"It's really a strange town."
16 May 2024 at 04:38
There was allure beyond negation. Branson's geo-cultural attributesβnot quite the Midwest or the South or Appalachia yet also all three; a region of old European settlement but also westward expansion; perched above whatever modest altitude turned the soil to junk and predestined the land for poor Scots-Irish pastoralists; in a slave state with the largest anti-Union guerrilla campaign of the Civil War but little practical use for slaveryβinvite an unmistakable imaginative allegiance. This is the aspiration and the apparition that the novelist Joseph O'Neill has termed Primordial America, the "buried, residual homelandβthe patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve." "Wherever they hail from," 60 Minutes' Morley Safer went on, "they feel they are the Heartland." No matter the innate fuzziness, Real America in this formula is white, Christian, and prizes independence from the state. It is atavistic, not reactionary. from The Branson Pilgrim by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi [Harper's; ungated]