read Hillbilly Liminality, Part 1, Hillbilly Liminality, Part 2, and Hillbilly Liminality, Part 3

I live in an inner-ring suburb of a moderately-sized Midwestern city that was once much larger and once one of the richest cities on the planet. Back before falu red rust and milky white flight and cheap foreign steel. Back when men named Rockefeller prowled the earth and sucked viscous black liquid from its depths. Before whatever we call the kind of economy to which we are now enslaved. I’ve heard it called the “attention” economy and I get why, but “inattention” economy seems to much more accurately reflect the nature of our professional and personal lives these days. All we seem attentive to are our own grievances, real or imagined. We used to build. Now we tear down. We have ceased to be caretakers and careful stewards of the world in which we live.

My home these days is in the city, but I haven’t always lived here. I learned a love of the earth somewhere else, disappearing into the hooded canopy of the forest, listening to bird song, smelling the mossy earth, crunching through fallen leaves, running my fingers across the sloughing skin of the shagbark hickory and the smooth bark of the beech, in awe of the earth’s mysterious power. . .

If you could fly from my stoop as the proverbial crow, you would do so for about 175 miles from Cleveland to reach my hometown of Logan. You would sail southward beyond the Cuyahoga River, across the flattened hills of Northeast Ohio, down, down, down and away from the glistening bowl of Lake Erie, beyond the line that marks the ancient glacier’s retreat, to the rolling Hocking Hills, where Black Hand Sandstone—the compacted deltaic sands of an ancient sea 300 million years long gone—forms some of the most spectacular rock formations you will ever see. You will have flown past the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and found yourself nestled in the forested hills and valleys of the Wayne National Forest.

Right around Interstate 70, which bisects Ohio across its midsection like a belt keeping its drooping lower half from falling down, you might notice the land begins to quickly change, the air starts to feel thicker, the smell of soil and flora grows deeper and richer. When you look skyward it will suddenly seem so much closer. Maybe it’s an optical illusion, but if there’s a poet inside you they will know you really are getting closer to the stars. If you are lucky enough to take this flight on a rainy afternoon in early summer, the petrichor in the air will be as strong as you have ever smelled, and there among the towering sandstone walls and the Trichomanes boschianum you might understand how rock and the blood of the gods have made this familiar scent that recalls ancient memories of childhood and of ages long past.

Southeastern Ohio is not unique in evoking a certain pull on its people. If one grew up in New York City—surrounded by towering skyscrapers, walking along narrow streets, feeling the wind blow in off the Hudson, hearing the cacophony of horns and sirens, pressing past people up and down the boulevards, climbing up endless staircases to family-packed apartments, walking to school at PS #, heading to the labyrinthian Metropolitan Museum of Art on the weekend, playing pick-up games at the closest neighborhood playground, defining home as a few city blocks—one might feel forever attached to the smell of late-night pizza slices and the pale yellow glow of fluorescent bodega lights. Place has a way of attaching to us on a cellular level. But like the cells that give us life—that build us into being—breaking and betrayal come calling. Deterioration sets in. The body will begin to tell you what it can and cannot do—and so will home. Home reminds you what your limitations are; leaving home can expand your limits.

Maybe experiencing place as if it’s an almost biological aspect of our being has more cultural and social and political power than we acknowledge. Maybe this is why we are so easily exploited—in the city and in the country—by the crass cynicism of those who benefit from our hatred. This is the Division Production Industry, and it sells its consumables in nearly every space—real or cyber—we inhabit. You don’t see as many of their storefronts as you used to, but you can now shop easily from their extensive online catalog. And like that menacing dealer lurking in the shadows of the Just Say No era, they’ll happily give you enough free product to get you hooked.

In the popular dialogue, on the news shows and in the social media posts, in most articles and opinion pieces, the apparent divide in the United States is described in the usual terms: Democrats vs. Republicans, liberals vs. conservatives, the left vs. the right, and still in 2025, black and brown vs. white. Although class talk has become more common in the years since the 2008 recession, we still rarely focus much attention on the poor vs. the rich (by design—to protect and validate those on the rich side of that equation). And we certainly do not pay close enough attention to what may be the most important supposed divide: rural vs. urban (although Beth Macy does excellent work on the topic in her recent book, Paper Girl). Most of these supposed binaries overlap, of course, but I’m choosing to focus on rural vs. urban because in many ways it’s the most easily-exploited of these binaries, and it is commonly used as a shorthand for all the others (it remains politically acceptable to leverage rural/urban differences for exploitative practices when—until fairly recently—doing so with these other differences was considered an affront to American “unity”). I am also focusing on the rural/urban divide because it’s a kind of “all takers” division in which folks across the entire political spectrum take part in order to conjure one enemy or another—the backwoods rube or the godless city hedonist.

In the years I have been on this planet I have lived in a lot of places—college towns and towns barely big enough to not be called villages, several good-sized cities, including Austin right before it transformed from just plain weird to techie weird, the cramped quarters of a guided-missile cruiser on one ocean and two seas, a Naval base in the Disneyfied and sun-fried city of Orlando, my boyhood bedroom in the woods during a brief interlude between college and whatever would come next. I walked and talked with Israelis, Saudi Arabians, and students and friends and acquaintances from more countries than I can begin to count. Thousands of people at this point. I have known people from six of the seven continents, but let’s cut me a break on Antartica. And though I have listened to many voices speaking many languages, and have seen cultural practices very different from my own (which themselves differ from those of the folks living just one county or one state over), and have enjoyed music in tunings good ol’ rock ’n’ roll never imagined, I have found that on a fundamental level everyone is essentially the same. Everywhere they are driven by love and hate and desire and fear, and too frequently, an unquenchable hunger to control people and to own everything. But fundamentally all the same. That is, perhaps, until they are fed into one machine or another designed to convince them they are unique or special in the face of all those others who are inferior and, in the most maliciously-designed of those machines, subhuman. The Division Production Industry builds those machines and keeps them well-oiled and running night and day.

Those of us from Appalachia or other rural American regions who have, out of desperation or desire or wanderlust, worked up the courage to leave the familiar confines of home for the possibilities that urbanity offers, tread between these worlds with an awkwardness we try to keep hidden. We are rooted in a place and a culture that formed who we are while we also possess the cultural capital of a global fluency. It is often an uneasy fit. A few years ago when avocado toast became a shorthand for liberal entitlement, I found myself realizing that I quite enjoyed avocado toast yet had never tasted an avocado until well into my 20s. Am I both an out-of-touch urban liberal and an out-of-touch rural rube? The Division Production Industry would have us believe we can only be one or the other. To be both is paradoxical, and if you are both you might well conclude you don’t belong to anyone’s tribe. So you might decide to just do a form of passing that allows you to have a voice, however quiet or loud, wherever you find yourself—in college classrooms or Provost’s meetings or shooting ranges or hometown bars or art museums or filling stations or ball fields or lumber yards or nature walks or policy talks. Code switching. Passing. These are forms of multilingualism to employ when you no longer belong there, so you choose everywhere instead.

But an America that has gone through a social vivisection offers little opportunity for political-cultural multilingualism for most people. All of our insides have been ripped out for the purpose of gastronomical inspection by an elite who knows it’s easier to eat the body in pieces than to devour it all at once. In the Tower of Babel story we are meant to understand that a shared language of the people poses a threat to God, but here on the earthly plane any shared language—that is, any sense of ourselves as one people—threatens those who merely fashion themselves as gods.

I don’t know how easily I might have reached the conclusion that our supposed divisions are largely imaginary—born significantly from competition over one resource or another and the perception of resource scarcity¹—had I never chosen to unbind myself from the idea that one should stay put. Staying put seldom results in having our biases and beliefs fairly challenged. I am reminded of Mark Twain’s assertion from The Innocents Abroad: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” It really doesn’t matter if that corner is a farmhouse on the prairie or a Park Slope brownstone—Twain’s declaration remains true.

The chance to travel and experience a world unlike the one I grew up in has perhaps been the greatest advantage I’ve earned from my hillbilly liminality. That travel helped me to conclude that the divisions we experience are sown not by the accident of our births, but by complex systems of power and money allied against the people. And none of us are exempt from those systems, however we might feel we have discarded the biases and bigotry that keep them going. In Something More Than Our Fathers, I wrote, “Small towns can birth as much love or as much hate as a big city. This has always been true. I have lived in both, in the North and the South, in the East and the West. I have seen the people of both disparaging those in the other. I have heard the people in opioid-decimated, copper-pulling rural towns describe the city as a hellscape of drugs and crimes. I have heard the people in segregated cities where black children are gunned down by white cops condescendingly decry the racism of rural America. In both I have seen far too many people applauding themselves way too loudly. Way too proudly. In both I have observed the ones who stand in the way of changing it all for the better.” The American system of the last few decades has failed people across all of its supposed divides, and extreme tribalism has arisen in the wake of economic decimation—a post-NAFTA economy that has gutted both the working and middle classes—and so people do what people have always done: turn inward, become self-protective, and grab whatever crumbs have fallen from the table. In the face of our own desperation, we find someone to blame (preferably someone far off, unusual, and belonging to one or more identity categories we do not). Or, as Beth Macy puts it in Paper Girl:

The bullies are no longer just on the playground; they’re on our school boards, in our mayor’s offices, behind the Resolute desk. They’re casting stones on social media platforms owned by bigger bullies who profit not by sharing fact-checked reports but by connecting lonely people who crave the addictive, rapid-fire punch of belonging and fear, fight or flight, us versus them—because it helps them sell more shit.

Here’s the thing—I have moved in and out of small town and cities and found many of the same kinds of trouble in both. And the same kinds of happiness and joy and success. To recognize the humanity of those who don’t live like you, love like you, look like you, think like you is not some kind of magic trick. Yes, leaving home, traveling, meeting people, experiencing the world makes it easier, but in 2025 we have all the resources we really need to open the world up at our fingertips. Unless. . . these resources are used in such a way as to cause more harm and more polarity. And that’s when the Division Production Industry is at its stockholder-pleasing best. The machines hum night and day, the smokestacks billow, the conveyor belts glide effortlessly and endlessly along, the divide grows and the cash flows ever-upward. The city guy fears that if he goes to the country he’ll be shot. The country guy fears that if he goes to the city he’ll be shot. Meanwhile the most dangerous place in the United States is a school building, and we can’t even see eye to eye on the unacceptable horror of that. As with all else in need of fixing, we’re too busy with our own grievances, real or imagined. Indeed, we have ceased to be caretakers and careful stewards of the country and the world in which we live.

Very Brief Bibliography of Readings on Urban and Rural American

Alexander, Brian. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town. St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Crown Publishers, 2016.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Viking, 2016.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Demon Copperhead. Harper, 2022.

Kusmer, Kenneth L. A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930. University of Illinois Press, 1976.

Macy, Beth. Paper Girl. Penguin Press, 2025.

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.

Woodard, Colin. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Penguin Books, 2011.

1. Of course resource scarcity can be real, but more often than not in the 21st century it is perception promoted and managed by those in power in order to increase profit and control the masses. As I write this, Elon Musk was given a one trillion dollar pay package—enough to give every single person in the United States nearly $3,000. It beggars belief that there simply aren’t enough resources—food, housing, clean water, etc.—to keep the human family relatively secure. This is a moral issue and not the political one we’re led to believe. Calling an issue political casts it as debatable between a number of sides. I refuse to believe there is rationality in coming down on the side of such obscene accumulation of wealth. Put another way: the U.S. GNP for 2024 was approximately 27.5 trillion US dollars—or roughly $83,000 per capita. We are by far the richest country in the world to the tune of about 9 trillion dollars. ↩