The below is from Stone Bridge.
So in any case I went to college in 1959–maybe the problem was education–and quickly became a an activist in anti-segregation demonstrations, then soon enough a little bit beyond liberal, and by the end of the 60s a full-tilt revolutionary socialist. Though I have long since mostly reverted to the sanity of mild liberalism, I believe to this day, in my heart, that my utopian values of giving ordinary people a fair deal, including good value for their taxes, do not include letting the elderly forage in dumpsters if their private accounts have worked out badly. Self interest, perhaps, since I am approaching an age that could be called elderly, myself.
The point of this is meandering diatribe is that nowhere in this fairly typical southern liberal trajectory–for a southern liberal of my generation at least– is any habit of condescending to people who have to shop at Walmart. I know, from experience, that most of them (us, actually) would be perfectly happy to buy better stuff, and buy it in stores less renowned for screwing their own hired help than Walmart, if they could afford it. One wonders when was the last time Brooks bought a cheap pair of shoes made in China at a big box store.
When you visit Stone Bridge, be prepared for a longer visit than you anticipated. This is sit-down reading, not a quick news and opinion scan. Though both shorter commentary and longer stories are there. By the time I reached Dante’s parking garage I was following behind in our battered van.
Not true, I was there much earlier on, at the Texas farm, several generations of my family having been farmers in KS on the border of the Osage Nation, in Chautauqua which was Osage up to about 1873 and had mixed-bloods on the census as white but enrolled Osage. I didn’t grow up on a farm but if my house has several back doors onto places of influence, the prairie is toward the top.
A piece on Homeland Security. I was already holding the birdcage with the parakeet that expired with its first whiff of Homeland Security. But reading “Stone Bridge” I am back to thinking again on it and children who grow up hearing, from birth, “Homeland Security.”
I breathe easy reading Stone Bridge.
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