So all of it just stopped. One day, we turn on the TV and no more Marshal Dillon and Chester/Festus, no more hayrides, no more kissing cousins and Daisey Dukes and no more barber shops and no more Mandrell Sisters, and no more pea-patch Paw Paws, and no more fat men in Western suits and no more Opry and vests that sparkle and light, and no more hillbillies and no how-w-deee and hats with price tags, and no more green acres, and no more houses on the prairie or on the banks of Plum Creek or anywhere rural. Just gone, like that. Overnight? It seems it. And no more drawl, except for Dallas entrepreneurs and decadent Southern capitalists, or the classy kind of drawl of women interior designers from the Deep South, the drawl that is reminiscent of plantation life and white columns and all those films from the ’30s where southerners were played by Brits, and so the accent is half-drawl half-Laurence Olivier. Not my culture, I can tell you that! My mother always said the easiest dialect for actors to slide between was polished British English to slow sleepy Southern like Savannah. She imagines this is because that is where the accent actually comes from. Where does my mother get this kind of information? And why does she still purvey it?
And shortly thereafter, the truckers were gone as well. And there goes McCloud, on that horse that he rode in New York. I see him there meandering off, disoriented, tired like at the end of Shane, but the street sign says Hill Street, and there’s nothing but cabs.
The rural purge. It’s a term for what happened to the TV. And yes, I looked it up. It’s real. That’s the other problem with the look up: you are reminded that culture is ruled by the whim of a few.
And there were reasons to see it go. There were definite reasons, and in fact perhaps it is just best forgotten, all that inane rural culture that paraded its spectacle across the airwaves. There were reasons to hang down one’s head in shame, to hang down one’s head and cry. Reasons it made my Ms. Magazine mother wince, and reasons that it made it hard to imagine anything but an all-white world except through parody, or stereotype, or worse. There were reasons to get those girls out of those short shorts and into some power suits and shoulder pads, and there were reasons that as soulful as Charley Pride might have been when he came on Hee Haw, it didn’t make sense in a world where there was Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gaye. How could it?
But what came instead after this pogrom of the rural? What were they making room for in all those time slots? If it was M*A*S*H, I understand. I understand about M*A*S*H. If it was to make room for the black families, I get that too, but why did everyone have to live in a penthouse or a brownstone or in Bel Air? Even the breweries and the pizzerias and the junkyards and the auto mechanics are going away. Everyone is moving up! Moving up to champagne wishes and caviar dreams, and rich women in ski lodges in Denver fighting over their husbands’ and ex-husbands’ private jets while wearing fur coats. Upwards on oil wells. Up, up up to the sexy and incestuous saga of a wine-growing dynasty in Napa with their own family crest! Onward from the dust bowl, onward to Fantasy Island! I too can spend my life perpetually on a cruise ship! I too can live in a vineyard, like my betters.
We must, we must, we must move up, move out, remove ourselves from the country! No one wants to see stories about poverty and dirt and hardship on a regular basis. It’s a buzzkill.