Episode 38. A Conversation with Sarah Smarsh about Bone of the Bone!
Michelle Rathman: Hello everyone. And welcome to a very special Rural Impact Extra. I'm Michelle Rathman, and I really mean it when I say we are thrilled that you joined us here today. And dare I say, I think you're going to be thrilled that you joined us here today too, because we are sitting down with the amazing author, Sarah Smarsh.
You know, when I first read her book, Heartland, it really just spoke to me and I have been thinking about it ever since. So, when we found out that she was coming out with a new book, we could not wait to see if she would accept an invitation to join us. And I am so elated to share with you that she said, “yes.”
And so today Sarah and I sat down, and we talked about her new book, Bone of the Bone, Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. With that said, you know, I'm going to do the same thing I say every time I invite you to sit back, get yourself into your podcast frame of mind, and listen to my conversation with the brilliant Sarah Smarsh.
Are you ready? I sure am. So let's go.
Michelle Rathman: Wow. Sarah Smarsh, National Book Award Finalist, and without any doubt, one of the most important commentators on socioeconomic class in America. Welcome to the Rural Impact. We are thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to have you here.
Sarah Smarsh: Thank you, Michelle. I am a big fan of your work and anyone who is talking about rural and endeavoring to bring justice and, and rightness to that space is a friend of mine. So, thanks for having me.
Michelle Rathman: Oh my goodness. I wish we were literally in the same room together, but first I want to say congratulations on I've, I've had my review copy for quite some time, and I've had to be tight lipped about it. Bone of the Bone Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. It's absolutely is a must read, as I said, and to start us off, I want to share with our listeners a review from The Book Reporter, and it goes like this.
“In Bone of the Bone, Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times, class, division, political fissures, gendering inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural urban Gulf.”
Sarah, in every page turn I, I had to sit with it and I wrote this the other day. I had to sit with it. First, it goes to your head. And then it goes to your heart. There are so many truths throughout the book, hundreds of them, really, and one that seem maybe the best to begin with, and it comes from the essay Lead, Nut Graph and Body. I want folks to look that up if you don't know what it is.
You write, "We should be suspicious of a news paradigm whose integrity diminishes as story importance increase." Sarah, this was in 2015. And I wonder if you could share with our listeners the context in which you wrote it then and how it applies to where we are today, just weeks away from the 2024 election.
Sarah Smarsh: Sure. Great question. I think the first time I've, I've had an opportunity to expand on that. That essay being almost a decade ago was written within the context of, you know, digital had certainly arrived. The, the, the online experience that we're all sharing was, was certainly well established by then.
But it was still, we were still all sort of grappling with smartphones were relatively new. And, I as by then had been in journalism for over a decade and was troubled by what I saw as the, uber simplification of very complicated narratives for the purpose of clickbait and you know, fitting onto your phone and, and an industry that can already be problematically reductive for fair reasons.
You know, I was trained at the tail end of the newspaper era and we used to talk about stories in inches. So, you've got so many inches to tell a story. And so there, there, there are reasons for, for, for being concise, and those constraints sometimes are important and fruitful. But there's as we all know now a truly toxic element to the clickbait era that we now find ourselves in. In to my mind, as someone who cares about justice and is talking about rural folks.
One of the most dangerous elements of that media ecosphere is the, the caricatures and stereotypes and, you know, identity labels that have come to be shorthand for X, Y, Z, that may or may not be accurate. It seems that digital has enhanced those problems rather than necessarily address them.
And so, I was writing actually, though, a prompt for me to kind of be a media critic in that essay, which I sometimes find myself doing as someone, by the way, who in any newsroom I ever worked in, and the only report I'm was aware of in that space to have had a direct experience of poverty and specifically rural poverty, no less.
And so, I often find myself sort of in a position to critique my own industry and the specific prompt for that essay actually came from watching coverage specifically of mass shootings, which we were was at that moment was a relatively new era. I believe Sandy Hook happened in 2011 or 2012.
So that kind of the intersection of that new horrific, horrific moment in American culture and gun violence with the you know, the, the swooping in and, and sometimes even predatory impulses of the, the media ecosphere for, for a story, for clicks, for attention, for ratings. Was so disturbing to me that that, that I wrote that essay about inviting readers to push back against these impulses toward making things too simple, making things too pat too quick, too easy, because often what we lose in that gaining of clicks is the truth itself.
We lose the truth itself.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah, you know, I recall in that essay, and correct me if I'm wrong, just talking about you reviewing the footage of the horrific events that happened in Central Park, I think it was around Puerto Rican Day celebrations, and you were looking through those films, and that really struck me, because I remember the horror that I felt.
As a woman watching, you know, just a little bit that we saw. Alright, so let's move into Poverty, Pride and Prejudice. And I think this one in particularly, even right now, it will always be relevant. As long as we have these conditions. So the demands that we make or don't make on those who receive government assistance.
And we'll talk a little bit later about this, but I think about, you know, just summer and in school nutrition programs. So let's talk a little bit about the impetus for that essay and talk to us about the bigger concept of the asks that we make or don't for those who receive government assistance by other names.
Sarah Smarsh: Poverty, Pride and Prejudice I wrote for the New Yorker about 10 years ago and the policy impetus for the piece was at the time my home state of Kansas. The, the Governor was Sam Brownback. Some of your listeners might remember he became a sort of symbol of, really far right approach to economic policy, specifically a kind of stripping away, you know, down to the bare bones of the, at the, at the state government level.
And so that kind of era for Kansas involved a lot of budgetary constraints and struggling public institutions. One of the maneuvers made, I presumably to then bulk up the, the state coffers in, you know, to, to somehow sort of level out these, you know, massive tax cuts that had been given for wealthy corporations was to increase the, is basically like to lower the amount that you could withdraw from an ATM with you what we used to call food stamps nowadays, it's debit cards essentially. And those can be taken to a, you know, any banks ATM to withdraw cash. And so, the legislation that had arisen was to put a cap on the amount that you could take out per swipe and, that essentially, then, for somebody that needs a certain amount of cash is going to increase the amount of fees that they pay.
And then I also, in the essay, explore the ways in which private entities, namely banks were then also benefiting handsomely from that, from that move in that those fees in part also go to into private coffers. And so, it ultimately, this is just one of myriad instances in which it's very expensive to be poor.
And I believe that that James Baldwin might have written those exact words, but it, but it's a sentiment that is ubiquitously understood among people who are struggling economically. You've got a beater car because you can't afford a newer one. You're going to pay more in maintenance. Maybe you've got to take out a payday loan or some other kind of high interest predatory loan for the purpose of getting by even just getting groceries, because that beater car broke down and then you lost your job.
And now, you're going to be paying off that interest on top of everything else. These sort of taxes on the poor, essentially and in, in a sort of punitive way are very telling to my mind about the way that we think about the worth of an individual in this country in relationship to their wealth or lack thereof.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah, and you also write about, and you so brilliantly about how we the ask the fire hoops, that's not your words, mine, that we make people jump through, certain people jump through. Whereas, you know, do we make, I think there was a reference to, do we make, you know, agriculture, you know, corporate farmers, you know, go through drug testing, for example, to receive their benefits.
And the answer is, of course, we don't. And, and I think the same thing about having children, you know, use a, a card for during school. And that was an experience that you had. And you talked about how it made you feel to present that card just for you to be able to receive a nutritious meal for lunch.
Sarah Smarsh: Yeah, yeah, I've been so heartened by you know, some states and I believe this also happens maybe within you know, specific unto particular school districts and, and school boards. But at some, in some places at the state level policy has been passed to ensure free lunches for all kids without the sort of needing to jump through hoops.
As you say that, that clearly defines you and kind of puts a, a letter, a red p on your chest, if you will, Poor. That causes shame and psychological distress, and sometimes even in my case, and you reference that anecdote from that essay avoiding going through the lunch line, even in fifth grade.
I felt so embarrassed about that aspect of my experience contrasted with the cool Ninja Turtles lunch boxes that were lovingly packed by a middle-class mother. So, yeah, that, that piece is really, you know, something that I'm often thinking about writing about poverty, writing about rural poverty, writing about groups who are marginalized and yet we don't often put them into the conversation of diversity in terms of identity markers.
There is a sort of unacknowledged, shame and punishment if there's, you know, a problem that we haven't even articulated. And I think in this country, that one of those would be class. And another is the sort of place power paradigm that the rural folks would understand. But so, so it's, so it's not just about, you know, injustice or inequality.
It's also about, like, having an experience like, like that experience I had in fifth grade. I didn't, I didn't no one, I presented pretty confidently. My clothes were crappy, but you know, I, did very well in school. I was outgoing and, and I think it would probably shock some of my teachers now to know that I went hungry for much of that school year, because when they looked at me, they didn't couldn't see and didn't know and understand the aspects of my identity that were not only representative of a type of marginalization, but we're also shameful, and we're also unacknowledged. And that combination is a lot for a person to carry no matter how old they are
Michelle Rathman: That is right. Oh, my gosh. Well, that's a perfect segue to the next essay. I want to talk about, which is 'Believe It.' I think that for me, that was another one that just screamed to me, you know, we live that right now, crying fiction, and it's, it's hard to discern but at the same time it's hard for people to believe some of these stories and you write about it.
And, and one thing in particular that's coming to my mind is there are certain parts of the Jesus story that we believe in, others that we reject. So talk to us about that essay.
Sarah Smarsh: Yeah, I wrote Believe It for a really, as as a writer, there's a magazine called creative nonfiction. That's really a writer's magazine, but anybody that appreciates a good essay or a good piece of memoir, or a good piece of literary reportage would love magazine.
And in, in it and, and aptly for, for that publication, I'm examining the genre of memoir and how we relate to and respond to it as a culture. And it tends to be, and this has been true for ages, that if you are a upper class white man and you say, this happened to me, then it's readily believed generally. You know, I'm speaking in, in very general terms. But as a sort of cultural commentary. By contrast, if let's say that there's a very important genre of, of writing and literature over the course of American history, whereby enslaved people would bear direct witness to their experience and that the, the publication of those stories often relied on white abolitionist types who, you know, were, and that dynamic, of course, was fraught with power and racism itself, no doubt.
And, and sexism too, in the case of female enslaved people, or formerly enslaved people. But, these stories would often be prefaced by a kind of a note on the character of the author. Often it was, sometimes it was the white man who had owned these human beings previously writing, I can vouch for this person's character because otherwise it wouldn't be believable or palatable in part because you know, the brutal truth of it went against, the customs and the accepted horrors of the day. But also, crucially because it might be a black woman writing the story and bearing witness to her own experience. And so, who we believe, and the point of this essay, and this holds true today, whether you are a sexual assault victim versus a sexual predator.
It, it holds true along identity lines still largely. The, the more historically marginalized your group, the less readily believed will be your story. And so, that matters because often it's the person who is on the receiving end of injustice, who will, who has the lens to see and, and the impetus to speak directly to that injustice for the purpose of their own survival. And so it's, it's like the, the person most equipped to comment on let's say race, a person of color will, you know, because of that precise injustice and their identity, be perhaps met with more skepticism, than someone from a more privileged space.
Michelle Rathman: You know, Sarah, I think about this in the context of where we are today and we are recording this on September 5th and the news that broke yesterday about all those podcasters, not our show. You know, and here we are, here they are being, you know, alleged to be paid millions of dollars by Russian backers, and so forth, spewing things that are simply not true.
And, you know, we are so, people are so readily able to believe that, and not someone's truth, their lived experiences. And maybe this is a good segue to our next essay, which is about liberal blind spots. I am a person who really does not appreciate labels. I think that we've, we've just been, you know, we, we don't see each other as other human beings and worthy of, of respect and grace for, of each other. But we do, we do have blind spots. So, I wonder if we could take just a few minutes to have you kind of talk to us about the answer to the question that was posed to you. To what extent do labels prevent productive dialogue?
Sarah Smarsh: Oh, such an important question and kind of loops back to that first point we were discussing about the, the patent you know, simplistic narratives that we can kind of lean on in the in an era where many of us are presenting ourselves online by way of, you know, essentially kind of a little identity avatar where there's your photo, and then, like, you have 60 characters to say who and what you are.
And often people list their, you know, what they are in a professional capacity alongside mother. And then there's an, a quick emoji of a cross to signal that they're Christian and it's like, it's not necessarily a bad thing. But it does I think sort of, engender a culture that is increasingly kind of splitting away from the complex, and sometimes even indescribable and unknowable truths of a human life. And then the way that we're asked to sort of brand ourselves, if you will. So, that essay I wrote for the New York Times a few years ago, and it received a huge amount of attention.
I was essentially challenging so, so I grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and my, while we did have to sell the farm when I was in college, as was a common story. And remains a common story. My, my family's still you know, working class, working poverty in construction, working in factories, retail, and so on.
First generation college student and certainly the first person in my family to enjoy the privileges of some economic stability. And so, I have a daily lens on the ways in which my own journalism industry often misdescribes, or problematically generalizes about the politics of that space, specifically the, the white working class, the white working poor, and the rural white working class and working poor.
The politics of my family does not remotely align with what is presumed about that group in that space when you look at those red and blue maps, and it would seem to suggest that when you cross a particular county line or state line, all of a sudden, everybody there is, you know, either wearing a MAGA hat or a black Lives Matter shirt. You know, it's like, there's actually in every space in this country, there are large political minorities. They are rendered invisible in national elections by the electoral college and, and of course, in, in any election to an extent in a winner take all politics. But so many narratives just constantly equating or making synonymous the kind of class identity of my family, and a politics that my family actually doesn't care for.
I wrote this essay to say you know, there are some blind spots with among even well-meaning liberals who are critiquing the political landscape and those blind spots involve classism. And often they themselves are corrosive to the social fabric, in with a sense of derision or easy judgment towards spaces where they have never been in flyover country, if you will.
I'm talking right now about the, the chattering class, you know, and the kind of urban coastal spaces, and folks who might agree with me politically about a lot of things but who simultaneously have negative attitudes toward my people, if you will, and so that's what that essay came out of.
And it got so much attention that then the New York Times invited readers to pose some questions to me. And a lot of them were challenging me on various points, which is great, which is good. Some of them were kind of vibing with me, but this particular question I recall came just, it seemed to be without any kind of emotional charge.
It was just the lovely and important question of, you know, you talk about how these labels are problematic. How do those labels operate in, in, in the broader sense in our national discourse? And, I don't know, I don't know if this is going to perfectly track with what I how I answered at the time, but and as is documented in in this essay collection. But I feel that the challenge of addressing that conundrum and issue is that, and I think you might have been alluding toward this in your in the way you pose the question. We do need to, we need labels to some extent, and we need categories and terms in order to you know, correctly measure who is benefiting from what, and who is suffering because of what, and also for us, you know, a sense of of pride and culture and difference and distinction and diversity.
All good. And, and so I'm not like a, you know, harsh critic of identity politics, quote unquote, or that sort of thing. That said, when we go so far down that road with our labels as to now, the labels are defining us. It's sort of like the tail is wagging the dog. We're not using the labels. The labels are using, the labels are reducing us in our ability to see other people. And sometimes even to see ourselves. You know, when I was a kid, you never in a million years would have seen a hat that said, “Redneck” or a shirt that said, “Proud Redneck.” And that, of course, is kind of a feature of the culture now.
And I see that as a kind of reclaiming of a term that has been leveraged by people outside of rural or working-class spaces to insult a group. And now that that group is sort of taking that term and saying, “And I will wear that proudly.” Cool, fine. That said, where, where we push up against a problem to my view is if now you are, you are like being absorbed into some sort of group think, and some group idea about what a redneck is and has to be and think and believe, and actually, you know, it's a much more expansive truth about individuals within a group what is true about their hearts and minds. Whether in a rural working class space or, or any other.
Michelle Rathman: My goodness. Oh, so the next one I have to go to is, what you wrote for the Guardian in 2020. And the essay is entitled, How is Arguing with Trump Voters Working Out for You? And I wonder what, if anything has changed four years later? I mean, a lot has changed in our world.
And I was actually relieved. I want to share this with you that that my, you know, I want to tell our listeners that when the pandemic first started, I actually reached out to you at the time Twitter saying, you know, I'm so worried about our rural communities, our rural hospitals, you know, and so a lot has changed since 2020, but has it really?
So I wonder, you know, with that essay in mind, what might you be able to share with us about then and now?
Sarah Smarsh: Yeah, and you, I think you said it perfectly Michelle where, a lot has changed and yet and yet things are the same. I'm not sure your exact words, but it there it is, that there's a different quality to the moment and different feeling to the moment, even in just four years, crucially, because while COVID is now endemic with us four years ago, it was at a, we were at a very critical moment where the intersection of public health, health, and health policy, and the incredibly fractured and volatile political moment, were crashing into each other.
And you know, it was a moment when people were, scared. They were experiencing loss. They were experiencing illness. They were also experiencing a keen and well-deserved distrust of our health care system in this country. And not to mention, if you come from my class background, or even the geographic isolation that often comes with the rural experience, regardless of your income, ability to access our health care system. Of course, as you well know and have documented is waning.
And so, there are a lot of groups who were tentative about the vaccine is what I'm talking about. It was of course, as your listeners will remember an incredibly, it's sort of like in the rear-view mirror now, even though it was just so recent, and in our cultural history and, and we're not necessarily walking around talking about it because there are so many crises to deal with. But there was a moment in which we were all sort of subsumed by, are you getting it? Have you gotten it? What about that guy that didn't get it?
And people on one side were outraged that the people on the other side were hesitant or refusing. The people on the other side were balking that the, you know, vaccine camp seemed to their mind to be “sheep.” I remember seeing all a sheep emoji and comments around that time. And you know, it just, as someone is who, who's kind of a bridge person, if you will. I come from a particular class space and a rural space. And then I went on to, you know, degrees and a career that is rooted in urban spaces. That said, I myself live, live in rural Kansas and moved back there happily.
But that, kind of, well, it's what W. E. B. Du Bois called a “double consciousness that I carry about those kind of two realms and worlds that are sort of layered on top of each other, but are utterly different realities in this country and society,” has made me a bit of a lifelong student of the art of mediating or, not necessarily seeking to convince, but seeking to come together. Disagree without dissolving. You know, I value and I've written this before, justice over unity. So, as I believe, I point out in that essay, I would never advocate for like, you know, extending a hand in of grace to someone who is actively trying to harm you.
But where there is disagreement among people in good faith, and among people who ultimately want the same sorts of things and share roughly the same set of values. And I do think despite all of our headlines to the contrary, that more often than not, that's the case. It is not remotely captured by our politics. But I, as somebody that speaks with people all across this country, rural, urban, everything in between, I'm, I'm absolutely certain that that most people are decent at their core.
The, the way to navigate these vast gulfs of understanding and language and how we discuss things, and what cable news we're watching or talk radio channel we're listening to, or podcast we're streaming, the way to accomplish that, surely, we have to have learned by now is not to shout and shame. Because all that does, all that does, as someone, by the way, who changed my mind about a lot of political ideas over the course of specifically in my young adulthood. It wasn't because somebody wagged their finger at me, I'll tell you what.
And when you do that, of course, the response is a defensive posture.
Michelle Rathman: Mm hmm.
Sarah Smarsh: So, I'm not so sure that the people that are, you know, arguing on social media are actually trying to accomplish anything other than assert their own superiority ultimately. And I'm sure that we've all been guilty of it here and there.
But the true balm or antidote for the poisonous divisions that we're experiencing is going to be true connection, is going to be empathic listening. It's going to be understanding that, 'Oh, well, that person didn't get the vaccine because they haven't, they've never had insurance in their life and they don't believe that it's going to be free. And they're scared that somebody's going to ask them to get out their wallet and they, and they can't afford groceries.'
So like, those labels we were talking about, they lead to assumptions and they break down conversation and communication, and a real communication is the only thing that's going to get us out of this cultural mess that we're in.
Michelle Rathman: Oh, I could not agree with you more, and we all want to feel, we want to have dignity. And when you do the finger wagging, and the shaming and blaming, we strip away people's dignity. We, we stop seeing them as human beings. My goodness. All right. So, there's one more essay I want to talk about before we close out.
It is essential for our time is Shelter Belt. And I had to look up the term because I didn't and now I was like, 'oh, of course that's what it means.' So Kansans and their rejection of the proposed amendment to remove the right to abortion. First state to come out and do it after Roe v. Wade was, we all know what happened to that. So, let's talk about that, and then let's take a look at that in the context of what we're seeing all across this country.
And as people of this podcast, listeners know you know, because I work in rural health and I am seeing the shuttering of obstetric services, you know, hospital closures, I want people to connect the dots here. but talk about Shelter Belt and in, in the context in which you wrote that brilliant essay.
Sarah Smarsh: Yeah, thank you. I wrote that for the times, as you say, right after the ballot amendment that was the, the first, you know, state level post Roe vote happened here in my state of Kansas, and to the nation.
Michelle Rathman: I was gob smacked, honestly.
Sarah Smarsh: And a lot of pundits for defeating this measure that would have, previously the State Supreme Court had ruled that the constitution ensures right to abortion by way of you know, reproductive health or bodily autonomy. And so this ballot measure would have essentially opened the door for stripping away that assurance and in, you know, further restrict abortion does have some restrictions in Kansas, but it would have it would have essentially, open the gate to undo that Supreme Court decision in a sense, in effect. And so, a coalition of folks across the political spectrum, across the urban rural spectrum, who took issue with this joined hands, hence the metaphor shelter belt, which is the word for a row of cedar trees here on the Great Plains.
That's often or another kind of conifer. That's planted for the purpose of blocking the wind to prevent soil erosion on a crop. As someone who is right now, removing cedars from my land for restoring prairie. That's a whole nother conversation. But the metaphor of the shelter belt was this sort of like you're, you're kind of standing in a line, or if there are any fellow children of the eighties listening, it's kind of like “Care Bear Stare.” Care Bears join hands and stare at the, the villain with the love in their hearts. And so there's this coalition joined hands. They were from often different corners of the political spectrum, as I say, knocked on a lot of doors made, like, just kind of heroic efforts of activism.
And and rightly to my mind and my own political bias, you use the term freedom a lot to point out that you know, if your, if your thing is freedom, if your thing is liberty, you might want to look at this issue of a woman's bodily autonomy, which may fly in the face of what your church has been saying or, or your husband has been saying or whatever.
And sure enough, a number of rural counties, I believe it was a total of 13 counties in the state were of a majority, “no”. And of those, I want to say 7 of them had gone, like, you know, 70 to 30 for Trump in the last presidential election. And so these were, quote, unquote, red spaces, certainly rural spaces and independent and probably previously non-voting, and certainly Republican voters showed up and voted down that amendment.
So, this to me was evidence of the argument, and kind of project that I've engaged with my whole career to say, you think you know these places. People, who never been there, but you don't know them. It's more complicated than you think. It's more nuanced than you think. And this vote seemed to bear that out.
And then that became a kind of playbook for the, for a lot of democratic campaigns in the midterms to really go full in on that issue to, to some success and mitigated what had been predicted as being a quote, unquote, red wave in those 2022 midterms and, and now that that same kind of political wisdom is being leveraged in the presidential campaign.
And I do think that the activists who just did the really humble you know, no, nobody's looking kind of work of walking down the sidewalk and knocking on doors, or driving a car down a gravel road and engaging in a conversation, change the course of our country as, as far as health care, and also the political conversation is concerned.
Michelle Rathman: Yes. Absolutely. Okay. The last one, and I want to talk to you about this one actually is not in the book and it was in the New York Times. It was a guest essay on August 7th, just last month. The headline and I have it right here, "Democrats Have Needed Someone like Tim Walz for Decades." And as a Minnesota native. Why is this? I know why, but you tell me your, tell us your position
Sarah Smarsh: Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, Tim Walz, of course, and I bet most of your listeners know by now, grew up in a small town in Nebraska. Then, you know, was a teacher in your great state of Minnesota, and ended up in the House of Representatives. And now, of course is Governor and running to be Vice President on the Democratic ticket.
And, he's a different sort of dude than most of most of the people who end up at that strata of politics. And how so? Class, place, these, these things that I have been looking at and homing on and, and trying to, you know, elucidate for, for over 20 years as a writer. He embodies the truth and the fact that you can't say white guy from small town Nebraska equals fill in the blank. If we're leaning back on those easy pat narratives and stereotypes in our current political moment.
You would fill in that blank with something that's actually quite opposite of what Tim Walz is and believes and has done at the policy level in Minnesota and, and as a Congress person. Now I will say there, it's not as though there's, there's no one in of course, at the level of state politics, and even more true at local politics, people with rural experience are present, less so, far less so in the in Washington.
And you know, John Tester comes to mind, he lost three fingers to a meat grinder. I've met the guy he's, he's the real deal. He's walking around in black cowboy boots and, and I, and he's got some real country bone of bona fides. So that headline, which by the way, writers don't, journalists don't write the headlines, editors do, might suggest that I'm saying that the Democratic Party has never seen, you know, someone that has the kind of real rural cred or small town cred that Tim Walz has.
But you know, it's fair to say in my lifetime you know, my mom voted for the famous peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, when I was a little baby. He lost that reelection bit of course. But I don't, and there was some kind of like vague notions about, I know that Bill Clinton grew up in small town, Arkansas, but he I don't know. Maybe it, maybe it's a Midwestern thing. It's a Plains thing, but like the, I see Tim Walz and it's like, I've never seen that vibe, which reminds me of my grandpa or the men I was raised by decent, humble, straight spoken, got a little belly, like to drink a beer, just my grandma would say common as a boot.
I don't know where that is, what that saying all about, but common as an old boot is, is what he, I think very authentically reveals about himself. It's not just a presentation or a contrived identity. You know, your listeners know, you know, something about a small town or a real place. You can sniff it out.
And he's, he's the real deal. And so why that matters is earlier in the conversation, we were talking about how, if you're a, if you're a kid who isn't getting lunch and nobody, nobody has articulated the reason why, and that is class. Then, then there's a particular pain about just not being seen on top of the discomfort of the hunger.
I have felt for a long time, like there's the, this space that I come from, somebody that, you know, worked in a field over the summer. I have not felt seen in that way in national politics. Whether, you know, party A or party B had a robust rural policy platform or not. I have not felt seen most specifically, well, I haven't been felt seen by either of the two major parties, but among the Democrats, I would say I haven't even felt looked at, in terms of that aspect of my identity.
And it's heartening to me that they've, they've got him on the bill which hopefully will lead to some, you know, like a 50 state strategy, or like a investment of resources in going to places that, yeah, like, maybe you're not going to win in the electoral college, but it's still essential to go there because there's so many human beings there.
And like, are you playing, are you playing a long game or are you just like doing this red and blue map thing that ultimately is really toxic for the country and leaves a lot of people feeling left out?
Michelle Rathman: So well said, it certainly has not added to our quality of life from my, that's my opinion. It certainly hasn't. Oh, my gosh. We'll talk about you know, you sing the praises of what you see in him. And I'm going to say that to you, Sarah Smarsh. I believe you are a national treasure. I am so grateful to talk with you and folks, I'm going to tell you, you have to read this book and everything that Sarah writes. We're going to make sure that we put up all of your book tour stuff on our website. I know they could find you in other places. We're going to make sure that there's links to your books, and I just really encourage, yeah, I really encourage people to go out and find and seek you out and read, read your words.
It's so eloquent. And again, I'm just so grateful to have you here. It's been a thrill for me.
Sarah Smarsh: Thank you, Michelle. And thank you for the incredibly important work you do in the rural space. So, I appreciate you having me on.
Michelle Rathman: I appreciate that stay with us for just one moment. Okay, before we sign off, I want to remind you that we always appreciate when you follow us on social, whatever platforms that you can find us on. And, of course, subscribing when you rate our podcast. It sure does help folks find us leave us comments. We'll take the good, the bad and the ugly.
We want to just keep bringing you these conversations that support understanding the connections between policy and rural everything. We know some of the things that we talk about are not light subjects, but in the end, we do hope that you have been enlightened.
Until we're together again, I'm going to remind you, check your voter registration, do it right away. Don’t hesitate and please take good care of yourself and everyone else around you. We'll see the next time on a new episode of the Rural Impact.
