Dear Missouri Editors:
In a recent editorial, "Rural Chic," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ridiculed political candidates who identify themselves with the traditions and values of rural Missouri. All candidates and statewide officials should know that agriculture is the bedrock of Missouri’s economy. It also is the dominant wellspring of our culture. Producing food and fiber for America and the world is a life-giving and life-sustaining occupation. It deserves honor, not condescension. Farming is difficult work, tougher and more challenging even than writing elitist editorials. Missouri has the fourth most diverse economy in the nation. We take collective pride in offering ourselves as a microcosm of America with large cities, small towns, suburbs and farms. We build airplanes and cars, grow corn, raise hogs and cattle.
In the heart of St. Louis wonderful non-profits like the Danforth Plant Science Center and great companies like Monsanto are helping to feed the world. We are an ethnic, cultural, and religious mosaic. Agriculture is a unifying element in our economy. For example, St. Louis is a major center of agribusiness, representing 12 percent of the area’s economic output according to the St. Louis Agribusiness Club. Does the elitism and divisiveness of the Post-Dispatch represent the mind of St. Louis? Certainly not. Does the newspaper’s disdain for Heartland Missouri tell us something about the increasing isolation of parts of the established media? Yes, I suppose so.
In "Rural Chic," the newspaper finds quaintly hopeless nostalgia in popular attitudes about farming. The "Agrarian Myth" is the editorial’s chosen label for what it believes is an idealized portrayal of farming. But it is insulting and demeaning to be told that one suffers from nostalgia if one farms, wears cowboy boots, hunts, fishes, loves gospel music or drives a tractor. But we all know the interlinear text of such an editorial, do we not? Where one finds cowboy boots and churches, there one also finds respect for our basic values. There one finds the big majorities against same-sex marriage, which was opposed by a solid majority of Missourians including St. Louis County where the effort to allow same-sex marriage was defeated by 54,000 votes.
It is in the Missouri Heartland that one finds no interest in job-killing new taxes - and in many other places, too, but that’s another story. And there, in those rural areas and small towns and Heartland cities, one finds many conservative voters who do not subscribe to the liberal viewpoint of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I understand the newspaper’s continuing anxiety that way too many people in Missouri keep turning up with good common sense and electing leaders who believe in the values of faith, family and community rather than big government. The paper should not give such a hard time to Democratic candidates for pretending to like guns and gospel music, and so on. Usually, people in the Heartland can spot a fraud the first time out. If they do get burned once by a Post-Dispatch liberal disguised in cowboy boots, it will not happen a second time, when the person next appears on a ballot.
Sincerely, Matt Blunt
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Just out of curiosity, when is the next time Matt Blunt is appearing on a ballot?
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