Maine is never at its prettiest in November. For 30 years that didn’t matter much to me, as turkey farming kept me from noticing.

But last weekend, on a trip to Orono, I noticed. It wasn’t the leafless hardwoods that grabbed my attention, it was the lifeless built environment along Route 2. That trip and a PBS film fused in my mind into a picture of rural/urban and perhaps all-American decay.

Route 2 first. My route to Orono takes me through New Sharon, Mercer, Norridgewock, Skowhegan, Canaan, Pittsfield and Palmyra to I-95, which speeds me the rest of the way.

Over Christmas break 1980-81, five buildings along Route 2 burned to the ground. None has been rebuilt. A double-wide replaced one. In Canaan, a store stood as a pile of rubble for years. In Pittsfield, another store, run into the ground by new owners, was razed. Palmyra had three convenience stores on Route 2. One is now a diesel repair shop, one is a residence and the third sits vacant and junky with a Trump sign tied to a pole.

The point of this history is that the decay has been going on a long time, and no one does anything about it. I recall Dr. Mark Lapping of the University of Southern Maine, who studied rural life for a lifetime, describing the elites’ attitude toward rural America: “We’re basically saying, ‘You’re going to die, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And frankly we’re not that interested.’”

He said that maybe a decade ago. Nothing has changed.

The PBS film told of General Motors idling its Lordstown Assembly plant at Warren, Ohio, a gritty city where we lived for 15 months. The plant was humming when we lived there. GM’s Packard Electric Division also had seven plants in Warren making wiring harnesses.

Most of the Packard jobs have gone to Mexico. Not the one in Oxford County.

GM pulled the work from Lordstown without formally closing the plant, perhaps to avoid paying severance. Those who accepted transfers to plants in Missouri, Kentucky or Michigan lost the right to return to Lordstown if it restarted. Some went to a plant that had already announced 900 layoffs to begin just after they arrived at their new jobs.

Beyond GM, Warren and the Mahoning Valley have lost all seven of their steel mills.

Just as many Mainers have stayed put after the rural economy has collapsed (tanneries, paper mills, broiler houses, shoe shops), many families in Warren stayed put even as the jobs left. Warren’s families were of two types, those depending on welfare or relatives and those with two partners working and earning more than $100,000 a year (in 1983).

Tiffany and Tom Davis were in the latter group. She taught school, he worked at GM. Bought a house when they were 23 and 21. After Lordstown, he transferred to Bowling Green, Kentucky. Warren has lost 40% of its population since 1970, falling to 38,000 from 63,000. More than a third of those remaining live below the poverty line.

Having lived in the country, in the suburbs and in the biggest city in each of two countries, I have long felt country and city are more alike than either is like the suburbs. The decay I see in rural Maine I saw 38 years ago in urban Ohio.

Along comes David Brooks to confirm my sense that decay respects no rural/urban divide. In the Atlantic for September, Brooks follows up his 22-years-ago analysis of America’s classes. He declares that much of that book, “Bobos in Paradise,” was wrong, in part because it was too hopeful.

(“Bobo” is Brooks’s coinage, combining “bourgeois” and “Bohemian.”) He acknowledges that as the son of college professors and an alumnus of the University of Chicago, he is a “Bobo.”

Though a conservative columnist for The New York Times, Brooks supported President Biden’s original Build Back Better plan, saying it would restore economic, cultural and political balance by moving trillions to neglected people, mainly without college degrees, rather than further subsidizing the super-rich.

He blames our hardening class warfare primarily on the “Bobos,” who wield economic, financial and cultural power beyond their numbers. Economic power comes from their jobs in academia, finance and tech; cultural power from their elite educations; political power from hobnobbing with movers and shakers.

By tightening their grip on all three, they shut off the American dream to anyone not born on at least one of the elite levels.

Other folks have political and economic power, but not cultural. Think the couple in St. Louis who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter marchers. Some have cultural and political power, but not economic. Think upwardly mobile college grads in the non-power cities, of which America has only five (Boston, New York, San Francisco, Austin, Washington).

Brooks laments, “The ability to perform academic tasks during adolescence is nice to have but organizing your society around it is absurd. That ability is not as important as the ability to work in teams; to sacrifice for the common good; to be honest, kind and trustworthy; to be creative and self-motivated. A sensible society would not celebrate the skills of a corporate consultant while slighting the skills of a home nurse.”

I’d like to take David Brooks on a ride along Route 2.

Bob Neal’s takeaway from the PBS film was when Tiffany and Tom Davis’s daughter, Audrey, joined her parents’ wrists with a red sash to stop him from going to Kentucky. Neal can be reached at turkeyfarm@myfairpoint.net.

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