Morning Belz, Feb. 2
A city on seven hills.
Interstates 20, 59 and 75 form a triangle with Atlanta, Birmingham and Chattanooga on the corners, and smack in the middle of that triangle is the city of Rome, Ga.
It’s a city of seven hills (Benito Mussolini gifted the city a statue of Romulus and Remus under the Capitoline Wolf in the 1920s) in a remote landscape of low mountains and ridge-like plateaus that go for miles and separate the sparsely-populated valleys. It’s the tail end of Appalachia. A land of cars in the yard and defiantly disheveled trailer homes. White people living absolutely free, except when the neighbor turns them in for cock-fighting. Plenty of cattle, and “No More Bullshit” Trump signs, and Sasquatch paraphernalia, and the occasional Confederate flag.
My family’s been hiking a lot in this area, and the wildness of it is striking to me, a native of the rural grid of Eastern Iowa. Here the roads wind all over and you can only ascend the mountains every 20 miles or so. The state parks are spectacular and, at least in the winter, not much used. Big pickup trucks appear in the rear-view mirror and tail you if you’re not hitting the turns fast enough. Clouds drop over the mountains, and lift off again. Just on Sunday we saw a shuttered mansion in the fog on the west brow of Lookout Mountain, an abandoned Fortune 500 carpet mill west of Lafayette, an old Methodist graveyard scattered with the Southern Cross of Honor, and what looked like thriving summer camps near Mentone, Ala.
Rome is at the center of this region, and, if you’re looking for a geographic hub for the motivating spirit that led to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, you could do a lot worse than this city of 36,000 in northwest Georgia. It was the scene of a near-hysterical Trump rally two days before the election, drawing roughly the entire population of the town. It’s also the city that produced Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is of course quickly becoming one of the most famous members of Congress. The Jan. 4 rally in Dalton, Ga., just to the northeast of Rome, is further evidence that northwest Georgia might be the beating heart of MAGA magical realism.
I don’t really know what this is all about, I’m just saying I find Rome interesting, and I’ll probably go there to make a video at some point. Here’s David French on honor/shame culture, Christianity and the South.
Tomorrow we make a new video, this one outside a Latino grocery in Dalton.
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Long-running photographic project I just ran across — Abandoned Southeast
Cool-headed step-back on Navalny and Putin — Responsible Statecraft
Taciturn but fun interview with Joan Didion — TIME
A mysterious monolith in the woods in Minneapolis — Star Tribune
Amazon HQ plan looks like the Underminer’s drill — WSJ
Black families’ mistrust of schools holding back reopening — NYT
California governor’s job approval rating plummets — LAT
Quotes
“What American political paranoia posits is that sinister, antidemocratic forces have wormed their way into the inner workings of the government and have subverted it to serve not the interests of the nation but those of a powerful few — have turned the instrument of the people against the people. This fearful idea has animated American political movements ranging in diversity from the Antimasons, organized in the 1820s in opposition to the presumed Freemason conspiracy, and the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothings of the mid-nineteenth century, to the Populists of the late nineteenth century, the American Communist Party of the 1920s and ‘30s, and the anti-Communist McCarthyism of the early 1950s. But the conspiracist appeal was always limited.” — Michael Kelly, New Yorker, 1995
About: I send this email most mornings to force myself to stay informed and in touch. It’s typically ~8 links, a quote, and an update on what I’m working on. Write me back! And please share the email. If I added you and you don’t like it, please click unsubscribe below. I was a newspaper reporter for 14 years at the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Des Moines Register and Minneapolis Star Tribune. I gave the basic story of why my family left Minneapolis here. You can find my new venture, Scuffed News, on YouTube (please subscribe!), Twitter and Instagram, and you can support the project with your money, in exchange for exclusive video and early access to some of the video, on Patreon.