Working harder than a one-legged pole dancer: Life in my corner of Flyover Country

 Wilkinson County, Mississippi, is a beautiful part of Flyover Country. Bounded on the west by the Mississippi River, its alluvial soil is incredibly fertile. Trees grow fast here, providing the lumber industry with an endless supply of hardwood timber.

Woodville, the seat of Wilkinson County, is the county's only incorporated community, with a population of under 1,000 people.  Founded in 1811, before the nation was torn apart by the Civil War, it is a classic Southern town. The stately courthouse, with its impressive cupola, sits in the middle of the town square. To Kill a Mockingbird wasn't filmed here, but it might have been.

Woodville boasts the state's oldest newspaper and some of Mississippi's oldest churches. Antebellum homes line Church Street, mostly built in the Greek Revival style, evoking serenity, grace, and understated dignity.

Wilkinson County is the last place one would expect to find a strip club--much less a strip club where the dancers are both topless and bottomless. Yet, until recently, Illusions, a gentlemen's club, did a thriving business on Highway 61, just outside the Woodville city limits.

According to local lore, investors in the club circulated a petition in support of an application for a resort license, which would allow the establishment to sell alcohol. Imagine the townspeople's surprise when they discovered that their signatures had paved the way for commercial nudity!

Several sources confirm that one of Illusion's strippers had a prosthetic leg, which gave her pole dances an especially exotic appeal. Did she do lap dances? No one  I talked with has given me a definitive answer.

Not surprisingly, Woodville's religious leaders were scandalized. I am told that a Protestant preacher read the names of people who signed the petition in support of the new business, which included several church deacons. A Pentecostal group picketed the club for a time, apparently without discouraging its customers.  

The East Coast elites are contemptuous of Flyover Country, which they consider to be a wasteland of Trump supporters and utterly devoid of culture. But they are wrong. 

Woodville has its own brand of diversity, encompassing diversity of race, diversity of religion, and diversity of culture. Lake Mary, where I live, is home to some of the world's most beautiful waterbirds, including white ibises, wood storks, green herons, snowy egrets, and many more.

Illusions closed before I had the opportunity to see the Pentecostal pickets or the one-legged stripper. Yesterday, however, I spotted a bald eagle while driving along Route 24 west of Woodville. The majestic bird was on the wing, fending off an aerial attack by crows. Yes, according to the Audubon website, crows are known for harassing bald eagles.

I once lived in Greater Boston, the epicenter of East Coast snobbery and elitism. I attended Harvard to get a doctorate and often walked the streets around Harvard Square.

I expected Harvard to be a glittering intellectual Camelot, which would open new vistas of opportunity for me. I was surprised by the grubbiness of the neighborhoods around the university and the town of Boston in general. I was shocked by the provincial perspective of most Bostonians, who seemed to prefer a leftist political viewpoint to independent thought.

How impoverished are the lives of the Bostonians! I'll bet most of them have never seen a one-legged pole dancer or a majestic eagle fighting off crows over the hardwood forests of the lower Mississippi Valley. 

I pity the coastal dwellers who disparage Flyover Country; they may never know the richness of life in the real America.

Froma Harrop wants more wind turbines in Texas. Why not Providence, Rhode Island?

Texas provides 28 percent of the nation's wind-generated electricity. Most of the state's wind turbines are located in West Texas, where the wind blows almost constantly. Anyone driving across the Texas plains has seen thousands of enormous wind turbines dotting the mesas and buttes. If you go west on Interstate 20 or Highway 287 at night, you will see thousands of lights blinking atop the ceaselessly turning windmills, installed, I suppose, to warn aircraft pilots that they’re flying over a hazardous area.

Some Texans are alarmed by the proliferation of wind turbines on the Great Plains. People who live on the plains are assaulted daily by the visual pollution of giant windmills that litter the horizon. Bills have been introduced in the Texas legislature to regulate the wind energy business and to assess its environmental impact on the Texans who live near wind farms.

Froma Harrop, a newspaper columnist and East Coast liberal, criticized Texas political leaders who want to get better control of the wind energy business. Texas Republicans are opposed to government regulation, she argues, so it is inconsistent for the Republican-dominated Texas legislature to put more regulatory controls on the windmills that pollute the landscape of the High Plains and the Llano Estacado.

Harrop doesn’t live in West Texas. She lives in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. She’s not bothered by the ugliness of wind turbines that scar the landscape of West Texas. After all, she doesn’t have to look at them.

I have driven across West Texas dozens of times and have seen the giant wind farms that blight the plains. Texas is producing more than a quarter of the nation's wind-generated electricity. Isn’t that enough?

Almost everyone favors renewable energy development, particularly the liberals on the East and West Coasts. They might feel differently if they saw thousands of wind turbines from their living room windows.

Scott Momoday, a Kiowa and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in literature, grew up in southwestern Oklahoma, on the very edge of the Great Plains. He wrote about the landscape of the West from a Native American perspective and believed that this landscape contains many sacred places:

To encounter the sacred [Momoday wrote] is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.

Scott Momoday and I grew up on the same landscape of western Oklahoma, a land of majestic views, blue skies, bloodred sunsets, and the Wichita Mountains shimmering improbably on the horizon. I agree with Momoday that this landscape contains many sacred places. Thus, it is a sacrilege to deface it or make it ugly.

As for Froma Harrop, she should live for a couple of years in Snyder, Texas, among the thousands of wind turbines polluting the Great Plains. Let’s see how she likes it, and when she’s completed her sojourn in West Texas, I would like to see her return to Providence, Rhode Island, and find thousands of wind turbines blotting out the seascape.

Texans should not permit more wind turbines in West Texas until a comparable number are placed off the coasts of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and the Hamptons. Let the coastal elites pollute their own visual environment before asking Texans to further desecrate the High Plains.