MY BARBER
My barber, whose barber shop in Swannanoa features Fox News on the TV all day and who is a Trump supporter, isn‘t stimulated by Asheville the way I am. In fact, much of what turns me on about Asheville turns him off. He grew up in a one small house near Black Mountain which is just down the road from Asheville. His family had an outhouse which they heated with firewood. Life was hard but he remembers his growing up as being a good time. He did chores and cut firewood and helped in the garden. His parents were strict disciplinarians. But now he feels everyone through liberal influence has turned soft and lazy. This corruption is because of rich foreigners from the north coming to Black Mountain and Asheville and undermining the way of life that he remembers as being hard but much better than the new corruption from then north in Asheville.
One of the things my barber resents is the gentrification by rich northern liberals who come to Black Mountain and Asheville to live and who raise the cost of living. Those little houses we passed on the way to Owl Bakery are now wildly expensive. There are new hotels everywhere.
The new Restoration Hotel, in the old Bank of America building, with its many bars and lounges and sky high room rates is an example.
My barber can’t stand liberals whom he feels look down on him because of their advanced education and hoity toity ways from classical music to their taste in exotic foreign foods to their fancy shops to their acceptance of LGBTQ people along with their demonization of the old confederacy and the lost civil war. Two things he won’t give up, his Bible (which represent for me fundamentalist affirmation of patriotism, racism, sexism, exceptionalism) and his guns (which for me represent protection of his identity from liberals and interfering big government).
But for me in the sixty years that I’ve lived in Asheville the town has shifted from being a provincial traditional town to an being an open and accepting town. This is what liberalization has meant to me. Asheville has woken up to the world, it has Europeanized, which means Asheville is “woke”, and proud of it. 60 years ago the Asheville Symphony was just getting started with my friend Fred Ohler, a fellow teacher, as first violin. Now the members are professionals. There were no Indian restaurants and now there are seven along with restaurants from all around the world, more international restaurants than Haarlem or Celle. And clothing from around the world is available in elegant shops with most articles made overseas. Manufacturing has shifted from blue collar to white collar and the IT business is flourishing. Asheville has become a much more interesting place for me and yet it still accepts Appalachian Culture and country music at the Shindig on the Green but now embraces the whole world, as do Haarlem and Celle. So this is one of the reasons why so many people come to Asheville. Asheville stimulates them and breaks them out of their hometown culture, in the same way that Varanasi and Celle and Paris and Haarlem and Tallin do for me. Asheville is no less interesting, but for it to be as fully stimulating as any other place.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 