(+++) WELL, HE TRIED

I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay. By Matthew Ferrence. West Virginia University Press. $21.99.

     Self-congratulatory memoirs are scarcely unusual; indeed, they are the norm in this type of writing, for which the desire for self-congratulation appears to be a significant stimulus. And politics is pretty much always silly season, although some seasons are sillier than others. So a memoir that asserts itself as not being self-congratulatory and that sounds from its title as if it is going to take a lighthearted view of American political culture seems to have the potential to be a breath of fresh air (to trot out a suitable cliché) both autobiographically and politically.

     No such luck. In Matthew Ferrence’s I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me, the author flaunts his superiority by declaring that he’s not, you know, really superior, just, you know, different, but in a really good way. The book is built around Ferrence’s experience as a losing Pennsylvania House of Representatives candidate in 2020, in a rural district registered some 60% Republican and some 40% Democratic, in which Ferrence is shocked, shocked, to find that he gets about 35% of the vote while the long-serving Republican incumbent gets about 65%.

     Ferrence, a university professor and self-avowed progressive, uses his book primarily to trot out the same tired old bona fides beloved of his political cohorts and anathema to his political opponents. Nothing wrong with that – politicians, including would-be ones, do that all the time – but the sanctimoniousness of Ferrence’s proclamatory prose may be less than engaging even for those who happen to believe, to a considerable extent, in the same things he does. “The high road is a laudable goal, but it’s also a losing strategy when you’re getting bulldozed. …If you’re a rural Democrat, whether progressive or not, you are forced to vote for Democrats who don’t care about you. Republicans, in turn, hate you because you are a Democrat. So you’re left with a decision between casual disdain and active loathing.” Gosh, how could voters not choose Ferrence for office when he so clearly articulates such uplifting thoughts?

     The specificity of Ferrence’s politically charged (and, let’s face it, strikingly unoriginal) comments on Democrats and Republicans does not fully bring out his passion, however. That comes into full view when he gets to wax philosophical about politics and life and all that stuff: “I’m getting to a point here about migrations and flow and the legality of existence and the indignity of nativist claims and the collapse of politics into what we know is a ridiculous racism-driven discourse of ‘border issues.’ …Much of this relates to home, definitions of it, who gets to claim it, and how the structures of politics are just one of many ways to alienate human beings from places where they might choose to make a life.” Wow, what a clear and voter-focused platform to run on! Again, how could people not choose to support it?

     Yet none of these comments is as strongly felt as what Ferrence has to say about poetry, which he abundantly and clearly asserts to be the highest good, not only by comparison with politics but also when compared to – well, pretty much anything else. “Poetry again, also the disdain of it, how declarations against poetry are declarations against the hope of a different, better, flourishing future. …Declarations against poetry echo as a marker of everything wrong with the philosophies of abandonment that shape our days in rural America. Austerity hates poetry, because poetry refuses the austere.” Leaving aside that arguable final sentence (T.S. Eliot, anyone?), it is difficult to remember the last time “declarations against poetry” were germane to a political campaign. Well, all right, not that difficult: Ferrence’s opponent, Bradley Roae, had mocked college students studying “poetry or another pre-Walmart major,” and this clearly raised Ferrence’s hackles, and the result was – well, among other things, I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me.

     Really, though, the anti-poetry quip (it scarcely qualifies as a broadside) is such a small matter, so deeply irrelevant to the everyday lives of the Crawford County constituents of Pennsylvania’s District 6, that it seems the height of elitism to make it foundational first to a political campaign and then to a book ostensibly about a political campaign – but really about the wonderfulness of progressive thinking (whatever that means) in areas usually deemed to be solidly conservative (whatever that means). Memoirs are often monumentally boring in the self-adulation of their creators, who proclaim themselves to have sprung Athena-like from the forehead of Zeus with their inevitably superior knowledge, understanding and even experience ready-made for the edification of the mere mortals who only get to read about their wonderfulness. Effective memoirs, non-self-celebratory ones from which readers may actually learn something, tend to be modest and filled with exploration and failure and learning gleaned from difficulties in life to which readers may themselves relate even if their personal circumstances differ significantly from those of the author. Does Ferrence say in I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me that he learned anything usefully communicable from his failed campaign? Well, he says that it is “easy to fall into the trap of thinking that politics somehow matters, and by that I mean the power, and ideology, and polling, and thinking that being a Democrat or a Republican matters in some fundamental way.” And he adds that he favors “self-immolation as an act of political defiance.” And for anybody who deems those thoughts useful and revelatory, perhaps Ferrence will be willing to make himself available as a campaign consultant.