A simpler time? Yeah, when?

by David Benjamin

“… You can’t go back home to your family—to a young man’s dream of fame and glory, to the country cottage away from strife and conflict, to the father you have lost, to the old forms and systems of things which seemed everlasting but are changing all the time…”  

—Thomas Wolfe

PARIS — Just before I flew here from Wisconsin, I encountered an annoying TV commercial for a company called Tractor Supply, which was fiercely promoting its mission to restore a simpler “life out here”—rural, white and agrarian—to Americans weary of the madding crowd and fearful of the multicolored metropolis. I scoffed, because I started life in rural America, where nothing struck me as palpably simple, where confusion reigned, poverty impinged, conflict simmered, substances got abused and prejudice ran rampant.

Pretty much like today. 

I note, of course, the irony, that a company with a net worth of $8 billion, with  2,000 stores and 46,000 employees, is going on TV to sell simplicity.

My main objection, I guess, is to the specious notion that there’s some sort of Thoreauvian virtue in living a life parochial, remote and seemingly ascetic (but with plenty of ready cash to buy provisions and machinery at Tractor Supply). Henry David Thoreau himself, the evangelist of “Simplify, simplify!”, terminated his woodsy experiment, forsook his cabin and scurried back to town, where the action was.

I grew up where the action was, in a hamlet of 4,500 whose main drag, barely a mile long, existed in a constant state of clamor, commotion and clutter. Tomah was one of a few thousand Midwestern “market towns” that provided sustenance, commerce and fun to a surrounding rural area that spanned hundreds of square miles dotted with villages, crossroads, farms, pastures, woods, cranberry bogs and an army base.

In the fourteen blocks that run north from the intersection of Highways 12 and 16 to the Milwaukee Road tracks, the Tomah of my childhood squeezed into its commercial center five grocery stores, four diners, an A&W root beer stand, two bakeries, five hardware stores, a shoe store and my uncle Bob’s shoe repair shop, several clothing emporia including the Bassinet, where my Aunt Bernice sold baby clothes, a Walgreen’s and a Rexall, two five-and-dimes, two banks and a loan company, the Post Office, a city hall, police and fire departments, a ranger station (actually, just past the railroad tracks), a public library, a city park (with fountain), two warring synods of the Lutheran Church, two dentists (one Catholic, one Protestant), four gas stations, a barber shop and several hairdressers, a laundromat and the biggest dry cleaners in Monroe County, two movie houses, at least a half-dozen bars and a bowling alley, a pool hall for the local delinquents, a furniture store, two radio stations, Bernie Schaape’s realty office, two very classy supper clubs (the Carlton and the TeePee) and the mighty Cash Store. 

This was hardly a simple burg, especially on Friday night when the stores stayed open ’til nine and the bars ’til two, when most of the farmers in the county, along their wives and kids, plus a few hundred GIs from Camp McCoy rolled into town to shop, eat, drink, cruise, fight, flirt, spend their wages and stand on the sidewalk for a half-hour at a stretch catching up, telling lies and passing gossip to old friends (or enemies). 

If anything brought simplicity to this roiling, boiling smalltown melting plot, it was the invasion of Walmart, which built a superstore out beyond the tracks. Sam Walton’s vast magnetic blob underpriced every retail outlet in Tomah and sucked the life out of a downtown where, through my open window above the S&Q Hardware, I had fallen asleep to a lullaby of drunken shouts and ladies’ laughter from the sidewalks of Superior Avenue on Friday and Saturday nights and the roar—every night—of Macks and Peterbilts air-braking and upshifting at the Monowau Street stoplights.

Towns ravaged by Walmart—and by Walmart wannabes like Tractor Supply—have never been quite so simple as they are now. Tomah’s main drag, no longer the market mecca of a small agrarian empire, is a hollowed-out shell of its livelier, more complicated—and more wild and sinful—former self. The town has become a bedroom community for a less sociable populace who, by and large, go somewhere else to work, recreate, vacation and spend their money. 

The message not conveyed in Tractor Supply’s subtly reactionary commercial is that those “simpler” days of yore included famines, droughts and floods, mud and mosquitoes, storms that wiped out a year’s crops in one hour of rain, hail and whirlwind, cold that killed livestock and froze people in their beds, epidemics of disease like typhus and diphtheria that killed whole families and other diseases that could wipe out cattle herds or devastate a whole farm’s worth of hogs, poultry and horseflesh. And then, there was the Depression. 

The ad men working for Tractor Supply, and a lot of conservative politicians, dangle the promise of restoring American “values” by somehow going backward, to good old days that only ever appeared on covers of The Saturday Evening Post. Look closely and you’ll see that many of Norman Rockwell’s touching and evocative images have no background. They float in space. I suspect that Rockwell knew—and he was whispering to us—that it’s pretty easy to idealize an entire era by freezing a moment. But it wasn’t his assignment to convey the whole story behind the blank background, the before and after, the “what if” and the “if only,” nothing of the larger world and deeper history beyond the fleeting, comforting, illusory image.

This wasn’t Rockwell’s job to show. It was ours to see.

An insect is trapped in a drop of amber and remains there, lifeless and changeless, for ten thousand years. Its entire species is extinct. Only in science fiction can the bug be brought back, rescued from the eons of constant change that rendered its existence little more than a glimpse of the bygone, a flicker of nostalgia. 

Fantasy can restore to life an insect, or dinosaur, that once was real but no longer exists. Advertising has perhaps a greater power, to fill our heads with memories of a time and a realm—of buckskin shirts and crinoline petticoats, yeoman farmers and cultural clarity—that few people, in any time or place, have ever known.

Simplicity is overrated, because hardly anyone—outside of a TV ad—has ever experienced it. Even Thoreau, in quest of the bare subsistence of which he preached, had to write lists, keep books and work his ass off.