Mayberry RIP

 

I know this was a rerun, but I did not see it in its original airing, so it struck me with a weird kind of uncanniness--the CBS Sunday Morning show did a piece on Mount Airy, NC, which is sort of acknowledged as the model for the fictional town of Mayberry, the home of The Andy Griffith Show.  It originally aired 9 months after 1/6.  I knew at once I wanted to blog about it. 

I live in one of the big cities that one of the Mount Airy people seems to believe get "burned down every day". It does not. No big cities are getting burned down every day by either BLM or antifa. We are very intact, thanks! If we were not, we are not stupid and would move or something. We would extremely fund the police. We'd be electing really harsh prosecutors. Actually, when they find the arsonists fucking up stuff during BLM protests, it's false flag shit from white supremacists. 

But here's the part that made me wonder about small town America:

Koppel asked the trolley's riders, "I know you came here to have a good time and not to talk politics. But let me just ask you, as a matter of curiosity, how many of you think we had a fair election?" 

"No way!" said one man wearing an American flag T-shirt with the word "Patriotism." 

"I saw two hands go up," Koppel said. "So, is it fair to say the rest of you think that it was not a fair election?" 

"No, no. No, it wasn't. I don't think it was at all," said the man. 

Another man said, "I think there was a lot of voter fraud. It's never been proven. There's been people that's voted that's been dead 15 years. I think it's more the mail-in ballot stuff. You don't know how much of those that were duplicated, triplicated. The whole bit." 

A third man said, "Look how many dead people voted for Biden." 

Koppel asked, "One question, it's a serious question and I know you all will take it seriously: Tell me what you think happened on January 6 at Congress?" 

The first man said, "They showed truckloads of people that they were bringing in for this. It was all staged. And that's how that started. They even showed pictures of it on the news, about these vehicles coming in with all these BLM people." 

Another man, who believed the election was fair, called the January 6 attack, "A disgrace on our country."

They believe Trump was somehow screwed out of his presidency by the dumb people who live in cities that are perpetually on fire and are nonetheless smart enough to both rig an election and engage in a false flag op to make Trump supporters look bad. They aren't extremely online, obviously, or they would know what both antifa and business casual klan online feeds looked like. They are in denial that their side is "the baddies".

They believe stuff that can't be true, and they have to know it can't. What truckloads of people? TPUSA and Doug Mastriano and a lot of MAGAs brought in truckloads of people, but there were no antifa.  What in the hell are they talking about? There was no documented "widespread" fraud. It exists in their minds. Bill Barr said there was no fraud. Recounts found no fraud. The Trump campaign lost over 60 cases. 

But they believe what they believe and would even not watch mainstream tv because it doesn't feed into the untruths they want to believe. And suddenly the small town world that looked great from a fictional distance seems like a place where bad ideas are a part of conformity, and where ignorance and avoidance of facts becomes the norm. 

I really think in the idealized world where Andy and them talked out things, they might have come to the conclusion that Trump is a big city liar, and never had a bone of patriotism or charity or good intent in his whole body. The real world is different. People get fooled, or they beclown themselves for a crack-brained treasonous pettifogger. 

The small town way hits differently when you wonder if a certain political POV is a part of the membership program to enjoy the life bucolic. I would pass on that.