Hispanic Fanatic

Recently, I got dragged to a theater to see an insufferable kids movie.

Normally, I have nothing against films for kids, and I will catch a showing of Paddington 2 with you anytime.

But this movie sucked. The only reason my family attended was because we had to accommodate the youngest member of our group, who inexplicably wanted to see a movie that was too childish even for the children in the theater.

I won’t identify this film, because then this site becomes a movie-review outlet, and that’s not exactly my forte. Although I will say, once again, that Goodfellas is the greatest movie of all time.

The kids movie I had to endure was no Goodfellas. Although a kids version of that Scorsese masterpiece is interesting to ponder.

In any case, it wasn’t just this film’s dull story, heavy-handed dialogue, cringy humor, and hammy acting that annoyed me. Those were all factors, but the chief reason for my antipathy was more thematic.

You see, the plot of this particular monstrosity was that a married couple lose their jobs in the loud, crowded, obnoxious big city. So they move their family to the rural countryside, where they literally live in a barn.

After a period of adjustment, complete with kooky locals and quaint rural customs, the family falls in love with their new home. The movie ends with the family dancing in joy as their new neighbors surround them and clap along in glee.

I’m not exaggerating. This fucker ends with our main characters literally dancing in sheer happiness at their new life. The scene is in slo-mo, no less.

Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I am from Wisconsin. Although I grew up in an urban environment —Milwaukee, home of the major league-best Brewers — I’ve spent more time in the Wisconsin countryside than most Latinos, progressives, or college-educated elitist libtards (whichever category you want to jam me into).

So I can tell you that rural America is not a place where people dance in slow motion, bursting with exuberance at their heavenly existence. It is a place, quite frankly, that is suffering.

Don’t take my first-hand experiences for it. Acres of studies and piles of books have documented this issue. You know that phrase “deaths of despair”? Yeah, it’s about people who don’t live in cities.

By most measurements, rural America has a worse quality of life than urban America. People who live in the country have shorter lifespans, higher poverty, less education, and fewer cultural or economic options. You are more likely to see meth heads taking over barns than a grateful family doing a jig because they escaped the city.

But despite wretched kids movies like the one I had to endure, and all those romcoms about city women ditching their lives for a hunky man who works on a farm, we all know, deep down, that it is ineffectual propaganda.

Several small towns will give you free land if you move there. A basic rule of economics is that if you have to give something away for free, it’s because nobody wants it.

And it’s not just America. Rural areas of Japan, Italy, and other countries are emptying out fast because humans around the world have decided that cities are superior, or at least more conducive to survival.

So why do we continue to glamorize the country life? Why do we insist that everybody would be better off if we lived outside a small town, away from the concrete and crowds of the big, scary city?

Part of it is our ongoing insistence that rural Americans are the true patriots, the ones whose voice and votes matter more than the rest of us. The fact that rural Americans are synonymous with “white conservatives” is a coincidence, I’m sure.

I’m not saying that cities are paradise. But portraying rural life as nonstop joy and the key to happiness is more than disingenuous. It is an insulting lie.

Also, if we kill this particular trope, I won’t have to go to any more shitty kids movies.

In Europe during the Middle Ages, lepers and vagrants were often assumed to have nefarious supernatural powers. The thinking was that too much exposure to the riff-raff would cause your hands to fall off, or your baby to die, or your wife to go mad. And if the local burgermeister couldn’t get it up with his mistress-wench, it must have been because that withered crone who begs outside his door had placed a hex upon him.

The reason for this odd logic, according to some historians, is that as cities grew, a permanent underclass developed that freaked out the respectable people. The upper classes feared these cretins who dressed in rags, and to deal with this dread of the unknown (or to assuage their guilt for not helping those less fortunate than themselves), they claimed that the wretches only appeared weak. So the myth grew that some manic with no teeth and gangerous limbs could take you out if you weren’t careful.

We’re much more civilized today, of course, and we don’t blame the poor for our calamities – well, except for all those homeless guys who are making downtown unsafe… and the welfare recipients who continue to sponge the system… and those illegal immigrants who are stealing our livelihoods… and…

Wait a minute.

Yes, we do indeed go after those who can’t possibly compete with the middle and upper classes. If we’re fortunate enough to achieve a certain level of comfort, but that final rung on the economic ladder is too slippery to grasp, we blame our distress on the equivalent of Middle Age witches.

This blaming necessitates the really nifty trick or assessing that someone has no power, and therefore won’t fight back, and then ascribing enormous power to them. The tactic is especially common in prosperous societies, where people have more possessions and, therefore, have more to lose.

A crazy homeless guy ranting about God reminds us of our potential to bottom out more than it would in say, Sierra Leone, where poverty is a widespread fact of life.

Similarly (and most importantly from this blog’s perspective) a team of illegal immigrants clambering over the neighbor’s roof, laboring mightily in the summer sun, invokes a fear in middle-class Americans that these hard-working strangers are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead – and that means they’re coming for our nice cars and fancy televisions and 80GB ipods and crème brûlée torches (by the way, this last item is real and exists solely for people who have way too much disposable income).

It’s been pointed out that immigrants are often the boogeyman for societal problems. Just look at Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” to see how despised the Irish were.

So now it’s the Latino’s turn to be scorned and feared.

Naturally, there are clear objections to the idea that illegal immigrants are modern-day scapegoats. Foremost among them is that undocumented workers are not cost-free to the economy, nor are they incapable of criminal behavior. In other words, negative reactions to illegal immigrants are not solely based upon made-up superstitions.

However, the depths of hatred for these individuals, and the vast influence ascribed to them, boggles the mind. Any sensible discussion of immigration reform is doomed once it’s declared that a guy making sub-minimum wage who lives in constant fear is really the secret strongman.

So do we go on blaming the powerless?

Personally, I’m going to try to take more responsibility for my issues – unless of course I can turn this around and blame someone much, much more powerful than me, like the government or Big Oil or the Bavarian Illuminati.

OK, now I’m on to something.