States of Depravity

In talking with friends last night, I caught a thread among different events and places from my life to date. I'm documenting the bits here so I don't forget them, but this post is only the opening of a conversation. Your welcome responses will be cherished.

Where I grew up, in southern Appalachia, a strong and deep-running ethic ties the rural communities together. I've touched the periphery of this subculture over the years, through friends of family and acquaintances, though I have no true, direct knowledge of it. As best I can discern, it grew up of necessity, rooted among the state boundaries in the region. The driving force was, for a while at least, shining work: the production (and distribution) of grain spirits — hooch. For various reasons, backwoods distilling isn't quite as bigtime anymore, but nothing has been forgotten. Some of that work has mutated to similar activities around other products, but mostly, the core values — self-sufficiency, quiet determination, etcetera — took root and persist independent of any specific activity, at this point.

So, in the best light, subversive actions may foster sustainable communities. But often, quite the opposite happens. What emerges in the latter cases are population centers, or geographic areas, bereft of any meaningful narrative. In these cases, it doesn't make sense to talk about 'communities' at all, since the ethics and activities which remain work quite explicitly against community building. A better name would look something like 'concentrations of disorder' or 'disunities'.

What came up last night, though, is how examples of these exist throughout the US and how distinct in character each is. Ignoring any tired generalities of extant nomenclature (e.g. red-neck), what interests me is the possibility that the various examples can be viewed in terms of their differences from each other and whether they could be shown to share common features in spite of the surface dissimilarities.

All of this, I assume, is well researched and documented among those who care. I'm just not familiar with any of that work yet. Most of my (mis)information comes from movies and such — a situation no doubt itself so common as to be trite — but the profusion of such examples that I could think of off-hand speaks quite clearly to that.

There's a fair bit more that I hoped to sketch out, but this much has already taken me several hours to draft. So without commentary, here are several links to apropos movies:

• Winter's Bone
• Deliverance
• Brother's Keeper
• Thunder Road
• Dark Days

What most bewilders me is that so many instances can be found around the US alone. Each so well-defined and unlike the others. Nothing yet said of the sort beyond our national border. No question that the Indian continent, or central america, or Brazil hosts as many examples. Or that, for all that is clear and known about Somali over the past four decades, surely there exists such subcultures there, as well.

I'll end this note with one final example, that brought it all home in the conversation last night, but which I know the least about. A friend who grew up in Alaska related a while back the widespread and appalling disarray of remote population centers there, due variously to geographic isolation, loss of industry, federal policies, and so on. Without wanting to butcher the description I was given, the people living in those areas huff antifreeze for want of hooch and rewrite local laws as needed. I don't know of any representative work for this one, so please share what you have.

G Bomb

To myself, i show up as the first result on google. Small acclaim. I've always wondered, are google searches location-specific? What do you get when you google 'company of hedonists'?

True Names

Yesterday, as i was driving to a friends house to help him move, a cardinal shot across the front of my car from the trees along the side of the road. I sometimes wonder whether squirrels and birds do this intentionally, thrill-seeking. It happens more than i would expect. Lightning, say, happens quite a lot, but i've never in my life had it strike within twenty feet. Birds, however, often fly in front of my speeding car.

But that aside, what occured to me as this particular bird passed a foot or so in front of the grill, was what i would say if it in fact collided with the car. 'I hit a bird yesterday'? I suppose, if one hits another human, it's enough (at first at least) to say, 'I hit a man the other day'. But later, you'd probably want to know what man i had hit, know his name.

So it passed through my thoughts as i drove on that, were we to afford all species proper respect, i would need to know this cardinal's name. But to have unique names for every bird, and squirrel, and dog would require a fair amount of specification.

In my current job, i'm often having to look up various people in a database. When they tell me their name, i take the more obscure of the first and last, since that will tend to return just their records. I despair a bit when it's a Bill Smith or Elizabeth Jones, because each of those four names will invariably return several pages of records.

So, to be fair, I suppose we already need finer indicators. Bill Smith with Vanguard Publishing, Elizabeth Jones of Thirty-two Terrace, Northwest. Likewise, pets often assume the family surname, though clearly your dog is not of your blood, so that's a bit loose.

But in the moments after this cardinal missed my windshield, i was struck by the idea of home many more names-- beyond the given and the sur-- we would need to name individuals across all species. Seemed like a cumbersome idea at the time.