So I hear there’s a book out there called White Rural Rage by Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller. This is just a guess, but I’m thinking it’s probably about angry white people living in the hinterlands. In fact, the book describes white rural people as racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, prone to rebelling against the government, and just generally not very nice people. Waldman is a columnist for the Washington Post which, I gather, makes him an expert on rural whites. Schaller is a PoliSci prof at Maryland Baltimore County, which probably gives him a bit more expertise on the subject than Waldman and maybe even more expertise than your average hobo living under a nearby bridge. Anyway, the book must be pretty good because it spent quite a while on the New York Times best seller list. Since I’m a white person living in rural America, I’m rather curious about the subject matter. Not curious enough to read the book, mind you, but curious nonetheless.

Since I haven’t read the book, I’m not prepared to comment on its veracity. I’d like to say that you can’t pay me enough money to squander the time it would take me to read this book, but that would be a lie. A hundred dollars would certainly convince me to read the book, especially if I don’t actually have to buy it. What can I say? I’m a cheap date. Anyway, this fellow on Twitter or X or whatever it’s called this week does a very good job of going into some of the, um, problems with the book. Using the word “problems” is a nice way of putting it. Part of the ethos of growing up in rural America is to try to be polite even when you’re dealing with idiots. To summarize from the Twitter, er X, guy, the scholarship was shoddy and literally none of the social scientists referenced in the book are happy that their names are associated with it. That’s never a good sign.

However, as I mentioned before, I am a white person living in rural America and I have been for about two thirds of my life (with a lengthy stint in the California Bay Area thrown in for good measure). I presently live in a small town ten miles outside of Wichita. That makes me a sophisticated urbanite in the eyes of many Kansans, but to most of the rest of the world, I’m a hick country boy. I actually did grow up outside of the city limits of another small town, although it was hardly a farming background.

All of this makes me more of an expert on rural America than Waldman and Schaller, although I confess that I really don’t know much of anything about the subject. This is not because I’m inattentive, but because the subject is far too vast to consolidate into a few academic studies cherry-picked by the authors. Rural people and their cultures and opinions are considerably more diverse than can be summarized by a few cheap stereotypes. Rural people in Kansas have little in common with rural people in eastern Kentucky who have little in common with rural people in California. Around here, we don’t have a whole lot in common with the adjoining county, much less people in Vermont or Mississippi. The diversity between rural areas is far more dramatic than most City dwellers could ever imagine. Rural areas tend to be more isolated from the rest of the world and from each other, which lets them develop their own unique identities, perhaps even more so than one city is unique from another.

Since these areas tend to have little in common with each other, perhaps there are rural areas where the white people are stockpiling ammo and getting ready for another revolution. It’s not happening here with any signifcant visibility. Wouldn’t it be far more likely that that could be happening in the cities? I’ve had more than a bit of experience with urban areas and it seems like they tend to be magnets for crazy. Most of us out here in the wide open spaces just want to be left alone. And almost none of us are that angry about anything, or any more so than they are in the suburbs or downtown.

Nonetheless, I’d like to thank Waldman and Schaller for giving a wider audience to untrue stereotypes about rural white people by portraying us angry, narrow-minded, idiots with lots of guns. The more people in the cities believe that, the less likely they are to move here. We’re fine with that.

Let me know if you want to send me that $100. I’ll send you my Venmo information, stop reading The Brothers Karamazov for the time being, and get right on that.