The market is up at the moment. It’ll be interesting to see what Mr. Obama says to make it drop later today. After all, he has to destroy the economy so he can enslave us.

I was thinking on the way in about the differences between city folk and country folk. The latter are much closer to Reality in the sense that they live on the land and work with it to produce basic necessities (food, fiber, building materials, etc.). Generally speaking, they also have longer sight and a sense of connection to the past, present, and future. They are like a first derivative.

So, country folk tend by nature to be relatively sensible (at least if they own and care for a decent amount of property, such as a farm or ranch; I can’t speak for the folks buried deep in the Appalacians). Second level derivative folks are those living in the market towns who provide services that allow the country folk to communicate, execute their tasks, and market their goods. Examples would be small town bankers, educators, phone company workers, grain elevator operators, commodities brokers, etc. These folk would have some contact with the land, though mostly through the first level folks, as well as contacts with the larger world.

Third level derivative folks are those living in larger towns or small cities, usually with a college or university unit (e.g. Greeley). These folks are usually employed in service industries and many times in processing industries (from meat packing to bread making to manufacturing), as well as in higher education, regional governance, and often power generation. They have even less of a connection to the land and more of a connection to the wider world. Rather than working the land, they are working with the products of the land, and with each other. Networking, in other words, as they process, manufacture, transport, etc.

Fourth level derivative folks are those living in the suburban areas of large to very large cities. Most of them are in service industries, from small businesses such as grooming shops for people and animals, to medium sized businesses such as call centers for various purposes or high-tech manufacturing, to large businesses such as insurance, banking & financing, etc. This would include the large companies that move products from the land to markets such as grocery and big box stores for electronics, etc. Many other people are in government jobs, usually at local, state, or federal levels (depending on location), as well as higher education and medical/pharmaceutical research and education. These folks are even farther from direct connection to the land, and many of them are fairly well-off in terms of paper investments. Their primary focus is on people and networking—working the system, if you will.

Fifth level derivative folks are those living in the large to very large cities. They have almost no connection to the land, and mainly work in services at all levels, from tiny to huge. Instead of resource processing and/or manufacturing, they deal largely with wholesale and retail sales, banking and finance, investing and commodities exchange, government, education at all levels, and internal and external transportation and communication. To them, especially at the highest levels, the world looks very small and very full of people. Because the large cities are quite crowded, these people are unable to manage without dealing with each other as members of groups. They also stratify themselves within their close in networks, and may feel like they’re on top of the world because they have movers and shakers around the world in their networks—which makes them big shots, so far above the “little” people that they can’t even see them, let alone the ground. The people at the bottom have slightly more contact with the land, but more in terms of the past than the present, as their recent ancestors may have moved to the city in hopes of bettering their prospects through greater access to work that provided paper wealth, often because they felt they had no chance to gain real wealth in terms of land or gold. Now, for a large variety of reasons, these people have because a permanent underclass that is “farmed” by higher level people for personal power. They have often become wards of the state.

One website, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/, has not only maps of the 2008 election by county, but also cartograms that show the relative numbers of Democrats vs. Republicans as distorted maps that give a feel for the numbers of each.

Generally speaking, the Republicans count among their numbers most of the first, second, and about half of the third level derivative folks. Everyone else generally shows as independent or Democrat. The so-called country-club Republicans are really independents who happen to wear the Republican label.

This take on the political spectrum, general as it is, suggests that the closer to the land and resources a person is (i.e. the more a person is likely to get his hands dirty), the more conservative he or she is likely to be. Also, given that the connection to the land and resources is much older than the relatively recent higher level derivations, it shouldn’t be surprising that these people are more sensible in general. Life is slower and simpler at that level. The further up (or down, as some might take it) the levels, the faster life seems to pass, the more complicated it appears, and the more stressful it gets.