Every place is a last best place

Because we won't survive without each other

There’s a new license plate in Montana these days. Well, I think it’s new. It’s hard to keep track. The Montana Department of Motor Vehicles is proudly committed to a very specific definition of freedom— namely, your God given right to choose from an embarrassment of license plate riches when outfitting your vehicle. There are plate varietals celebrating conservation societies and public radio stations, tribal colleges and cops (just, you know, as a general idea). Dozens of choices. Most are fundraisers for various Treasure State nonprofits. A win/win all around, is what I’m told.

The new-to-me plates look like most of the others. A painting of mountains— grand and bucolic and cocooned by skies that are in fact quite big. It’s the slogan that caught my attention. “Montana: God’s Country.” Not the first time I’ve heard that one. And you’d be forgiven, I suppose, for not reading too much into it. Let’s say you believe in some variety of a creator God (I do, but I understand if you don’t). If so, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that deity being particularly pleased with themselves when they created the parts of the world that smell like pine, places with jagged peaks and wondrous creatures. If I invented mountain goats, I’d never shut up about it.

The problem is, we live in a world where language is never merely descriptive, where every signifier is cannon fodder for an all-encompassing discursive war. Morgan Wallen wasn’t talking about natural beauty when he skipped out early on his duties hosting an iconic New York-based late night comedy show. “Get me to God’s Country,” the rich and famous celebrity posted on social media, just before his private jet whisked him away from the Big City to his home outside Knoxville. In that iteration, the line read less as praise for one place than a slur directed at another. Get me to a zip code that isn’t Godforsaken, he was saying. Get me away from these people. It doesn’t take a critical studies PhD to figure out who resides in God’s Country and who doesn’t.

We’re never actually talking about place. We’re always talking about people.

I was back home in Montana for a couple weeks. We had a family reunion— no small feat given that the Bucks diaspora is currently spread out coast-to-coast. Most of us live in big cities now, far from home. In the parlance of the current culture war, we abandoned God’s Country for the lands of defunded police departments and pronouns unbridled.

Back when we were growing up, when our lives included chickens and geese and an impossibly long bus ride to school, we had a vague sense that fancy people somewhere else (the Acela Corridor probably, or a magical realist version of it that extends to Southern California) looked down on the rural West. Who’s to say how much of that was true and how much of that was projection. We really did get treated like dumb hicks when our family moved temporarily from Montana to Maryland. We really did get shuttled into remedial classes and asked if we had running water back home. But it’s difficult to parse the line between real and perceived slights. We were still a professional class White family. There were a few arrows lofted our way, but I’d be lying if I claimed they were anything but rubber tipped.

These days, the attacks are disproportionally levied in the other direction- from the boonies, towards the metropole. There are currently gun thugs on the streets of Washington D.C., ordered there by a President who no longer has a popular mandate but knows how to throw red meat to his base. Donald Trump, as is his wont, brought the National Guard to a pen fight. My brother, sister-in-law and niece live in D.C. At various points during the reunion, they’d get a new update from friends back in the District. Masked men with long guns running traffic stops, standing around make-shift barricades, acting menacing as all hell. Chekov’s occupying army. Something bad, we all fear, is going to pop off.

There are a million reasons why I resent Donald Trump, but the pettiest one by far is that everything he does is so transparently critiquable, that you can’t do so without sounding like a hack. Nobody needs it spelled out. Yes, I’ve seen the crime statistics in D.C. They seem quite low. Everybody knows that isn’t the point (and even it if were: is that how you make a place safer for its residents? With soldiers? Or is that merely how you assure somebody else, far away from the city, that their most craven and fanciful biases are actually correct?). Everybody knows that the army is only there because that municipality exists, in the conservative imagination, as both Chocolate City and Sodom, because it’s a place that elects Black lady mayors and where Black teenagers, you know, hang out in public.

I do not want to spell any of this out again, but here we are, in a reactionary moment galvanized not merely by hatred and bias but an imaginary metaphysics of place. There are no actual, physical locations anymore, just symbolic fiefdoms. There are Rural, White places where God apparently blesses our guns and our slurs and teeming, diverse metropolises where ATV boys pop wheelies and (presumably) commit hourly larcenies. America is now Eden vs. Thunderdome, and Eden currently controls the military.

And yes, when Trump talks about geography, and which places are virtuous and depraved, all he truly cares about is where his voting base does and doesn’t live. It is not that deep for him. But we all play the game, to some degree or another. Thank you, dear readers, if you personally have not ordered the National Guard to occupy a major U.S. city. But that’s not the only way the metaphysics of place manifests.

Consider, for example: On our way out to the reunion, we stopped in Bozeman, Montana. Now, back when I was growing up, “Bozeman” signified very little. It was just another Western college town. There were a bunch of bars and burger joints downtown and a land grant university a few blocks away. A couple decades later (thanks both to a rapacious real estate market and the cultural impact of a certain hit soap opera about taciturn men staring ruefully into the middle distance), and Bozeman now exists as a place where millionaires and billionaires can manifest their own goddamned destiny. Main Street used to be a spot for ag students to drink Busch Light after a day at Bridger Bowl. Now you can buy thousand dollar boots and a designer t-shirt that says “Cowboy Shit” on it and prance around like you own the place.

Consider also: That White people who grew up in Montana before its recent boom will often go out of our way to prove that we’re not like the White people who arrived one or two generations later, a performance that is understandable, I suppose, but also highly delusional if you know the first thing about our state’s history. “I’m not like the other settler colonialists, you see, I’m a cool settler colonialist,” we all proclaim, unconvincingly.

We are never talking about place. We are always talking about who we want you to believe we are, and who we want you to believe that we aren’t.

Or another scenario: You saw this with the recent flooding in Texas, but also a hundred times before that. If you read the comments below news stories about Red State tragedies (you should not, of course, but sometimes we all forget), you will invariably stumble on a number that say, in essence, “good riddance.” The commenters are talking, of course, about how the people in these places voted for Republicans and in so doing have given up their right to sympathy from those of us who live in more enlightened, progressive places. Gross, I know. The counter-point, I suppose is “but they started it…” Also gross.

To say nothing of: This whole gerrymandering business. I hate everything about it, including the fact that it reinforces the myth that states are not actually complex, diverse human communities but chess pieces defined solely by whichever party happens to hold power at any given moment.

And also: When you’re on vacation, and traveling across the country, and making small talk with people from many different places, you hear a lot of statements that initially sound benign but that are weighted with dense layers of meaning.

“Where are we from? Chicago, well, not really. Naperville, actually. We used to live in the city before our kids are born but the schools are so good out there.”

“How do you all like Milwaukee? Is it, you know, safe?”

“I can’t believe you ever left Montana.”

There is judgment in their comments, but also in my replies. In Glacier, I ran into a lovely family from a suburb just a few miles from our house. I couldn’t help myself. I snuck in a line about how much we love living in the city, how pleased we are with the education our kids are getting in Milwaukee Public Schools. I was being honest, but also peacocking.

But again, I’m not claiming that there’s a moral equivalency here. Me making smug, potentially tokenizing small talk with strangers on the shores of Lake Macdonald isn’t the same as a dictatorial strongman using the military to terrorize American cities. But there’s a common denominator in all of this, and I’m not so sure— in any of its manifestations— if it’s all that useful to the work of building a better world.

To anybody else who grew up in the Rocky Mountain West, forgive me for this blasphemy, but place doesn’t matter, at least not in the way we so often pretend. Yes, there are very real aesthetic, geological, cultural and climatic differences between our various homes. A bluff is not a marsh is not a line of rowhouses. In some parts of the country, you have to drive for hours to buy a sweatshirt, in others you can hop on a subway and be there in a few minutes. Some places are more welcoming to a broader swath of people, others less so. A meaningful difference, for sure. But even then, your mailing address will not save your soul. There are no ethical postal codes under capitalism, just variations on schemes (in some places, real estate; in others, resource extraction).

And yet, in each of those places there are people. In the swamps and the plains and the high deserts and the housing projects alike, there are mothers who point upward and say to their children, “look at that, isn’t it beautiful.” And they are right, all of them. I am, once again, Finlandia-ing you (“other lands have sunlight too, and clover, etc. etc.”), but bear with me. What is home, after all? A place we all landed for reasons that have very little to do with moral superiority and a great deal to do with the randomness of political economy At some point, in all of our family lines, somebody arrived somewhere to do so me work (perhaps by choice, perhaps not) and well, there they were. A home was made. A dream home. Or a nightmare. A place that either welcomed us or shirked us. A place that, for some of us, would later be stolen. In many cases, a place where restitution is still due. In every case, a place that matters, and not just to itself.

I have told this story in this space before, but I think of it often. My wife’s maternal great-grandparents were farmers from Marion, Wisconsin. Kjersti’s Grandma Pearl met her Grandpa Howie in Madison, and waited for him when he served in the South Pacific. They reunited in New York while Howie waited for his discharge paperwork. At some point in the sojourn, her folks came to visit. The group found themselves standing outside of a large office building right around quitting time. Nobody can remember which building (the Flatiron maybe?). What’s important was that all of a sudden, these four rural Wisconsinites stared down a crushing wave of people— hundreds of them streaming their way onto the street and towards the nearest subway station. Frank, the quiet farmer from the Shawano-Waupaca County borderlands, just stood there, staring. A long silence, followed by a single quiet sentence.

“Who… feeds…. these… people?”

At times, when I’ve told that story, I’ve projected a defensiveness onto those words. The salt-of-the-Earth Midwesterner clings to a sliver of dignity in the face of a raw display of metropolitan self-importance. But recently, as I’ve tried to find my own bearings in this era of long knives drawn, I’ve imagined it differently.

That gruff, soft-spoken Wisconsinite. Those busy New Yorkers. None of them truly lived in God’s country. If there was something holy in both of their homes, it was in the fact that they were connected, that they depended on each other, that when one was weaker so too was the other.

Some places are quite beautiful, it’s true. Some are less dangerous, or rank higher in various rankings of relative well-being. None of them have a monopoly on virtue or holiness. All of them, I fear, are just one catastrophe away from disappearing. And since they are connected, I fear the domino effect that might come from each successive fall.

But if that is true so is the corollary. The tethers between places, if we notice and strengthen them, can keep us all upright.

I don’t believe any place is God’s Country, but I love the home I come from just as I love the home I’ve made. I love the places you’re from as well, for all their faults. I love them because you’re there, and that’s enough.

End notes:

1. Speaking of being interconnected, your support of this space truly makes a difference to me and my family (in all weeks, but particularly on vacation weeks, such is the challenge and gift of life as an independent writer/organizer— if I do love writing, but if I don’t do it for a little stretch, I don’t earn a living). Would it be an option to become a part of our community of supporters? The price is cheap (the cheapest this platform will allow me to make it!), the perks are great and boy am I good at showing my gratitude.

2. An important announcement: I will be participating in the Parents Fast For Gaza (which, as you’ll see from their FAQ, is open to non-parents and features a wide variety of ways to participate). I’m officially sponsoring a White Pages Community Team for the week of September 21st. While I’d encourage you to sign up for any week you can, I’d especially love if any of you so inclined would like to join me in signing up that week (just specify The White Pages as your community in registration).

3. A much less important (but community-focused) announcement: The summer is almost over (I know it’s done for many of you— my kids have a week left) and, as I expected, I have not yet completed our movie series, so it’s continuing in the fall! Fun! This coming Thursday, at 8:00 PM Central Time, I’ll be doing a live watch along of the next film in the series (Wonder Woman: 1984, a film I watched once, alone, in deep pandemic days, and which bummed me out tremendously at the time— we’ll see if it improves upon a second viewing). Where? The Substack chat. Come join (or follow along later, which is equally fun).

4. I’m back home this coming week, and the kids start school after Labor Day, so stay tuned for lots more goings-on: merch giveaways, new Barnraisers offerings, etc.

5. Speaking of back-to-school, as I say every year: I love your pictures, parents. This is the only time of the year when social media is unequivocally good, and also: if you have not received sufficient amounts of “they look soooo cute” praise for your front stoop photos of squirrely kindergarteners and ornery teens, feel free to toss me an email and I will shower you with genuine delight.

6. No new song of the week, as our road trip car has primarily been soundtracked by K Pop Demon Hunters. As much as I have grown to respect “Takedown,” the vibe isn’t quite a match. Next week, probably!