Right. And then there’s the fact that agriculture is a trap in that once you adopt it you can never go back and anyone nearby who doesn’t adopt it as well will eventually be outcompeted and disappear as a people, or they will be driven into ever more remote and inhospitable environments. None of this requires anything like foresight or intention either.
You shouldn’t be surprised. It’s caused by the same bad actors who are responsible for most of the ways in which the US is an outlier vs its so-called peer democracies.
“Great” in that sense doesn’t mean “good,” it means big. You see the same use in a lot of bird names as in the great blue heron or the great auk, just off the top of my head.
The truth is that pretty much everything about the western US starts with California and then spreads back out. This is because, due to the gold rush, California was settled and made a state first, while the rest of the western states remained “territories” and only achieved statehood much later as they too became more heavily settled.
Basically, the settlement pattern of the western states is backwards after about 1852 or thereabouts, with the California and the west coast filling in first, and the interior states filling in later.
Read a US history book on the westward expansion and it will all make perfect sense. Hint; it might have something to do with older names remaining in use up until the current day.
I mean, southwest Colorado was part of the Dust Bowl. Culturally it’s definitely part of the Great Plains area. I would argue that eastern Wyoming and Montana are as well. They have more in common with the Dakotas than they do with the Rockies.
I still wouldn’t consider it the Midwest, but at least there’s a tenuous thread of logic to the idea.
100 percent spot on. It’s also a huge part of how they lost such a ridiculous chunk of blue collar workers in spite of labor leadership being solidly Democrat for decades.
Poor whites and rural hicks became the only working-class people it was still socially acceptable to openly mock in public. This was noticed and exploited by the right with dire consequences for our current political landscape.
Of course, a ton of other variables were at play as well, but the certainty that so-called “coastal elites” held them and everything they valued in contempt played a huge role in convincing blue-collar and middle-class rural whites to vote against their economic interests.
Rust Belt works. Ohio is really part of three different places; the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the Midwest. Maybe The Rust Belt isn’t considered polite anymore, I don’t know, but my mother’s side of my family is entirely from the Pittsburgh to Cleveland area so I mean no offense. My grandfather was a career engineer at Bethlehem Steel, for example. His joke was that he literally sold bridges for a living.
Eastern Wyoming and Montana are the Great Plains, so that at least makes a little sense. Idaho though, there you have me. I am at a loss. Maybe it’s their poor public education system?
More evidence, if any was needed, that advertising works. The entire product is built on marketing a self-image to those who for whatever reason aren’t perceptive enough to see how they’ve been manipulated by the advertising industry.
I’m somewhat guilty of it myself when it comes to outdoors activities that I’m passionate about like climbing and hiking and backpacking and snowboarding. I know a lot of it is overpriced bullshit that I don’t actually need, but sometimes I’m like “here, just take my money, I must have that fancy new piece of gear or equipment!” At least I’m aware of it though.
I was thinking more of “Blood Meridian,” but it’s definitely true that “The Road” tackles a lot of similar themes albeit on a more personal and isolated scale.
I think “No Country” also is a continuation of said themes, with Anton Chigur as a sort of modern incarnation of The Judge. He must own everything. Nothing can be allowed to exist or happen save by his dispensation.
He is an amoral archon, as is life and the universe itself. He is offended only by those who refuse to acknowledge and countenance the cruel and arbitrary nature of reality itself.
Decisions and random facts of chance have permanent consequences, none of which can or should be escapable. It’s offensive to The Judge/Anton Chigur that anyone might imagine otherwise.