We had traveled to the heart of American farming country to stay with an old friend in Kentucky. It was winter and it felt like it might never end. We were made welcome in the white clapboard farmhouse that was full of books. We ate good simple food and talked about our families and our farms. But as hard as we tried to be cheerful, it felt as if we had stumbled into someone else’s grief. There was a sense of impending doom about the coming election results. This had once been a thriving landscape of small-and medium-sized farms. Now, it felt like a landscape littered with ghosts and relics. Read more.