Notes From Central Pennsylvania:
The Very Long Arm of Egalitarian Propaganda

Life events have brought me into increasing contact with Central Pennsylvania, a vast tract of mountainous, rolling farmland stretching between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.  I think it was James Carville who derided Pennsylvania as those two cities “and Alabama without Blacks in between.”

There is something to that description.  It is not a wealthy area, and it is mostly white.  In many ways, it is indeed “Appalachian America,” both by the mountains and the markers.  I see more Confederate flags here than in many places south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Are these the Scots-Irish of David Hackett Fisher’s wonderful book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, the later German farmers, or a mixture?  I don’t know, but I am discovering.

As I am wont to do, I take the opportunity where I can to explore.  One thing I’ve discovered is just how far the reach of egalitarian propaganda goes.

For instance, recently I attended a Mennonite church service.  Mennonites are a pacifistic but extremely conservative religious sect, similar to the Amish but not as rejecting of technology like cars.  On the day I went to service, I was surprised to see that men and women sat on separate sides of the church.  I certainly stuck out, despite my attempts to dress conservatively. The men looked very uniform in appearance — and very ethnically German, to my eye.

You would think that if any group could resist the messages of modern America, it would be the Mennonites.  Yet I was surprised to hear, during a portion of the service that included comment from the men’s section, that the Mennonites were keen to compare themselves to the Jews:  as suffering outsiders. . . . Read the rest of the article.