The country-city thing kind of blew up on us there for a bit. Martin was correct that Dennis C's "heavy handed" comment struck a nerve - it felt like criticising the flower arrangements at a funeral - but I'd note in passing that I didn't call anybody anything, let alone a "city boy." I invoked a little narrative - provocatively, to be sure, but with a purpose (poorly executed). Sometimes one wants to chuck a little Mythos into the roiling cauldron of Logos that is LBO Talk, and see what happens. I did it poorly, so the experiment, so to speak, was inconclusive.
It might be worth reflecting on the fact that the absence of the city predates the city. I think that means the first articulation of the *distinction* between city and country originated from within the city. At least inceptually, the city was the innovation; "city people" "knew" that they (or theirs) had come *to* the city "from without". Inceptually, those *not* in the city didn't necessarily know they were missing out on anything - at least not until an at least latent urban identity had been conceptualised, articulated and disseminated. (As in, "Hey, cuz - you gotta come see this shit!")
I've never met a country person (which I don't mean as synonymous with an industrial farm worker) who worried much about whether their access to "nature" was "mediated" or not. Neither word has much use on the farm. Maybe alienation - from "nature," not from the products of one's labour - is like an infection that spreads outward from the libraries - a kind of hidden cost of consciousness. Off the books. ;-}
You can't get milk out of the idea of a cow - and it's damn hard to get milk out of an *actual* one while you're reading. Put that book down, son. Step away from the computer. Go outside play with your friends. Or with yourself. You may be pleasantly surprised.
I'll give the last word to Brother Fanon:
---
Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation, at the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people, this artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean values — the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty — become lifeless, colorless knick-knacks. All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged.
Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectual had learnt from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native's mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of this theory. The very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend — these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie, because for them my brother is my purse, my friend is part of my scheme for getting on.
The native intellectual takes part, in a sort of auto-da-fe, in the destruction of all his idols: egoism, recrimination that springs from pride, and the childish stupidity of those who always want to have the last word. Such a colonized intellectual, dusted over by colonial culture, will in the same way discover the substance of village assemblies, the cohesion of people's committees, and the extraordinary fruitfulness of local meetings and groupments. Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred — or everyone will be saved. The motto "look out for yourself," the atheist's method of salvation, is in this context forbidden.
- from *Wretched of the Earth*