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\tby Claire Wolfe<\/B><\/FONT><\/p>\n \u201cLike A Prairie Home Companion \u2026 with grenades!\u201d \u2014 Michael W. Dean, filmmaker and gadfly<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n See below for two ways to order.<\/p>\n ONCE UPON A TIME …<\/p>\n … there was a town called Hardyville. Truth to tell, it wasn’t much of a place. The nearest freeway passed about 200 miles away — and kept right on passing. It didn’t have a single sign of what people in the real world might have called civilization or culture. It was just one dusty intersection with one lone stoplight, a few encircling residential streets, a fair number of surrounding ranches, and a whole lot of nothing, all located in a red-rock valley 600 miles west of the precise geographic middle of nowhere.<\/p>\n Hardyville was also — from 1997 to 2007, on and off — located on the Internet, first on a news site and then on the website of Backwoods Home<\/i> magazine.<\/p>\n Given the town’s absolute lack of conventional appeal, you might ask, "Why the heck would anybody want to be there?" There are reasons — about 1776 of them.<\/p>\n Hardyville does have one really, really great thing: some of the most smart, cussed, stubborn, independent, clear-headed people you’d ever want to meet. And Hardyville doesn’t have one really, really awful thing most of the rest of the world is saddled with: too damn much government. <\/p>\n Hardyville managed to scrape its way into the twenty-first century almost entirely without politicians, bureaucrats, or any of their Evil Spawn. It is, in other words, what America once had a chance to become — and didn’t.<\/p>\n So what happens when the immovable objects of freedom and sheer, bloody stubbornness are slammed by the (so we are taught to believe) irresistible forces of faux-democracy, bureaucracy, and a whole army of other -ocracies and -isms?<\/p>\n Read on and you’ll soon know …<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n![\"Hardyville](\"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/cw01.jpg\")
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