David Wong writes in Cracked, a publication I have never heard of before, on the city-rural divide and how it is at the center of this election cycle. In the movies that he uses as a jumping-off point, he reminds us that it is the rural people who are the salt of the earth and normally the heroes while the city people are weird, arrogant and dress in bizarre clothing like we see in The Hunger Games.
In point of fact, watching The Hunger Games on cable just recently I was struck by how closely it resonates with our current political and cultural situation. Our blue elites hate our guts and despise us. They treat us like dirt and have no reservations about cheating, lying and stealing from us while also making fun of us behind our backs when they think we are not paying attention.
See, I’m from a “blue” state — Illinois — but the state isn’t blue. Freaking Chicago is blue. I’m from a tiny town in one of the blood-red areas.
As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. “Their ways are strange.”
And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.
Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes — either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.
“Nothing that happens outside the city matters!” they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you’d barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.
But who cares about those people, right? What’s newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.
To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. “Are you assholes listening now?“
