I disagree completely, and this is not just an attempt to aggrandise our national poet (Thomas was such an ardent Welsh Nationalist that he refused to join Plaid Cymru because it recognised the Westminster Parliament, and famously suggested that he could "understand the views" of the Meibion Glyndwr). There is vastly more to Thomas' poetry than anything which has been written in the English language about the cosmopolitan professional classes (the only real attempts I'm aware of are those of TS Elliott and Philip Larkin, neither of whom had anything like the degree of sympathy mixed with loathing). Thomas gives massive, profoundly human content to the same important truth that Marx was speaking to in the famous Manifesto passage on "the idiocy of rural life"; while there are admirable things about the rural way of life, it is a historically backward class, both regressive and reactionary.
The mass of rural people is less forward-looking, intelligent and open than the mass of urban people, both through self-selection (members of the rural working class remain in the countryside either because they can't or don't want to work in industries other than agriculture) and through the way in which rural life (smaller and more homogeneous communities) shapes people. The comparison with black people is misplaced; black people are black because they are black, but hicks can become urban within a week of moving house, and cosmopolitan only a few months later.
Prejudice against people because of their accent or background is always horrible (quite apart from anything else, it's rude; I hope I can be forgiven some of the stronger language I'm using here in the interests of plain speaking, and if nothing else, I plead my own background, which should contain enough animal excrement to satisfy all but the sternest critic), but the shudder of revulsion which causes urban leftists to use the "inbreds" slur is based in a reality about rural life. Do you not notice that all the people who have used the "hicks and inbreds" turn of phrase on lbo-talk, have used it in reference to their own past? I disagree with the contention that there is any process of racialisation going on here; the process which makes their cultural practices backward and nasty is historical, not congenital. Again, contempt is a nasty emotion, but so is patronage, and to pretend that there is nothing backward and degenerate about rural life is just untrue. I don't think that the appropriate attitude to rural life can be summed up any better than it was in "Iago Prytherch". You may have a point that urban contempt for rurals, like the contempt of anybody for anyone (try checking out attitudes toward gays and blacks next time you're out in the countryside), is an obstacle to forming a left movement in the USA, but there is a decent Marxist pedigree to the contention that the peasants are lost to the revolution anyway.
None of this is of course to say that there are not wonderful, intelligent and sensitive rural people; the towns are full of them.
dd
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