Comments on: Welcome to Bush Country

By: Joie

Joie — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:15:29 +0000

I grew up in brookville… and I also dated the guy that owned the porn store before it was shut down for health violations. i know a lot of what goes on there… behind the scenes, in a sense.. if the churches and health department know HALF of what I know, they would be shut down for good. but why should I? what’s in it for me?? a good old fashioned “burn the witch at the stake” party? oh well… drugs, people murdering one another, and teens getting pregnant… my questions is, what’s the harm of a little porn? the whole town has already gone to hell!!

By: Groucho Lenin

Groucho Lenin — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:04:04 +0000

OK, I’m from Brookville. I hated it when I grew up there and, like every other kid I knew and probably like every kid in every small town in America,I couldn’t wait to graduate and leave. But having traveled across the country several times, I gotta tell you that Brookville would not make my list of the 10,000 worst places in America. Not even close. We had a place to hang out and shoot pinball,a free place to swim in the summers (when they came on a weekend!) and as many as four rock or soul live music venues to pick from every Friday or Saturday night. We even had our own freak district known as Hippie Hill. Brookville lost its only industry in 1965, but still managed to thrive instead of becoming another of the many ghost towns you see everywhere. Yes, the population is racially homogeneous, but this is the rural northeast/midwest! We didn’t burn crosses at the town limits; Blacks in general chose to move to the cities. Look it up. And although few Blacks settled in Brookville, a whole lot of them passed through. Brookville was a major hub on the Underground Railroad (some of which is actually underground there) and hundreds of Southern slaves enjoyed our hospitality and aid on their way to becoming free Canadians. Brookville voted overwhelmingly for Bush? What a shocker! Brookville voted overwhelmingly for Reagan, Nixon, Ike and Lincoln too. This is Republican country. The Jefferson County Democrat Party holds its conventions in a phone booth. But back in “the day,” Brookville was also a local center for radical anti-war politics and yes, even The Killer Weed! The high school had a walkout war protest and hung the principal in effigy. One journalist asked the rhetorical question of whether kids were actually at the local school dance or getting high in some squalid, mattress-covered hippie pad in Brookville.
Don’t worry about the signs. I really doubt if you’d get shot and killed for sneaking into a deer range, but they take deer hunting seriously and a night or two in jail for trespassing would be a real possibility. And if you think about it “Get out of town and don’t come back” was really a kind-hearted reaction to someone who left a dog in a broiling hot car. I think PETA would approve.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:43:25 +0000

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23515081@N00/487639581/

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:42:58 +0000

here is a better picture of the Adult Super Center, I was driving down I-80 going home from vacation and stoped in Brookville to eat, and thought the Adult Store with the Poronography Pollutes sign nextdoor was funny, so I took a picture also.

By: derek

derek — Mon, 15 May 2006 02:25:57 +0000

hello,

i happen to be from this sleepy little town; thanks for helping put us on the map.

first: the speed limit on that road is 35, so you’d better be careful driving 50, as people from out of state are very likely to get pulled over. one lady shopping on main street got a big fine and was told to “leave town right away and don’t come back” for leaving her dog in the car. The citing officer took the time to get the local paper there for a photo op before he ‘rescued’ the dog though.

second: now there is an even funnier sign in town, right adjacent to the porn shop. This one is a big billboard with a crying little girl that says, pornography pollutes: body, mind and soul. Its been put up by a local witchhunting reverend with a “non-profit” called ‘brookvillians for family values’ or something. He’s also got a newspaper and a radio station.

Just an update for you. Also, the porn store is currently closed down because of some kind of health-code violations.. not sure the exact nature but I knew someone who worked there and there were fairly minor infractions

By: JJ

JJ — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 05:18:44 +0000

I live in Brookville PA. it sucks and so does everyone in it. I spent my senior year here tryin to find a good paying job, didnt happen. The porn store moved in and so did every god loving person who wanted it out!! Couldnt even pick up the newspaper without seeing letters to the editor, that all read the same thing “KILL ALL PORN LOVERS”. In 2005 a man shot his wife in the face, up here on a hill in good old brookville, he killed her, in their own home infront of her son. He told the judge he didnt know why the gun went off..HE GOT 7 YEARS IN JAIL!! 7 years, I say he is out in 3. That man got 7 years for taking a life, the porn store just got shut down last week because it had locks on some doors and something about codes. Instead of a big blue sign that says “Adult Supercenter” I think the town of Brookville needs a big sign that says “COME TO BROOKVILLE, KILL YOUR WIFE AND GET AWAY WITH IT!!” People of Brookville need to stop worrying so much about porn and start worrying more about the murders, drugs and the kids around here that dont have food to eat. I hate this town, and I hope one day I have enough money to leave it.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 21:05:43 +0000

Jason, you should read this blog. Highly relevant to the topic about Bush Country.

By: Jason Godesky

Jason Godesky — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 20:58:54 +0000

Deleting spam brought this to my attention. Must’ve missed this…

I didn’t know that bush invented porn? Amazing, pass the kool-aid!

Surely you can do better than that. This isn’t a statement about Bush, so much as it is about the hypocrisy of the “morals voters” who support him. Their morality permits pornographic super-centers and shooting trespassers on sight (so much for “turn the other cheek,” huh?)–to say nothing of that jump in approval he got from Abu Ghraib and all the people who explicitly said they liked him for torturing people, even when they knew that some 98% of Abu Ghraib’s prisoners were detained “by accident”–but not to letting a man see the person he’s loved and lived with for 25 years to be at his side in the hospital in his final hours because, well, that’d just be icky.

By: Zeus

Zeus — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 23:57:07 +0000

I didn’t know that bush invented porn? Amazing, pass the kool-aid!

By: Justin Case

Justin Case — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 03:01:17 +0000

Hey Mike– long time no see. A couple comments regarding your post. Firstly, I think the store sign, “Adult Supercenter,” is rather in tune with enlightened family values. As opposed to a sign like “Vaginas ‘R’ Us” or “Tony’s House of Duct Tape and Barnyard Animals”, “Adult Supercenter” isn’t likely to provoke any uncomfortable questions from kids seeing it from the backseat of their parents’ SUV. For me and most of my friends, the word adult didn’t acquire its tertiary, deviant sense until well into our teens. Furthermore, the fact that “Supercenter” is located in a highly visible spot shows that the community does not inflict a large amount of shame on men leaving the establishment with overstuffed opaque black bags. If anything, the presence of the store seems to suggest that, despite its intense political conservatism, the community has a liberal, live-and-let-live attitude towards sexuality.

I think the deer range signs you saw were a clever way of reconciling the community’s commitment to rugged individualism (a primary conservative value) and its liberal tolerance for eccentricity as described above. It’s important to examine the signs in context. The owners of the deer range certainly don’t want to kill a couple of good ol’ boys from the local high school who want to bag a deer to use for their senior prank. The owners probably did the same thing when they were in high school. However, the owners, committed to individuality and property rights, obviously don’t want trespassers (who, outside of Jason Godesky, would?) The solution is to put up an over-the-top, folksy sign that will scare away outsiders. If they were dead serious about keeping people out, they would electrify the fence and install razor wire.

This leads me to believe that the church’s slogan is probably truthful. As for the lack of diversity, a tolerant, friendly community like Brookville is probably emulating successful tribes by staying close nit, homogeneous, and wary of outsiders.