Before the invention of farming around 10,000 years ago, humans had to forage for food. It was a precarious, hand-to-mouth lifestyle, back then before Joe Biden or Keith Richards were even born.
Although there were lean years, farmers produced enough food for there to be cities where otherwise useful people turned into lawyers, astrologers, politicians and musicians.
Before the first cities, everywhere was country, which, if you think about it, meant there was only Country & Western music. Before Ninevah and Babylon, there was no Urban & Eastern playlist on Spotify.
While they were hanging out waiting for someone to invent agriculture, Stone Age hunter-gatherers hunched around smoky fires in damp caves, listening to bards covering Bill Haley & The Comets, which often ended up with arguments about whether rock is a tool, a music genre, a play that beats scissors but not paper, or a celebrity. And what the heck is a clock, anyway?
We’ve come a long way in the last eight millennia or so. After all, now we have Tacoma and TikTok. Nevertheless, whether it’s better to live in the city or the country is still debated.
On the one hand, partisans of the rural life invoke the patriotism and upright character of lives lived outside sinful cities.
Merle Haggard brought the Country vs. City Controversy to AM radio dials in 1969.
We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee
We don’t take our trips on LSD
We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street
Cause we like living right and being free
The Living Right attitude still sells records — that is, if records were sold nowadays. Why, Jason Aldean cashed in on the old attitude just last year!
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you’re tough
Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Hard to believe, but not everyone is attracted to the wholesome country life.
Talking Heads sneered back in their 1978 track, “The Big Country.” City-slicker David Byrne, looking down his nose at the flyover states from the comfort of his coast-to-coast flight, drew a condescending line in the irrigation circles below.
I wouldn’t live there if you paid me
I wouldn’t live like that, no sirree
I wouldn’t do the things the way those people do
I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to
If you’re old enough to have heard these songs decades ago, then you’ll remember the hippies’ Back to the Land pipe dream; that spacey yearning for peace, love, and happiness — ideally under a geodesic dome in the woods somewhere near Longbranch.
From a beanbag chair oozing its stuffing through burn holes in a squalid University District apartment on Earth Day 1970, the countryside would have looked pretty appealing, and you might have inhaled what Bill Clinton claimed he didn’t as Three Dog Night harmonized on KOL FM:
Whenever I need to leave it all behind
Or feel the need to get away
I find a quiet place, far from the human race
Out in the country
It’s the humans that are always the problem, as in the old hymn, “Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.” Or Sartre’s bummer, “Hell is other people.”
Daydreaming about the joys of country life, you probably also bopped to the Canned Heat anthem:
I’m gonna leave the city, got to get away
All this fussin’ and fightin’, man, you know I sure can’t stay
No less an authority than Ecclesiastes has it that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Which, by the way, includes arguments about country vs. city life.
Sixth-century Athens had Aesop’s retelling of the Country Mouse-City Mouse Fable. It was the latest version of a really old story that’s almost as old as “Days of Our Lives.”
Remember how the city mouse visits his friend in the country, where he is served simple food, bland fare to his urban sophisticate’s palate, and how he invites the country mouse to return with him to the metropolis for a 5-star dining experience?
Inside the ancient equivalent of the Trump Tower, the mice friends scramble up onto the banquet table and begin gorging themselves on the rich scraps left over on the silver plates.
Suddenly, the door flies open, and two cats lunge toward them with murder in their eyes.
The panicked mice leap off the table and scurry to safety through a hole in the baseboard — just like in cartoons.
The country mouse’s heart is racing as he struggles to catch his breath. He gasps to his city friend through his hiccups that he’ll go back to the country, thank you, where, though the eating is plain, at least he can savor it in peace.
Odds are, you think the country mouse made the right choice.
Readers on the KP will leave the nightlife, high culture, and risky pleasures of the city to our übercool friends in Seattle.
To paraphrase the Standell’s 1966 proto-punk paean to Boston, “Dirty Water,” Seattleites are welcome to live down by the banks of the Duwamish and karaoke:
That’s where you’ll find me
Along with lovers, muggers, and thieves
Ah, but they’re cool people
Well, I love that dirty water
Oh Seattle, you’re my home
Out here in our rustic simplicity, we step outside on a September morning thinking warm days will never cease, the breeze ripe with mellow fruitfulness.
John Milton had the same experience when he left plague-infested London, “where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,” stepped outside his country cottage to breathe, and
Among the pleasant Villages and Farms Adjoined,
from each thing met delight.
Dan Clouse lives in Lakebay.
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