Norman Rockwell is dead
Dismantling the myth of a happy Heartland

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by Joel Dyer (letters@boulderweekly.com)

Imagine a television commercial depicting Christmas time in the inner city. As the camera moves slowly past the projects, we see that the whole place is spic-and-span, every window freshly painted and encircled with multicolored lights. A beautiful wreath of fresh greenery hangs on every door. In the middle of the concrete basketball court stands a 20 foot high fir tree adorned with every imaginable bulb and tinsel. Little black kids in perfectly coordinated outfits dart here and there, squealing with joy and chasing each other around the giant community Christmas tree. Their moms and dads stroll along the sidewalks carrying large bundles of brightly colored packages as they sip hot cocoa. For the feel-good finale, fluffy pure white snowflakes the size of cotton balls begin to slowly float down over the whole scene. Suddenly, everyone stops in their tracks, looks to the heavens and simultaneously breaks into a rousing rendition of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." Cut and print!

Can you imagine the backlash that would occur if advertisers ever tried to use such a twisted vision of the ghetto to sell us their products? Jesse Jackson would have a fully justified conniption and the men and women who daily struggle just to survive in the economically depressed jungle we call the inner city would be angry as hell at such a disgusting distortion of their lives. But you don't have to worry. Such a commercial will never make its way into your living rooms and dens, and for good reason. The Madison Avenue gurus, whose job it is to convince us to buy things we don't need with money we don't have, realize that because four-fifths of us now live in or near urban centers, we know that life in the inner city isn't this way. They know that we would be offended by such a tasteless depiction. Unfortunately, they also realize that most people don't have a clue what life in rural America is like, so when it comes to creating consumer mythology, it is the lives of those in the heartland that tend to get painfully distorted.

Turn on your TV anytime between Thanksgiving and Christmas and you're likely to see a half dozen or so "over the river and through the woods" commercials within a couple of hours. You know the ones I mean. Grandpa meets the family at the train station in a one horse sleigh then takes them back to a gingerbread farmhouse where grandma is just pulling the turkey out of the oven along with 22 varieties of freshly baked pie. It's enough to inspire Norman Rockwell, were he still with us. But Norman Rockwell is dead, and so is this bucolic vision of rural America.

Imagine a realistic holiday greeting from America's heartland. The kids and grandkids arrive in a typical small rural town in their minivan because the train stopped coming years ago. As they drive through the three-block-long downtown, they see that every storefront is boarded up or the front glass is broken out. Chipped paint faded by the sun still spells out the words "close out sale." It's the only remaining evidence that commerce once existed in this place. At the end of the block are the only two remaining businesses in town: a gas station/convenience store and a trashy beer bar with a few hard-bitten pickups out front. On the outskirts of town our family passes the old school building; it too stands empty and crumbling. The half dozen kids still left in our rural community are being bussed to classrooms 40 miles away.

Finally our holiday visitors arrive at an old farmhouse that hasn't seen a paintbrush in 20 years. There are no lights or fresh cut wreaths. Our family enters through the kitchen door and is greeted not by the smell of roasting turkey, but by a kitchen smothered in dirty dishes crawling with cockroaches and a table piled high with months of unopened bills and bank notices. In the living room, grandma is wearing the same dirty robe she's been in for days. She's thinner than she's been in years because she isn't hungry anymore and hasn't been able to sleep for weeks. Grandma is suffering from severe depression. Across the cluttered room from granny sits a filthy, unshaven grandpa staring into space. On the table next to his chair is a bottle of cheap bourbon. It's been placed squarely in the middle of a legal paper captioned "Notice of Final Eviction." Grandpa has a shotgun in his lap and is desperately trying to think of any reason not to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. Odds are he won't find one. Merry Christmas!

No, it's not a pretty picture, but it is accurate. You could fill a book with all the depressing facts and figures about the sorry state of rural America that people don't know these days. But you couldn't get it published. The marketing departments of publishing houses figured out a long time ago that rural subjects don't sell well in big cities and that there aren't enough people left in the hinterland to justify an author's advance and the cost of the paper and ink.

That being the case, I have decided to provide a small holiday sampling of rural realities. Farm income declined by nearly half between 1996 and 1999 despite increased production. The average poultry farmer now raises 240,000 birds a year, but after expenses only nets $12,000 in earnings. Since 1998 pork has been selling for a price that barely returns one-quarter of the farmer's cost for raising the animal. The USDA estimates that this year's prices for major commodities will be the lowest they have been in a quarter of a century. In 1999, U.S. farmers grew two billion bushels of grain but failed to find a market for approximately half of that. Over one million family farms have been lost in the last 20 years, which has caused an economic chain reaction throughout rural America. One small business has gone under for every four farms that disappeared.

It is now estimated that one out of four people living in the rural landscape suffers from depression. Alcoholism, drug dependency and child and spousal abuse have increased dramatically in recent years; at the same time, the rural mental healthcare system has been virtually dismantled. One out of four kids in rural communities goes to bed hungry every night. That's a higher percentage than in the inner city. And finally, suicide has become the number one killer on America's family farms. Farmers are taking their own lives at a rate three to five times higher than the general population.

These are the harsh realities we should all think about next time we see a commercial designed to make us feel all warm and fuzzy by feeding us images of a fictional rural lifestyle. We should consider the pain such ads are causing the millions of economic refugees currently living in rural America who can only sit and watch as this lie about their lives is told over and over again. It's time we heard the truth about rural America. And it's past time for all of us to reach out a helping hand to those who have sacrificed so much to feed our families. Happy New Year from the broken Heartland.