Reply #24: So who gets to tell the story? [View All]

[Orwellian_Ghost]

This was an interesting comment found at the article. There are others as well. I recommend looking at the discussion that comes after the article.

Any experience that shows affluent urban dwellers that they can't control everything is a step in the right direction, IMO. If Doug Fine is telling everybody to do likewise, he's full of manure. (OTOH, composted manure can help good things grow.) If his example gives lots of people some insight into what they're doing -- great. The worth of a symphony or a painting or book doesn't depend on its ability to make people run out and compose their own symphonies, paint their own paintings, write their own books, or otherwise follow in the creator's footsteps.

We do have a little problem here, and Anneli Rufus seems to have overlooked it. I can't overlook it because I live in a place where many affluent urban people come to get away from their affluent urban lives, and in creating their alternatives they've made it hard-to-impossible for the rest of us to live here. What I can't help noticing is that nearly all the stories about such places are written by the affluent urban people who move in, not by the people who've been there forever (or at least for a long time). There are many reasons for this. One is that even those of us who have stories to tell and the skills to tell them well have a real hard time getting the kind of access to agents and publishers and big-circulation magazines that the Doug Fines have, and when we do get it, we're expected to tell the stories that the agents and publishers and big-circulation magazines think their readers want to read.

Affluent liberal oh-so-well-intentioned readers, from "yuppie farmers" to eco-tourists, don't like to be compared to imperial colonizers -- the ones who arrive in a new place, don't recognize that it's already inhabited by sentient beings, and proceed to make it over into their idea of paradise. So we don't get to tell our side of the story. We do get bit parts as "local color" in other people's stories.

Oh yeah -- and we get to read liberal commentators taking each other's inventory in print. Big fun!