A Different Take on Rural American Life...

From Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (Carol follows her husband from metropolitan St. Paul to a little town called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota):

The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It is nothing so amusing!

It's an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of spirit by the desire to appear respectable. it is contentment...the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.

A savorless people, gulping tasteless food and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.