David McElroy

JASPER, Ala. — When my family moved to this little town when I was a kid, I thought we’d moved to the end of the world, because I’d never lived in a place this tiny. Although I came to appreciate some things about it by the time I left, I’ll always feel like a stranger in a strange land here. I’m just not a good match for the culture.

Jasper is the county seat of Walker County, about an hour northwest of Birmingham. That’s the county courthouse above, and the clock at the right is also located on the courthouse square. The city is home to roughly 15,000 people today, not much bigger than the 11,000 or so that it was when I moved here when I was 12 years old. After having spent my years before then moving around between somewhat bigger cities all over the South, it was a culture shock to me when we came to live in this place so that my father could take care of his aging parents. I stayed until I left to attend the University of Alabama and even came back to work briefly after that.

I came here today because I wanted to think about how people meld into cultures and how those cultures affect their political beliefs and actions. We like to think of ourselves as individuals — especially those of us who believe in individual freedom — but there’s something that happens to groups of people living and working and raising families together that shapes them in ways that are hard to understand.

More than we sometimes realize, much of what we are is a product of the culture in which we’re raised and in which we choose to live. This has implications for how we need to organize our societies.

I started thinking about this issue last weekend as I listened to a debate between interns from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation about the differences between libertarians and conservatives. I was stunned at the final point of the opening remarks of the first Heritage debater representing the conservative position:

“Without a free society, you cannot have a free individual. But with an absolutely free individual, you cannot preserve a free society.”

My first emotional impulse was to call the guy an idiot for making such a bizarre and Orwellian assertion. But the more I listened to the speakers from the two sides talk as the debate went on, the more I realized that the differences between these people weren’t primarily their ideas. It was that they were part of very different cultures — and there’s no way to reconcile the two.

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I won’t be posting any new articles this week, but there will still be articles posted each day (including one you’ll find right under this one). If you’ve read all of the hundreds and hundreds of articles I’ve posted, you might have already seen the articles for this week. Otherwise, you might not have even known I was gone

Since I didn’t have anyone available to recommend the best articles as reruns — and I’m too lazy to go through them all myself — I’m just reposting some that consistently get read each week from random people coming in from search engines. I hope you happen to enjoy them.

I should return in about a week. The monkeys will deal with any pressing needs, but they’re even slower about correspondence than I am. Enjoy your week.

I get varying reactions when I tell people that I quit watching television 15 years ago. Some people look at me as though I’m a alien from Mars. Many, though, nod knowingly and say, “Oh, I don’t watch the stupid shows. I just watch it for news.”

What those people don’t understand is that they’re watching the most dangerous thing on television. If you want to watch so-called “reality” TV or low-brow humor, I might laugh at you, but you aren’t under the impression that you’re educating yourself. You know exactly what you’re getting.

The people who watch the TV news channels, however, are under the mistaken impression that they’re being educated about the issues. They don’t seem to realize that what they’re getting is entertainment in a news format. They don’t understand that “television news” is the ultimate oxymoron.

This is counter-intuitive for most people, who assume they’re doing a good thing when they avoid the “stupid shows” and they instead watch news and similar programming to “educate themselves about the issues.” So why do I claim they’re mistaken?

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