Just got invited in for a natter with my first boss from about 25 years ago.
He only lives round the corner.
(Here, everyone lives round the corner). #SmallTown.
Here is a #parody of the controversial song with a super #racist video by #JasonAldean. #Aldean became known for filming a country video outside the #MauryCountyCourthouse, where a #black teenager was lynched in 1927. Aldean claimed this was not racist, and simply indicative of something that made no sense except as #racism.
This parody shows things you are likelier to find in #smalltown#America than Jason Aldean's imagination. The picture is still not pretty.
"Small-town America – which is often code for conservative white America – is routinely treated as the 'real America' by politicians, pundits, writers and culture-makers. Nearly all of those people choose to live in urban America. …"
To anyone — all Republicans, for starters — who thinks, along with Jason Aldean, that small-town USA is the realization of God's kingdom on earth, a place where the milk of human kindness flows free (exceptions apply, of course!), I suggest a course in American literature spanning, oh, centuries.
Perhaps they can start by reading Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, a glimpse at how small towns can institutionalize blood-curdling lethal cruelty, just because.
Or, more contemporary, read Silas House, Southernmost, on how a small town in Tennessee deals with a gay man who risks his life to save a person drowning in a flood and is then defended by a preacher of an evangelical church.
Novels like this are legion. They depict what small-town US is REALLY like and has long really been like — from the eyes of outsiders like Silas House (gay), Bette Greene and Arthur Miller (Jewish), Shirley Jackson (uppity intellectual woman).
As Tori Otten writes, "The intended effect [of Jason Aldean's music video praising violen, repressive small towns] is to encourage violence against people protesting racial injustice."
So of course Republicans are eating the music video up.