Review Redux: Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America

I originally reviewed this book on Goodreads in 2014 and have edited it somewhat to respond to some of the comments made there. And repost the edited review here.

This is a prime example of why sociology is not science. No testable hypothesis, or repeatable data, just a mélange of anecdotes from which sweeping generalizations are drawn. I do not mean to demean Sociology or any other discipline. Heavens, I taught a Sociology course and another in Political Science, but neither field is a science in the sense that they truly apply the scientific method, i.e, develop a testable, predictive, theory from a hypothesis developed from data. The problem I had here was that the data set (if one could call it that) was tiny and very limited and certainly not enough to draw meaningful conclusions. I love Sociology, Anthropology, etc, but I've been around long enough (too long?) not to be skeptical.

I live in a rural area (the closest town to me has a population of 2,500) and as a community college dean (population of the town 27,000 but a district covering hundreds of square miles that borders on NE Iowa) got to observe many rural high schools over thirty years. These two researchers, husband and wife, have the temerity to move to a small town in Iowa for 18 months, interview some local students, and from those observations, draw all sorts of conclusions. (After some poking around, it would appear that the community described in the book is Sumner, Iowa. Funny thing. My father and mother grew up in Fayette, Iowa, not fifteen miles east of Sumner. I suppose my parents are both examples of the brain drain. My father left to study at Yale and become a university president on the west coast. My mother hated the farm near Randalia – now a ghost town -- and talked disparagingly of Iowa the rest of her life. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Education and lived on the east coast. So should the high school in Fayette have tried to move them into the vo-tech track to keep them in Fayette? And this was 80 years ago.)

To draw those conclusions, it's obvious the authors have bought into the national mythology of the small town that probably never existed except in people's minds. Are rural areas in trouble economically? Yes. Are we losing population and youth? Yes. Has it always been so? Pretty much. Can it be fixed by adjusting the values of the local high schools? Hardly.

It's become fashionable to blame the problems of rural areas on agribusiness. The size of farms has increased, but ALL of the farms in this area are owned by family corporations. It takes brains to run anything but a hobby farm, those quaint little small acreages that profess to be sustainable by selling "organic" vegetables at the local outdoor market. No way are they sustainable economically and ALL rely on a second income in the family to pay the bills. The problems outlined by the authors are not unique to rural America. They are descriptive of an ever increasing under-class that exists both in rural and urban areas, one that reveals disdain for unions, a desire for the cheapest goods which necessarily fuels jobs abroad and the need for undocumented workers.

Their solution? Make the high school a "town-saver" by not pushing highly motivated students into four-year colleges and emphasize associate degree and vocational education. Just where have they been in the past forty years? Vocational adjuncts to community colleges were all the rage 30 years ago and have all withered on the vine for lack of students. "Gone are the days of plentiful, well-paying blue-collar factory jobs..." they report. Well, duh. That's why the vo-tech schools closed. Students don’t see a future in blue-collar work so they are flocking to four-year schools and community colleges to get into high tech and service industry jobs. My community college has a going program in training wind-turbine technicians, something they recommend starting. All they had to do was look forty miles across the Mississippi to see what they recommend already in effect. [Note that this program was discontinued 10 years later for lack of students.]

Their recommendation for small towns to embrace immigration, while laudable, would simply distort the labor market even further, driving down wages already too low. They suggest incentive programs to get professionals back to rural areas, especially in health care. The University of Illinois started just such a program forty years ago, building three regional medical schools precisely for the purpose of training rural family practitioners. Health care is thriving in my community but only because of gerontology and the movement of those who left. My college town of 27,000 has TWO dialysis centers. That tells you a lot.

In the thirty years or so I was at the college, I participated in innumerable focus and planning sessions designed to bring industry etc. to the community and revitalize the economy.Several opportunities arose: a prison the state wanted to build, a large pork processing plant, a mega-dairy in the western part of the district, and plastics plant. The town is close to a four-lane highway connecting to I-90. Each one of these initiatives was shot down. The community didn't want the traffic of visitors from Chicago coming to the prison; they didn't want "illegal" aliens to move to the area to work in the pork processing plant or mega-dairy, and they didn't want the pollution from a new industry. (And we won’t even talk about the ICE raids on Postville, Iowa that virtually closed the town after building a thriving Kosher meat plant.) What HAS thrived in the area is nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, and gerontological health care. Young people are moving out but returning here to die. Now how the educational community can solve that by focusing on vo-tech is beyond me. In the meantime, the company that thrived here and supported the economy has moved most of its operations to Mexico.

Many people resent sociologists like these two and I suspect their data suffers from the "Margret Mead" syndrome if not the "observer effect." We followed events in Postville, Iowa (could it be the same town pseudonymously named Ellis by the authors?) and read Stephen Bloom's "Postville: A Clash of Culture in Heartland America." I visited Postville and talked with a friend who was the chief deputy sheriff for a large county in which a corner of Postville resides. His take on Bloom? BS. Bloom only talked to a few people and many of his conclusions were just wrong. I have a feeling that Carr and Kefalas made similar mistakes and that they went to "Ellis" with a preconceived idea and found anecdotes to support it.

There’s also an element of holier-than-thou that really frosts me. They move to a small town, spent a short amount of time there, and then purport to tell the residents everything they are doing wrong. I’m a liberal (albeit with libertarian tendencies) but this kind of paternalism I find repugnant.

Note that Carr was born and raised in Ireland and Kefalas studied at Wellesley and the University of Chicago and they now live outside of Philadelphia, no doubt on the Mainline (full disclosure: I grew up on the Mainline.)

A very weak book with few new ideas.

Edit 2/19/19

Pro-Life or Pro-Abortion or Neither

I am pro-Life, but NOT pro-fetus. That's why I have six adopted children. To argue that the fetus is a "child" as some billboards proclaim, is specious. If it's your point of view because of your religion, fine, don't get an abortion, but if you believe in freedom of religion then you have no right to foist that mistaken view on everyone else.  To argue that because an embryo has the potential to become a human being, abortion should be prohibited, is silly. An acorn has the potential to become an oak tree, yet no one would argue that destroying an acorn is like cutting down an oak tree. Those who take that position rarely bother to stop and think about what it means to be a human.

At the molecular level we are indistinguishable from plants and bacteria -- on a chemical level our cells function the same as brewer's yeast, a single cell organism; and we share a 98.5% genetic (DNA coding) with chimpanzees -- which are also "alive." Therefore, the important question one must ask is at what point the fetus or zygote acquires those characteristics that make us human, for no one would deny that we are indeed profoundly different from other forms of life. The point at which humanness is acquired (not personhood, which is a legal concept) becomes important.

Traditionally, the anti-abortion advocates have argued that because the DNA genetic code exists at conception, that is when "life" begins. That is like saying a building is complete when the blueprints are done. The combining creates the DNA blueprint, but dead tissue excised in a hospital has the same DNA blueprint, and cancerous tumors contain genetic uniqueness, yet no one would call them "life" worthy of preservation. Not to mention the fact that only about 1/3 of all conceptions lead to a successful birth -- nature performs abortions at a much higher rate than humans.

I subscribe to the position that the potential for humanness begins at the moment when the cerebral cortex is formed and the synapses begin functioning. This is not a unique nor new position. The Jesuit scholar Teilhard de Chardin and the Catholic theologian Bernard Haring have both written that the cerebral cortex is the "center of all personal manifestations and activities." It is here that speech, conscious movement, visual information and sensory stimuli are all processed. The enlarged cerebral cortex is unique to humans, and it becomes a functioning entity sometime between 25 and 30 weeks of development. Coincidentally, that is also when electroencephalographic readings take place. (The absence of EEG readings is now widely used as a determination of death.) Teilhard de Chardin, who was a paleontologist, as well as a theologian, regarded the "development of an enlarged cerebral cortex as almost a second creation -- as a sign from God that humanity is, indeed, special, regardless of the fact that we share a common ancestry with all other life."

I don’t subscribe to Theilhard’s spiritual view of the world and cite him merely to point out that there exists a variety of religious viewpoints with regard to abortion. But to me many of those who claim to be “pro-Life” are merely parroting a political position and are being manipulated for political ends rather than promoting a coherent philosophical view.

Statement of Faith as Delusion

I was wandering around, perusing some things when I stumbled on AnswersinGenesis.org. It includes some rather remarkable suppositions. To wit:

By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.

Specifically noted are such nonsensical items as

*The days in Genesis do not correspond to geologic ages, but are six [6] consecutive twenty-four [24] hour days of creation.

*Scripture teaches a recent origin for man and the whole creation, spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ.

*The great Flood of Genesis was an actual historic event, worldwide (global) in its extent and effect.

to cite but a few. Most rational people would argue this set of beliefs is, at best, delusional. And if just a few people adhered to this set of rubbish, they would be considered to have a delusional disorder.

A delusion is defined by the psychiatric profession as "a belief that is held with strong conviction despite evidence disproving it that is stronger than any evidence supporting it. It is distinct from an erroneous belief caused by incomplete information (misconception or misunderstanding), deficient memory (confabulation) or incorrect perception (illusion). The psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers proposed 3 criteria for delusional beliefs in 1913: certainty (the belief is held with absolute conviction), incorrigibility (the belief cannot be changed with any proof to the contrary) and impossibility or falsity (the belief cannot be true) (Jaspers, 1967). Delusions are associated with a variety of mental and neurological disorders, but are of diagnostic importance in the psychotic disorders."

The statements of faith above would certainly appear to meet the criteria of being delusional. Yet, according to the DSM,cultural or religious beliefs held by millions are not considered delusional. "Beliefs that would be considered normal for an individual's religious or cultural background are not delusions."

That statement itself would appear to meet the criteria of delusional.

Contempt of Court Redux

I was reviewing some book reviews I wrote years ago in preparation for a lecture on the Supreme Court. This one would have been appropriate for my talk on the 14th Amendment, which was already too long, anyway, but it will fit nicely when I discuss the lack of enforcement powers of the Supreme Court. This was a case where they showed a bit of muscle and in 1906, no less, and related to the 14th Amendment.

I had forgotten that one of my Goodreads friends noted that it was popular in the south to have your picture taken at a lynching, especially if you were one of the perps, and have postcards made from the pictures which then were mailed to friends and relatives. Many of them are still available in antique shops and some were collected in a book and made into a movie. If you have the stomach for it you can look at them at https://withoutsanctuary.org.


My edited review from 2012:

Note. If you don't like spoilers, don't read the book since the first chapter reveals what happens right up front. Everyone else *should* read it. Often we labor under the assumption that because things are the way they are today, it must have been ever thus. This book will quickly disabuse you of that notion.

The extraordinary story of two heroic black lawyers who championed the case of an innocent man, a sheriff more interested in political advancement than justice, mob rule, and one of the very few times when the Supreme Court has issued a contempt citation for failure to follow its rulings, and the importance of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. To quote Thurgood Marshall: " The Shipp case was perhaps the first instance in which the court demonstrated the the Fourteenth Amendment and the equal protection clause have any substantive meaning to persons of the African-American race. . . .The import of the Sheriff Shipp case on the federal court's authority over state criminal cases should not be underestimated." It also meant that Justice Harlan was to become one of my most recent heroes.

The case began with the assault on a young white woman who had been walking home from work when she was attacked by a black man and although she was never able to identify him precisely, a black man roughly meeting her description by the name of Ed Johnson was arrested. There was another witness who swore he had seen Johnson with a leather strap in the vicinity. Johnson unwaveringly swore his innocence and had several witnesses who maintained he had been several miles away at a bar.

While Chattanooga had been a place of reasonable racial harmony for several years and had had no recent lynchings, (in fact, two well-respected local ministers, one having served with the union, the other with the Confederacy, were a strong force arguing against mob violence but they were out of town that evening,) a mob formed when they heard someone had been arrested and was soon whipped into such a frenzy they began to batter down the doors of the jail. They were only persuaded from further violence when Sam McReynolds, the judge assigned to the case, showed up and offered to prove that Johnson was not even there. He and the Sheriff had arranged earlier in the day to have Johnson and another marginal suspect taken to another city. Finally satisfied, the mob dispersed.

Before Gideon v Wainright, suspects had few rights and were not entitled to a lawyer. Unlike most states, however, Tennessee law required that a lawyer be appointed in capital cases. Also unlike today, which practice is now forbidden, it was common for judges to meet with prosecutors to plan the prosecution. The question was whom to appoint as the defense attorneys for John after the grand jury had returned a "true bill" of indictment. Despite numerous efforts, the Sheriff had been unable to get a confession from Johnson who continued to swear to his innocence.

The authors do a masterful job of portraying the case. The three court appointed lawyers really did their best against a stacked deck, especially Judge Shepherd who, in an impassioned summation to the jury, ripped the judge and prosecutors for not giving Johnson a fair trial. Initially the jury was split 8-4 for conviction, but after the judge sent them home for the night, he met with the prosecutors. No one knows what happened during that meeting but everyone feared the eruption that would occur should Johnson be found innocent or there be a hung jury. In any case, immediately upon returning to their deliberations the next morning, the jury announced they had a verdict and all four of the holdouts had changed their minds.

The trial itself had some startling scenes with a couple of jurors, in tears, requesting that the victim be brought back to testify and *they* asked her if she could swear that Johnson was her attacker. She never could with certainty. After the verdict Shepherd wanted to appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court but three more lawyers, appointed by the court, picked in a closed door meeting with the prosecution (highly unethical behavior) and, it was later admitted by the judge, two of whom were picked by the prosecution, persuaded Johnson, and the other lawyers that *even if he was innocent* it was better to be hung in the course of *justice* rather than by a lynch mob. When they announced their decision not to appeal the verdict, an extraordinary decision, the judge sentenced Johnson to hang, the penalty for rape in Tennessee.

They had failed to reckon with Noah Parden, whose resume alone is worth a book. His trip to Washington where he convinced Justice Harlan to issue a stay of execution and the later decision that resulted in the federal application of basic rights to the states under the 14th amendment is riveting. What Parden had managed to do was to persuade the Court of the need to apply the Sixth Amendment requirement of a fair trial to the states Due Process was not to mean simply did the rules get followed, but did the defendant get a fair trial. Equal Protection had to mean that black defendants would get the same presumptions of innocence and privileges accorded to white defendants.

Unfortunately, the significance was perhaps not lost on the mob, which, horrified that the federal court might deign to dispute its cherished denial of black men's rights, decided to enforce its own brand of morality. The Supreme Court has no enforcement powers but what they did was, I believe, never before, nor since, done. No spoilers here, read the book.

To give you a small flavor of the endemic racism that pervaded American society at the time, it was the practice of lawyers admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court to kiss the Bible as they were sworn in. After black lawyers were admitted to the bar, that practice was dispensed with because white lawyers refused to have their lips touch anything that might have been sullied by black lips.

Ed Johnson lies today forgotten in a closed African-American cemetery under a tombstone on which is inscribed, I AM A INNOCENT MAN. GOD BLESS YOU ALL.

Interestingly, much of the research for the book was done at Tuskeegee University in Alabama which has a detailed record of virtually every lynching. Many of the original documents are in terrible shape and part of the proceeds of the book will be allocated to help the preservation of those materials.

From Quora. David Shapiro on Colbert and Trump

Why does Stephen Colbert speak about President Trump in such an unprofessional and horrible manner?
David Schapiro

Let’s answer this question with another. You walk into a bar. There is a man there, speaking loudly. You hear him call one of the patrons “Crooked”. You hear him call another customer a “Liar”. He calls most of the customers “rapists and murderers.” You see him walk up to a war hero and call him a loser for having been captured defending the country. The bartender suggests that the man is being rude and not respecting his establishment. The loud man turns to the bartender and says “you’re a liar and a fake! Why are you lying about my behavior? “ The bouncer at the bar asks the man to calm down and respect the customers. The loud man says “Why are you singling me out! This is a witch hunt! Why don’t you go after the lady who was in the bar last week who was on her phone emailing all night!” The loud man starts bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, about how popular he is and how everyone loves him. About how he’s kicked out all the paying customers at the bar and brought in his friends and gave them free drinks which he had no authority to do.

A man in a suit stands up and says “sir, you’re being rude. This is a friendly establishment and you are demeaning it with your behavior.”

…and the man in the suit is the one who is horrible and unprofessional?

Mike Tidwell and John Barry and Katrina

I was listening to an older C-Span BookTV program--I often download the audio and it takes a while to get to them all -- that occurred after Hurricane Katrina. John Barry is the author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (My review is here) an extraordinary book, and Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast that I have yet to read, but will.

The show, at the bookstore Politics and Prose in Washington, was taped not long after Katrina devastated New Orleans. Both of these authors had a great deal to say about that event and how the devastation could have been avoided. I remember there was lots of discussion at the time of the corruption of the New Orleans Levee Board, yet as Tidwell pointed out, that organization had no responsibility for the levees that failed. It was the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Government. And it must be remembered that while the hurricane was indeed strong, it was the over-topping of the Lake Ponchartrain levees and their failure (they were supposed to have been able to withstand much more than they did) that caused the disaster.

But New Orleans is sinking. It was built on the alluvial soil deposited by the Mississippi every year during its regular flooding. The New Orleans levees were built to prevent that flooding, so now New Orleans is the only U.S. city that is below sea level. Louisiana is losing 25 acres per day to erosion. Several university studies have made it clear that one solution is to rebuild the barrier islands. It could be done for $14 billion. That sounds like a hug amount, yet it was the cost of the Big Dig in Boston whose sole purpose was to speed traffic to Logan Airport and it was the cost of just six weeks in Iraq whose purpose was, well, just what was its purpose. Another $14 billion would be required to bring all the levees up to a better standard. Again, a lot of money. Yet the damage to repair New Orleans was the destruction of 300,000 homes and a cost of $125 billion of which on $80 billion was covered by insurance. So again, our failure to address infrastructure issues in this country in the face of increasing number of natural disasters, while we embark on outrageously expensive overseas ventures with little purpose or success, is nothing short of criminal. It's also symptomatic of a failed state.

Black Confederate Soldier Myth

Kevin Levin has posted the book proposal for a very interesting book due out this fall. The proposal itself makes for fascinating reading. It's available at Levin's site: http://cwmemory.com/searching-for-black-confederate-soldiers-the-civil-wars-most-persistent-myth/

Review: 38 Years a Detroit Firefighter's Story by Bob Dombrowski

A very personal memoir of the author's thirty-eight years as a Detroit firefighter, moving up through the ranks to become Chief. The gradual fall of Detroit and the terrible difficulties the firefighters were forced to endure as budget cuts and white flight (in which the firefighters themselves participated after suing for the right to live outside the city) is told quite humbly and with an undercurrent of humor. More about the politics of the department than the techniques, it was still an interesting read.

Interesting quotes: "If it is true that a nondrinker lives less than a drinker, then it is also true that a non-firefighter lives longer than a firefighter. According to the experts, firefighters have a ten-year-shorter life expectancy because of all the smoke, chemicals, and dangers they face. So firefighters should enjoy a few drinks daily. Losing seven years of your life is better than ten. Where the heck is my pea can?"

"Many injury letters started out with the words “While sliding the pole at 0735 hours, I twisted my knee” or “I twisted my ankle.” In fact, there were so many injuries while sliding down the pole at seven thirty in the morning that the Michigan Department of Safety got involved. Then somebody determined that the poles were dangerous and must be removed. This became a big argument with firefighters who loved the poles and wanted to keep them. They were a symbol of Detroit firefighting, just like the red trucks and our traditional helmets."

"Sometimes people will do things like throw out a mattress to soften their fall. And it can be dangerous for firefighters. We have had firefighters killed by jumpers landing on them."