Appalachia

Apparently, The City Journal is the magazine venue for the (laugh now) non-profit 501(c)3 Manhattan Institute that puts forth the sort of "Atlas Shrugged" propaganda that lost Mitt Romney the last election. Howard Husock is a regular contributor to Forbes and The National Review, and is a promoter of the "philosophy" of Charles Murray, the author of the controversial 1995 book, "The Bell Curve" that proposed that "cultural inferiority" is behind low-performance testing of some African-American young people ... Husock is performing the same "service" for the residents of Marietta, Ohio who he portrays in his article ("A Connecticut Yankee in Apppalachia&quot as being mostly misfits and drug-addicted single-parents who need both Marcellus Shale developers and the philanthropy of people like Alice Ely Chapman to keep them from sliding into the pit of Hell ... Actually, like many other towns, Marietta has its share of problems - yes there are fewer jobs than in the 1960s, and there is a sizable drug problem - but it also has many good people and many cultural attributes (it was just named the "sixth nicest town to visit by The Smithsonian Magazine. Our most pressing problem is that some of the entities here that reap big profits are too cheap to pay their workers a living wage. As far as the Marcellus Shale play is concerned, most of those hired are from places like Texas or Oklahoma, and those workers (that Husock mentioned as staying at local motels) will be on-the-road again once they finish trashing the local water supply ... Here's the deal. The Mid-Ohio-Valley tea-party gang here are a very active (and often very nasty) group that would not be above slipping a few choice morsels (i.e. the night photo of a west-side house scheduled for demolition) to some faraway hack to promote their Social-Darwinist, "blame-the-victim" message ... My guess is that Mr. Husock spends most of his time in a cushy office, and has never come within a 100 miles of the town that is so pompously trashing in his lengthy article ... I certainly hope that the good folks at the Eli Chapman Foundation (who HAVE done much good work with children from ALL backgrounds) will notice that their name is being used to promote a spurious political agenda, and that they will respond accordingly! ~ Fred O'Neill, Marietta, Ohio