Fungible America and its Obsession With Aboriginals
December 4th, 2008“I’ll Sneak up on Jeff Bob and Try to Insert a Tag”
Because I am a failure and I do not possess a 7/8″ Forstner bit, I had to quit working on my woodworking table pretty early yesterday. I get to bed between 8:30 and 9:00, so I’m glad things didn’t work out, because I think there is a good chance I would have stayed up late and ruined my morning.
I ended up watching a woodworking video with Marv and Maynard. It’s a Taunton.com video about table saws, featuring a guy named Kelly Mehler. It was so relaxing. When you have tools but still can’t get anything done, they cause anxiety. When you see someone tackle similar problems effortlessly, it’s incredibly soothing. I do not know why.
Maybe this is how women want to feel when they pick husbands. “Look at all the crap this guy can do; he can take CARE of me.”
Oh, hey, it looks like he has his own site: Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking.
He works in Berea, Kentucky, where my late mom went to boarding school. According to her, Berea was “arty.” I think that means a lot of yankees had descended on the place and tried to turn it into a bizarre and geographically inappropriate colony of longhairs. I don’t know too much about Berea, but I believe it’s one of those towns where they have a whole lot of people making butter churns with hand tools. It’s probably the kind of place where it’s very easy to buy a really good chisel.
I don’t know if the theme of the place has anything to do with Appalachian culture. To hear my mom tell it, the situation was pretty much the opposite.
Wikipedia says a past president of Berea College started the artsy-craftsy metamorphosis, hoping to capitalize on the national market for Kentucky crafts. I don’t want to break anybody’s rice bowl, but Eastern Kentucky is not known for finely crafted items. It’s just not. It’s not even known for good construction. The old houses tend to have crooked walls and sloping floors. I’ve been all over Appalachia, and one of the things I noticed was that old houses and buildings in North Carolina looked a hell of a lot better than they did in Kentucky. The difference is very obvious.
I’ll bet the vast majority of the people making this junk are from out of state, and that they have taught the locals ten times what the locals have taught them. I’m just being honest. People up there have always made great music and fantastic quilts, but I can’t think of anything else they do really well. The sad truth is, people who are good at things generally leave, to get away from the bad local economy. They call it “brain drain.” This is why I grew up in Florida.
Kentucky attracts people who are much more excited about its culture than they have any right to be. One example: Appalshop. This is an outfit in my dad’s hometown, Whitesburg. This town is located among some of the most nearly vertical terrain in the US. The hills aren’t all that high, but they’re about four feet apart. It’s very close to West Virginia. For some reason, a bunch of hippies showed up and started documenting the culture and recording the music. That’s Appalshop.
It’s kind of odd, because culturally, the hippies are about as much like the locals as Cambodians. Their values are utterly foreign. Nobody in Eastern Kentucky wants to hear about composting and tofu and recycling. People who preach that stuff are lucky if their houses don’t get burned down. The only liberal value people in Eastern Kentucky support is the desire to addict people to welfare checks. When it comes to government money, they are hardcore socialists, on the same page as Saul Alinsky.
Here’s a handout horror story. My aunt was a school principal up there. She said people in her town instructed their kids to fail ADD tests so they would get stuff from the government. Imagine that. “Honey, be sure you don’t bust 600 on the SAT, so mamaw can get free Ding Dongs.”
It’s kind of insulting, having hippies educated in New England show up and “help” the locals preserve their culture. But I guess they’re not going away. If I lived up there, and they came to record me playing the autoharp or the banjo, I’d feel like a monkey at the zoo. It’s funny; no one seems to notice the implicit condescension. There is nothing flattering about having yankees show up, take photos of you, your house, and your family, and treat you like a newly discovered aborigine.
I wonder why the hippie organizations don’t send people into black ghettos to preserve the wonderful culture. Okay, I don’t really wonder. It’s because it’s harder to get away with condescending to black people.
I think people from Appalachia should get in vans and go to places like Michigan and Massachusetts and document the culture. Problem is, people in places like that don’t have any discernible culture. “Here’s Lance and his wife Margaret. Let’s see if we can film them playing some indigenous music. Oh, wait. That’s right. They HAVE no indigenous music, because they’re exactly like people in California and Indiana. Well, maybe we can film them hitting a bucket of balls at the driving range.”
I want some more woodworking videos. I can’t get enough of this stuff. For some reason, they’re the best tool videos. The metalworking stuff just isn’t as satisfying. Maybe it’s because metalworking is so much easier. Metal does whatever you want. At least it seems that way.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:42 AM
I had the advantage of having a dad who knew his way around all sorts of tools. He is also frugal. He buys quality tools and fixes everything until it posatively can’t do the job anymore. We would take any of those “useless” objects and retask them. I love working with him because it is like those videos you are watching. We have done just about every kind of building and renovating from morterless stone walls to a log cabin, to resurrecting a 1948 Farmall A crank start tractor (one crank will still start it in the -20 winters of Vermont). People who can do these things with what seems like no expense and pure ingenuity are getting harder and harder to come by. You are right that tools and the determination to learn how to use them are powerfully liberating.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:51 AM
Here in a third world state (not Kentucky) we are awash in cultures (yes, more than one) and desperately poor. Friends in nearby affluent capitalist states envy me my cultures… but for too many years we have watched the rest of the nation become more homogenized and prosperous. And now our revenge has come. We will inflict our third world, socialist, culturally diverse ways upon the commerce of this nation. Mwahahaha!
I favor dyi decorating shows – very calming and soothing.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:51 AM
Indiana may be boring- OK, it IS boring- but it is NOT massachusetts. Low taxes, good gun freedom, and a lot of the people with brains who escaped from Kentucky.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:06 PM
Same theme, different country.
Here in the third world country I live in I see the same thing. Only the folks here don’t realize how condesending are the things that the visiting gringos say because of the language difference. Occasionally I have matched up rooms for rent during Carnavales with some of those sockless backpackers who spend time on The Thorn Tree forum so I have gotten to hear some of the strange things people come up with.
Interestingly it seems that modern travel, cars, and conveniences are fine for the developed world but they hate to see those things being enjoyed by the rustic natives who inhabit these wilder places. You know, rustic natives like my wife and daughter for instance. The tourists cry over the fact that we now have a MacDonalds out here but never notice that it is always full of “natives” actually getting their moneys worth instead of haggling with some old crone who operates a restauraunt out of the spare room in the house and makes her carne guisada with choice cuts of gristle and fat. Yeah, it’s cheap, but that’s about the only good thing that can be said for it.
Hope this didn’t stray too far and still makes sense. Rough morning out here.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:39 PM
“Appalshop”? The first word association that came to my mind was not “Appalachia” but “appalling.” No wonder liberal hippie progressives are obsessed with “nuance” and “gray areas.” I would be too if I had that big of a tin ear.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:43 PM
You really don’t get Michigan. We’re 3/4 of the way to being an island, and our culture shows it.
December 4th, 2008 at 1:01 PM
I still say that YOU are the best person to document Kentucky. Your childhood stories are just plain fascinating.
December 4th, 2008 at 1:40 PM
“People up there have always made great music and fantastic quilts, but I can’t think of anything else they do really well.”
That was just a setup, right? That general part of Kentucky is well-known for lots of things, and some of them are even legal and non-intoxicating; like quilts and butter-churns.
There may be reasons for those out-of-square walls and houses.
December 4th, 2008 at 1:45 PM
Moonshine is only good if you really want to like it.
December 4th, 2008 at 2:54 PM
I think indigenous music in Michigan is “air guitar”.
Or rap.
December 4th, 2008 at 3:27 PM
Indigenous Michigan Music:
Motown.
You’re welcome.
Punk (Iggy Pop and the Stooges, MC5)
Again, you’re welcome.
White boy Rap (Eminem and Kid Rock)
Er, ah, ahp…..
Madonna
Dang, sorry about that.
December 4th, 2008 at 4:15 PM
The sad thing is, Motown music was pretty much the same as the other soul and R&B stuff that came from the east coast. Probably best not to Google and find out how many of the artists were not from Michigan.
Wikipedia says Motown moved to L.A. in 1972! DOH!
December 5th, 2008 at 10:00 AM
Fey overly schooled but essentially uneducated liberals – who feel smuggly superior to the unwashed Third World (or Third State) denizens but whose lives are empty (due to having no faith in anything of actual substance) always have a fascination with those whom they believe to be inferior but are much more fulfilled than they.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:20 PM
The fact of the matter is, Berea was formed in the 1800s by people from New England to showcase the lack of education in Kentucky. (Did a research paper on it back in college.)Basically, it hasn’t changed much since then… the entire town is basically run by hippies or elitists to this day.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:04 PM
…people in her town instructed their kids to fail ADD tests so they would get stuff from the government.
That would have surprised me had I not seen the documentary Country Boys. Filmmakers followed two teenagers around from age 16-18 to see how their lives evolved on the way to adulthood.
For me the most appalling aspect was the way parents and other relatives sponged and swindled the poor kids. They taught them — by making victims of them — to do anything except work, which neither of the boys turned out ready to do after graduation. Although the story left off there, my bet is they will go on to do the same.
Seems like for all the attention conservatives have been paying to the self-destructiveness of urban culture, we’ve let rural culture take its own dive.