in 1911 and one of my aunt’s neighbors still has one of Walker’s fingers.
• Where I grew up in Pennsylvania, in Columbia County, residents in 1864 voted 2-1 against the releection of Lincoln and huge portions of the population dodged the draft. Perhaps as many as 500 men organized an armed uprising against the Union. Union troops put down the so-called “Fishing Creek Confederacy” and arrested like 100 rebels.
• …

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.