Randolph County: The Black Hole Where Globalization’s Hopes Go to Retire
Randolph County, USA: Where Globalization Goes to Die of Sheer Boredom
By Our Man in the Provinces, still jet-lagged from passport stamps that read like a suicide note
Randolph County—pick your state, they’re franchising the name like a depressed Starbucks—sits at the precise longitude where the 21st-century supply chain forgets to deliver meaning. Fly in from any continent and the first thing that greets you is a sheriff’s cruiser older than the Kyoto Protocol, idling like a smoker outside hospice. International significance? Absolutely. Randolph is the control group the rest of the planet measures its decline against.
Take the chicken-processing plant outside Wedowee (Alabama edition). On paper it’s a multinational triumph: Brazilian-owned, Chinese-bankrolled, Mexican-staffed, and patronized by shoppers who still think “global south” is a aisle in Walmart. The birds arrive in crates stenciled with export codes for Dubai, but the workers wear diapers because bathroom breaks lower quarterly projections. Somewhere in Davos an infographic celebrates this as “resilient value migration.” Here it smells like wet feathers and overtime that still can’t cover rent, a scent now bottled in every “developing” zip code from Lagos to Lodz.
Or pivot to the Randolph in North Carolina, where the last cotton mill became an Amazon returns graveyard overnight. The building is the size of Liechtenstein and about as productive; inside, mountains of unwanted polyester tee-shirts—emblazoned with slogans like “Keep Austin Weird” and “I’m With Stupid →”—await shipment to African second-hand markets, which increasingly reply, “No thanks, we’re full.” The circular economy, apparently, is just a freight elevator to the global basement, and Randolph pressed the button.
Geopolitically, the county functions as a black-box recorder for neoliberalism. Trade war tariffs, semiconductor shortages, even the Taliban’s return—the local diner’s jukebox skips the same Skynyrd track through every catastrophe. When CNN declares the world “interconnected,” Randolph’s Wi-Fi still buffers during cloud cover, proving that 5G can’t penetrate fatalism. Analysts in Brussels worry about supply-chain “near-shoring”; here they call it “Tuesday,” and the only reshoring visible is the lake returning to its pre-climate-change shoreline one cracked bass boat at a time.
Yet the place exports something rarer than soybeans or sadness: a template for managed obsolescence. European villages fighting depopulation study Randolph’s strategy of replacing storefronts with churches, churches with vape shops, vape shops with genealogy centers—anything to keep the parking meters relevant. Japanese bureaucrats visit to witness “extreme rurality,” marveling at how a county can lose 30 % of its people and still re-elect the same family judge since the Carter administration. The tour ends at the Dollar General, where a single aisle sells both pregnancy tests and sympathy cards, efficiency even German supermarkets haven’t mastered.
Environmental diplomats chart the county’s forest plots as carbon-offset sacrifices: pay Randolph not to cut trees its residents couldn’t afford to prune anyway. The credits finance a tech bro’s Bali retreat, while locals burn pallets to stay warm, releasing the exact CO₂ some Swiss foundation just paid to sequester. It’s the kind of symbiosis that would make a flatworm blush, but the Paris Agreement accounting is immaculate.
Of course, Randolph fights back the only way it knows—by reenacting Civil War skirmishes where the Confederacy wins this time, thanks to better catering. International observers note the spectacle as “performative secession,” useful for distracting citizens from the opioid vending machine at the truck stop. The UN’s rapporteur on poverty visited once; he left early after being offered a deep-fried Twinkie shaped like his own report.
So why should anyone beyond the county line, let alone the ocean, care? Because Randolph is the null hypothesis of modernity: if you do everything the supply-side preachers demand—low taxes, loose labor, endless extraction—and still end up with Dollar Store kimchi, the experiment fails everywhere. Lagos traffic jams, Leipzig’s housing crisis, and Lima’s water riots are just Randolph with more layers of graffiti. The county proves the world doesn’t end with a bang or whimper, but with a clearance aisle.
And yet, humans persist. A Sudanese mechanic just opened the first halal BBQ joint beside the Confederate monument; the lunch rush is bilingual, the Wi-Fi still imaginary. Somewhere in that gesture lies a fragile optimism, or at least a shared recognition that the apocalypse, like everything else, will have to go through Randolph eventually—and it’s already stuck in traffic behind a poultry truck.
