odbqpdbo:

i was out innahills for a while and, yeah, there are constitution party signs around election season, but there’s also an art scene, and fucken wiccan covens and deviantart-in-2005 coffee houses with people with tail buttplugs and skull collections and shit

the idea that brooklyn and portland are the only places in america where people don’t spend every waking hour eating the same piece of plain white bread over and over and over is…………..lol have these people ever been anywhere (no)

Around this point in the cultural cycle we should be seeing a back-to-the-land movement where urban idealist types strike out for rural farms. Doesn’t involve too many people but can have a noticeable influence on the culture.

(For example, by filling the countercultural imaginary with idealized images of rugged manual-laboring men and nurturing child-raising women in a way that counterweights sexual egalitarianism.)

One thing though, we last went through this part of the cycle in the ‘70s, back before the 1980s farm crisis completely destroyed homestead farming, I’m not sure it’s even possible today, that we even still have an idea of being on the land to go back to.

The 1970s were actually a great era for American farming - a 1972 Soviet crop failure set the agriculture market on fire, and then the federal government tried to keep the embers burning. The ‘80s crisis came when the bubble collapsed.

This is where Northern California’s “Emerald Triangle” marijuana-producing region comes from - hippies armed with Earth Day/Skylab-era technology like hydroponics, solar panels, and composting set out to farm the backwoods only to realize the economics demanded a cash crop and the weed they were growing for personal use would do just fine.

I’m a little afraid that the Portlandia backyard chickens/pickling/lumberjack thing (which in Portland itself is already losing ground to generic West Coast appfucker culture) was all we got this time around.