Line dancing

It’s a rarely remarked-upon process, and I wouldn’t have noticed it if Diane hadn’t pointed it out, but people in rural areas around the world are turning red-neck. Yes, that’s right, hicks and country bumpkins the world over don cowboy boots and hats and crank up the country music in their pickup trucks as they go off to line-dancing practice. You see men in string-ties in northern Sweden and women in enormous wigs in rural Taiwan– and who’d ever thought people would wear such large belt-buckles in the backwaters of Estonia!

Countrysides were of course always ignored by city-dwellers. Civilization is everywhere a matter of giving hicks the blessings of city-life. The word itself tells the story — “civilization” has its root in civis meaning “city.”

The only exception is the US. It is only in the US that civilization, such as it is, is based on rural values. Americans don’t actually believe in civilization, they believe in rurification. Not surprisingly, countryside types from around the world go for it like a hillbilly farmer goes for his sister. Red-neck culture gives you a way to talk, a way to walk, and a cultural idiom of resistance. So what if you look stupid?

I never cared much for these cultural expressions myself although I suppose my roots in rural Sweden provide me with a license. I chewed tobacco for a while, but I never shot squirrels or demanded that members of the same sex squeal like pigs. Still some of the paraphernalia is pretty cool and here in East Asia it adds an unexpected Occidental twist to the most Orientalist of experiences.

Diane and I spent a memorable evening in Nankai, northeastern Thailand, a few years ago. They had a restaurant on the roof of the hotel where we were staying and a duo was in charge of the entertainment — a Willie Nelson look-alike and Nankai’s own Tammy Wynette with frizzy hair and fuck-me heels. We ate deep-fried rat and red ant egg sallad while the moist midnight air carried the gentle twang of the steel-guitar across the Mekong river. I wonder what the remnants of the Hmong guerrilla over in Laos, on the other side of the Mekong, made of it. Come to think of it, they were probably off line-dancing.