Hey Aldean, I was raised in a small town. Let me tell ya' 'bout it . . .

[Warpy]

34. Any days of those innocent, fresh faced white kids

meekly doing their chores and looking forward to an ice cream social at the church are SO over. Kids growing up in small towns can't wait to get away and I don't blame them, mechanization is depopulating rural areas and their towns, never a hotbed of success in life, are now dying. If those kids are gulted or bullied into staying, they find a local pill merchant so they can numb out and cope with social isolation and hopelessness.

My problem with suburbanites like Sarah Palin and this Aldean character is that they're peddling nostalgia for the set of "Leave it to Beaver," not anything that ever really existed. Small towns worked hard for a living. Ward would have worn coveralls and June would have ditched the pearls and high heels the day after the wedding. Eddie Haskell would have been smoking his corn silk and rabbit tobacco hand rolls all by himself because Wally and Beaver had chores. Eddie would have hopped a freight out of town as soon as some girl said she was late, what was he gonna do about it? Wally would have gone to ag school but minored in something that got him a job in a city. Beaver tried to hold it together, but buying Wally out put him into deep debt and a couple of lean years wiped him out and he had to sell for pennies on the dollar to Con Agra or ADM, blaming himself and getting a meaningless factory job somewhere else and slowly drinking himself to death, his childhood erased and planted with alfalfa.

People who are deeply sentimental about small towns are like Gen Xers deeply sentimental over the 1950s. You can bet they never lived there.