!K for Kentucky --- agk's diary 19 Aug 2025 @ 18:16 UTC --- written on GPD MicroPC in vi via puTTY in living room as daughter naps before tumbling --- I was born in a Commonweath. I never learned what distinguishes it from an ordinary federated state. Our rich are lords of their manors or gangsters. Our poor are peasants tied to land owned by a lord, or in and out of the workhouse. We don't hold wealth in common. Kentucky pays, though, to repave state highways every summer, widen as population grows. It invests state workers' pensions and pays out. It spends on state prison infrastructure and wages. I'm only learning civics. I can't say what's Commonwealth, county fiscal court, or municipal government. Teachers and librarians are paid, water infrastructure maintained, dams raised, opioid settlement money disbursed, medics paid, fire- fighters, police, sheriffs, jailers, and coroners, fleets and jails maintained. Some wealth's common, for someone's conception of good. Daughter sits in the swinging chair, looks intently at the 1938 Works Progress Administration Kentucky map on our wall. "I'm watching Kentucky TV," she says. Rivers, roads, national forests, rail lines, and dots of towns are on maps. Central and Western Kentucky are longitudinal polities integrated by north-south roads and road cuts. One Kentucky: Cincinnati and Lexington, through Richmond and London to Knoxville. Another: Louisville and Elizabethville, on through Bowling Green to Nashville. All first integrated by rail. Louisville, Paducah, St. Louis, and Memphis were integrated by river. Maybe they still are. Kentucky has a lot of counties. 120. Ask a Kentuck- ian where she's from, she'll say her county. Each has elites, local lords with 500 acres in cattle or corn, residential and commercial rentals, Sheriff's and Judge Executive's offices. Slushers in Bell County, Creeches in Perry, Combs in Madison. You find in adjacent counties ones didn't inherit the manor. They're trash. Trailers and mansion, vast farm and shacks obtain in eastern highlands, far west riverine lowlands. Humans warehoused in county jail and drug treatment or monitored by parole boards and suboxone clinics. Remnant downtown anchored by farm-to-table eatery run by local gentry with startup grants, or vacant, crumbling. It's hard to cross Kentucky east to west but no doubt it's one polity. The seal once displayed two coattailed men's fervent embrace, round them the words, "united we stand, divided we fall." This tender crest the legislature changed in the 1950s. Now gentleman and frontiersman stand arms-length, politely shake, conclude a land survey deal. Frontiersman's deep in Kentucky's conscience. Crossing mountains from Virginia for the long hunt among abundant bison and elk was a rugged task 225 years ago. They followed hunting trails of Cherokee who lived southeast of Virginia. No one lived here, this was hunting ground for them and Shawnee from west of Pennsylvania. Frontiersmen surveyed the land, built forts, died in ambushes, brought slaves to mine and refine saltpetre and salt, widened roads for oxcarts. Behind him the pressure of more farmers, settlers. Lincoln's boyhood cabin's in Kentucky. An early railroad line was built here by slaves. The vast western Kentucky plantation of 100 slaves inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin. My town was built by anti-slavers. A white man who sentimentally wanted to free the woman raised him, his father's property, raised money, founded an interracial church, school, and village here, in the slave south. A few counties west the Union army established a camp for black refugees and a fort based a black regiment. Kentucky didn't secede nor join the Confederacy. Unlike the rest of the south, it was only briefly under Union imperial military rule modeled on US governance of the Filipino colony. The Emancipation Proclamation also didn't free Kentucky slaves. After the war pro-Union mountaineers voted Repub- lican. In the bluegrass and west pro-Confederate tobacco and cotton planters voted Democrat. Kentucky wasn't "solid south." Industrialists nonetheless wrested control of transportation, commodity warehousing, finance, money supply, and the legislature. Rentiers dispossessed farmers, produced tenants and laborers. Interracial farmer organizations and labor unions, hundreds of thousands of black and white men and women, built statewide economic coop- eratives in the 1870s and 1880s. "All who produce" parlayed economic into legislative power. The brutal 1893 depression, 1896 election, and 1900 assassination of the sitting, legitimate governor broke the popular power. The new power was white power, an uneasy alliance between white male industrial/landowner power and white male organized labor. Its party was Democracy Its results, the failure to absorb the black former peasantry into the industrial working class in time to gain from New Deal prosperity, and underdevelop- ment of the Commonwealth. During the better part of a century of one-party Democrat rule, there were two factions with the same policies but different patronage networks. As present-day Kentucky became a one-party Republican state during Senator Mitch McConnell's career, Democrats failed to unite and Republicans became the party of the powerful, of local gentry and county lords, gravel, asphalt, and road maint- ainence gangsters, million dollar racehorse owners, real estate, finance, and insurance. Almost a decade ago Kentucky changed my life. Medicaid expansion made basic healthcare and dental easy for me. It helped me go to college and graduate. My family, including preschool daughter, is back to normal, uninsured. We buy basic drugs mailorder from overseas til tariffs take them, do advanced assessment and interventions at home, fabricate medical devices and orthopedics, answer anxious young parents newly facing life uninsured with children. Kentucky's targeted for development. Wheels and glass and other light car manufacturing was already here, and Toyota's biggest assembly plant. In the last year the Governor and our Senators brought in battery plants, vast data centers, and uranium refining. Reshoring starts in the year 2030 in Kentucky, with the dirty, dangerous stuff China used to build high-tech manufacturing power. Unlike in China, banking is not a public utility here. If manufacturers and data centers fail us, rob us, or despoil us, all of which they're bound to do, our recourse is litigation. In the west, fields that used to grow fruits and vegetables now grow endless acres of corn for export. In the east, prisons will "create jobs" on sterile plateaus of strip-mined mountains. In all the small places across the state, church camps tucked in the hills, donkey tree off the one-lane, polebarn on fire lighting up the night, volunteer firefighter watching atop four-wheeler, limestone cave and rugged wilderness, country church and slate-bottom creeks where cellphone service doesn't go, out by the trestle bridge and abandoned distillery discolored by whiskey fungus, Kentucky's home.