In the Netflix series “Unorthodox,” a young Hasidic woman flees her husband and family and the oppressive strictures of ultra-orthodox life in New York and seeks a new life in Berlin.  She struggles with a modern society and her own fears and limitations, but slowly, step by step, gains the confidence to survive.  At a pivotal moment in her battle for personal freedom, she puts on a pair of blue jeans under her orthodox prescribed skirt. In the following sequences, she wears the jeans and contemporary clothes as she slips off the burdens of ancient customs and rules.  It seems to me that restrictive blue jeans signify freedom from restriction. 

How we deal with existential fears and mysteries is the subject of Matthew Hutson’s The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking. Hutson doesn’t condemn magical thinking or consider it unusual and thinks it may well be an essential part of a healthy emotional life. We hold tight to things that help us make sense of life.  An old ring that a grandmother had, a numbered shirt worn in a winning game, my dad’s dog-tags.  Significant life changes are usually accompanied by things that don’t change.  There are wedding rings, coming of age body alterations of all types, maybe a tattoo of Amanda (maybe have that one replaced), the holy water of baptism, and, in the end, a granite tombstone. Ancient handprints of Hindu women made just before sati.  Who doesn’t save a special toy belonging to a now grown child or a wedding gown or a Louisville Slugger from a home run?  And I missed my old VW bug named ‘Liz’. 

My old school friend George told me once about a pair of special blue jeans, the almost lucky jeans.  George was, and still is, an artist who made imaginative and beautiful objects of clay and took compelling photography.  As a starving art student at Florida Atlantic University, he slept in the pottery building or the fieldhouse where there were nice showers.  After graduation, he still struggled to survive until his art was recognized.  I lost track of him for a while after college but connected a little later.  Then he said he was a painter.  He painted the lines on the highway for the Ohio road department and was paid well during warm months.  In the winter and spring, he received enough unemployment money to make ends meet while living in a barn of an Amish farm in Ohio.  He traded a little help around the farm for free accommodations in the hayloft while doing what art work he could.   

And as he prepared to leave for his recall to work, the farmer’s daughter comes up to say goodbye.  I asked George if this was the start of a farmer’s daughter joke but he swore to its truth. The young woman of course was wearing her traditional long skirt and Amish clothing. She asked for one small favor.  George, take off your jeans.  George is thinking:  my lucky day! I guess I’ve hit the jackpot.  The farmer’s daughter slipped off her skirt and took the blue jeans and zipped them up snug.  Then she slowly takes them back off and gives them back. She says, George, I just wanted to know for once what it feels like to wear blue jeans. 

The jeans must be long gone now and George is a successful artist and does have the good luck and steady income of an art museum director.  I don’t know what he wears to work. 

Yes it’s a word. Perhaps urban folks have idealized the rural life ever since Hector was a pup. During the Romantic era, poets and musicians and artists of all kinds wrote and sang and painted the pure and sweet rural lands and country folk. Highborn ladies liked to play-act the shepherding life. And of course, pastoralism is the ism of pastoral, from L. pastor, a shepherd. Modern pastors a shepherds of the soul, according to Sister Estelle, who was Adriel’s principal at St. Ann’s school.

In the ancient Greek world, stressed-out urbanites longed for the restful world of rural Arcadia. Arcadia became the idyllic dream of Renaissance and, later, Romance Period poets and artists. In the New World, the yeoman farmer became the staunch hero figure of the emerging West. The backbone of America. Even while settlers and ranchers drove away the indigenous people they still idolized the “noble savage” living off the land.

And yet there is always the patronizing of rural dwellers that speaks in romantic tones of rural life while dismissing the rural population as provincial idiots, but wise idiots. Hayseeds. This contrast is inherent in the many stories and jokes about the local yokel outsmarting the city-slicker.

In the book by Sarah Smarsh, Heartland, A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke on Earth, she tries to show the reality of rural life. Families working hard but staying poor, lack of health insurance, the dignity and relentless hope of rural families who are both adulated and scorned by urban sophisticates. Unlike some memoirs of mountain people and poor family upbringing, she does not revel in a delusional self-made success story. In fact, she credits librarians and teachers and her own parents for her success as a social scientist, professor, and writer. And importantly, Smarsh blames the poverty of rural folk, especially the women, on a failed economic system that discounts the work of women and laborers. And I might add that this cruel political and economic system not only exploits rural women and men, but also falsely praises them as bedrock Americans.

When Adriel and Paula moved to Paint Lick, Kentucky (don’t you love that place name?) one of the locals at Jeanette Todd’s general store told me that he knew I had been to college by my speech. “You talk educated.” Paint Lick was our pastoralism sojourn that last about 12 years and 2 births. I think everybody intuitively understands that speech is a give-away of background and status. Linguists study prestige dialects and levels of dialects in sociolinguistics. When I hear Sara Smarsh speak, I hear only a faint echo of here Oklahoma farm childhood. The rural dialects always are less prestigious in any country. One of my linguistics profs spoke of the Bostonian elite or Kennedy-esque tones as being the highest prestige dialect. While any rural “twang” carries a low-prestige dismissal of the speaker, there is also the pastoralism-chic of South Carolina landed gentry speech. I once read of a couple who met at an Eastern Ivy-League college who drove to the South on a meet-the-parents trip. The young girl complained that the further southward they drove her boyfriend’s speech also sounded more southern. I think she began to wonder if she was going to “marry down.”

The romantic notion of the pastoral life in all its natural beauty and solid characters is like a sort of rural slumming. Rural people are both admired and disdained, loved and despised. The rural/urban divide was in stark contrast during the Trump debacle. The urban, educated voters openly despised the rural less educated and the hatred was returned in full. Each side expressed great pride in their own values. In Kentucky, there is a fierce Appalachian pride and any hint, joke, or criticism of mountain culture is resented. When it was revealed that an acting school in Prestonsburg was teaching the young students the measured tones of the Standard American English dialect, proud intellectuals in Kentucky waxed livid in their defense of the mountain kids and claimed there was a kind of cultural killing going on in the acting school. Of course, this was nonsense. Actors more than anyone need to well, act. To speak like the the character they must portray. Personally I love to hear a mountain born friend talk. But there is also an understanding that Eastern Kentucky dialect is not a prestige dialect.

We do love the shepherd tending his flocks, maybe playing a quiet country tune on an old guitar. But the farmer is equally loved, taken for granted, and resented.