In the Bible, Jesus excoriates the scribes and Pharisees for compassing sea and land (that is, travelling far and wide) to make converts, while ignoring the hypocrisy and unbelief more local to them – the entrenched darkness in their own hearts. My metaphor falls apart at that point, because Jesus wasn’t saying “Hey, instead of traveling far and wide to make converts ‘two-fold more the child of hell than yourselves,’ you should do that task closer to home.”
My point is about travel and not about making more Pharisees. God knows we have enough of those.
In the Cohen brother’s near-perfect film masterpiece Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) says the classic line “Ain’t this place a geographical oddity? Two weeks from everywhere!” As a writer, you know when you’ve read or heard a perfect line. There’s zero fat in that joke. It is brilliant writing. That line (and the whole movie) makes you, consciously or subconsciously, pine for a time when real distance made the world bigger. When (for most people) local was all there was.
Ulysses is not the hero in the movie. He’s a scoundrel and a representative of worldly modernity run amuck in the midst of the quaint, picturesque, often backwards and antiquated, image of the old south. Nobody says it was all perfect. There were horrors at home just like there were horrors everywhere, but there is a part of us that still longs for some historical, geographical sense of “home.”
The heart’s desire for Mayberry is real.
Back at the beginning of the last century, the American Century, Hemingway and the other expatriates, damaged by war, dissatisfied with quaint, rural America, became the “Lost Generation” abroad, making the world their playground. War damaged hedonists, traipsing around in foreign countries made for good art, I’ll admit. I’m a huge Hemingway fan. But the mythical romance of it killed the idea that a beautiful soul could stay home and not wander. Wanderlust became a cult.
This idea of Bohemian children of privilege, trekking around Europe and Africa, destroying civilization for its own good, is the foundation of the wanderlust cult – even today.
There are many reasons why this corrupt romantic ideal caught on.
The Industrial Revolution was killing rural America, and it was doing it on purpose. In addition to millions of rural citizens leaving the farm and flooding into the huge cities, making them worker drones for the elite, the advent of global war took millions of these men and threw them into Europe – a brothel of degeneracy and hedonism if there ever was one. From these realities we derive the old saying (and I paraphrase poorly) “How will you ever get them back on the farm once they’ve seen Paris?” Which is to say, “European girls are easy.”
The same thing happens with Amazon and Walmart and the cult of foreign travel.
What am I saying here? I mean, that’s where we all come to in my columns. “What in the world is he going on about?”
And that’s really the point. Why do I have to be going anywhere with this? Why can’t I just stay home and enjoy it? (winky face)
The point is that, lately, we’ve been enjoying ourselves locally. We’ve been purposefully staying close to home. Vacationing regionally. Shopping at Mom-and-Pops, eschewing chains, rejecting the one world cult. Tramping down the prurient lust for some external sense of happiness in dislocation.
Did Hemingway experience more jumping on a train in Paris and riding to Berlitz or to Spain to fish than I can experience with my wife visiting small towns in Texas we’ve never seen? Who knows. But my local travels are not likely to create a cult of wandering hedonists buying tourist t-shirts in Pamplona.
When you eat, drink, travel, and buy local (You’ve all heard of these quaint terms, right?) you systematically rebuild the blocks of civilization that have been purposely dismantled in favor of globalism and the modern, progressive, statist world village. Localism, that is – spending our time, resources, energy, etc. locally, is warfare against the corporate, one-world hellscape the elite have in mind for you and your progeny. Think that’s extreme? It’s not.
What does this have to do with Ulysses not wanting to wait two weeks to buy Dapper Dan pomade because it was coming two weeks from Bristol? Nothing. I don’t know. I’ve lost the thread.
Buy local.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
