Little Town, Big Town

The town I live in has 3,500 people and this time of year, it seems almost cartoonishly picturesque. The clichés literally come to life: Pumpkin patches, apple orchards, streams of gold leaves blowing diagonally across the road. Though a mere two hours drive from New York City, this place has mythic elements of Norman Rockwell country -- referring, of course to the famous painter of archetypal small-town America, born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When I moved here from New York City, I neither expected to find, nor did I search for, the meaning of life, or for "real" American values of the sort that Governor Palin said are uniquely instilled in towns like these.

Gov. Palin's remarks this past week implicitly referenced some urban cabal of cosmopolitanism with values of a lesser worth and a suspect work ethic to boot. She spoke as if schoolteachers and factory workers belong exclusively to rural or small-town pockets of America. As if there are no patriots in Chicago, or hard-working folk in downtown Los Angeles, or faithful, family-first Americans in Kansas City. I'd go a step further and say her comments were vaguely sinister, encouraging an us-versus-them divisiveness that is the sign of an increasingly desperate campaign. It is also rhetoric that historically has fueled not only paranoia and group-think, but even tyranny.

We may be resigned to hearing about a 50-50 country for the rest of our time on earth. But it might be time for some mythbusting about rural vs. city, as if America's fissure occurs the minute you exit the urban highways. No agrarian area or factory town has the monopoly on values -- a word that has become so sullied and co-opted it is almost unusable -- nor can our country's small towns lay sole claim to patriotism. To assert otherwise is dangerous and inaccurate.

I spent 18 years in the suburbs of Boston, 20 years in Manhattan, and now six years in one of those supposedly-value-laden idylls in Connecticut, and what I have to report may shock you: there are good people everywhere. There are good values everywhere. There's devotion to family, faith, country, friends and workplace everywhere. And this just in: there are also mean, lazy, deadbeat Americans everywhere as well.

To give her the benefit of the doubt, Gov. Palin probably meant to flatter her audience when she made her remarks in Greensboro, N.C.: that's why she complimented that town for being not only pro-America but the real America. She wanted to tell them they were special, and to practice some affinity politicking - not only am I like you, but you're like me, and -- wink -- we're better than those elite city folk. She has now issued the kind of boilerplate apology -- or clarification - that has become so tiresome, and to which we have become so accustomed, from celebrities and public figures of every stripe when they speak too quickly, assess the damage, and have to repudiate what they just said. I am not sure I believe her apology, but while cementing her 'outsider' status as a small-town gal herself, her sweeping comments reinforced the artificial brick wall between city and country. They diminished the struggles of city dwellers who love their country, and fight for it, and marginalized their contributions both to a market economy and to society.

Like New York City, my town is filled with regular citizens, construction workers and bankers, activists and people who don't follow the news, and parents worried sick about their children, the schools and their jobs. Like New York, the people in my town are watching property values tank and 401Ks flameout. And like I did in New York, I chat with the woman who serves me a coffee-regular in the morning, and I wave and smile at my neighbors -- though I do have fewer of them -- who don't always have the time to stop and talk about the weather. When I was on bed rest in New York, my friends brought me delicious take-out and carted around my kids on the subway, and when I had surgery in the country, my friends brought me covered dishes and carted my kids around in mini-vans. Other than the fact that my plumber, Doug, usually comes within hours of my calling when there's a water emergency (my super used to take a few days), other than the fact that the air is crisper here, the small town life is no more American than the city life I left behind. Our July 4 parade is small and intimate, and the Cub Scouts do throw candy at the crowd, but we honor the veterans who march, and the volunteer firemen and women -- noble people, and the finest of citizens -- no more vigorously than we do their urban counterparts. In other words, there is plenty of "kindness" and "goodness," as Gov. Palin put it, even in big cities, and as we saw when the towers collapsed in our backyard, no shortage of "courage" either.

Many a politician has played the plain folk vs. elite game with its troubling innuendo in the past. McCarthy redefined "un-American," and profaned the concept of patriotism. Mao Zedong, from the countryside, feared the urban scene, and built a political philosophy on contradictions between city and country, agrarian and intellectual, and ultimately purged the scholars. Nixon famously feared the ivory tower. But where I obviously don't believe that Gov. Palin has a HUAC, a dictatorship, or another paranoid Nixon White House in mind, I do interpret her attribution of pro-American values and the embrace of hard work to small towns as a slap in the face to everyone else, and her (and the Republican campaign's) constant hammering of perceived elites as both a phony issue and a needlessly divisive one. There is simply no advantage in deliberately creating character divisions based on geography in a country where good and bad, and hard-worker, slacker -- and unemployed -- mean the same, everywhere. To her Greensboro audience it may have been shrewd politics. To the rest of us, it was insulting.

So, we hope for the gray area, and it exists in my small town. The other day, I found myself driving behind a big, gas-swilling pickup. On the right of the cab window, was a yellow ribbon magnet reading "We Support our Troops." Appropriately, on the left side of the rear bumper, was an 'Obama 08' sticker. Perhaps like millions of Americans who are working too hard and getting poorer by the hour, the driver needed to remind people like me, behind him on the country roads, to keep in mind the two ongoing wars. Perhaps he was reminding the rest of us that you can be both a patriot and a Democrat. For me it was an unvarnished, quiet snapshot of why Governor Palin's comments in Greensboro so entirely missed the shades and gradations of this great country.

Comments

[bogpony]

Great article Marcia DeSanctis! I too moved to a small town after living in New York City. The owner of my local country market, whom I've known for years, recently told me he'd hold onto the milk, newspaper and few other items I meant to purchase when I realized I forgot my wallet. I drove ten miles home, then ten miles back with the money for the items. The Korean owner of the deli on our corner in the city used to say, when I was a forgetful new mother who had hurried out without my wallet, "take it, take it. I know you. Pay me later."
In New York, I knew every small business owner on our block - and there were many in those days, and they greeted me and my kids by name. I also knew the names of all the kids in the dozens of families in our building, not to mention the many we met at the park. I can't say that I have found anything like that sense of community here. But that's not what Palin means by "community" or "small town values." These are code words that she uses to stoke the fear and suspicion and, yes, racism, that her campaign has decided is its last resort

[gaila]

There are only a few categories of Americans who deserve to be disparaged:

- Child molesters
- Rapists
- Murderers
- Thieves (white-collar and no-collar)
- Spammers
- Hypocrites
- People who join committees, but fail to shoulder their share of the work

Everybody else gets to be considered decent unless or until they demonstrate otherwise. If I made the rules, that's how it would be.

[dlinguist]

In the olden, golden days Presidential candidates used to hop in a train and visit thousands of communities. At each whistlestop, they would extoll the virtues of the local community from the back of the train and speak of policies and values that would be attractive to the folks of that community. The local paper would carry the story and the speech. Everyone walks off happy and the candidate and train would move on to the next stop. The few journalists travelling on the train would think nothing of it. The monotony of repetition. All in a day's work.

Perhaps it's in the nature of Conservativism to long for those days gone by, for certainly their approach and philosophy of campaigning hasn't changed much since then. This is the era of YouTube, blogging, and 24-hr dedicated news channels with time to fill. You can no longer customize and cater to one community without the rest of them hearing about it. The message can still be subtly tailored to the local audience, but the cameras from numerous national networks should be a clue that the message is ultimately being seen by the rest of the country. You simply cannot campaign nationally as if you were merely popping into another little whistlestop town.

[geowizerd]

I live in a small town in PA (pop. ~2500) halfway between Johnstown and Altoona. Yes, there are very good people here, for the most part. Some others, not so much. For a good idea of the narrow-minded rednecks John Murtha was talking about, check out this video of an area GOP crowd attending a Palin rally in Johnstown. Pretty scary stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtZWwgw__WY

But the funny thing is, is that a lot of bigoted people here are otherwise great people, who would give you the shirt off their backs - it's just how they were raised, both the good, and the bad. But I do NOT support any ideas that small towns are any more patriotic or "more American" than any other place in the U.S.A.

[JoePalooka]

True, the cities *were* as equally patriotic and "American" as the rural life surrounding them; but that was only up through the '50s. Since then cities have created their own unique hallmark of dirtiness, corruption, alien values and contempt for patriotism. Unfortunately you are not, and never will be, anything but a stranger in a town where people (naturally) treat you with politeness.

[geowizerd]

I think that's a crock.

[dlinguist]

You have no idea how infuriated I am by your comment.

Alien values? Contempt for patriotism?

Marine Staff Sgt. Riayan A. Tejeda of New York city, died on April 11, 2003, aged 26. Immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
Marine Lance Cpl. Jakub Henryk Kowalik, of Chicago, died on May 12, 2003, aged 21. Immigrant from Poland.
Both granted U.S. Citizenship, posthumously.

What would they have said about your comment?

http://www.fallenheroesmemorial.com/oif/profiles/tejedariayana.html
http://www.fallenheroesmemorial.com/oif/profiles/kowalikjakubhenryk.html

[Winter Maiden]

Small town life is different from big city life, for this reason: big city life is more anonymous and therefore, in many ways, both more free and less responsible. That's not to say that there otherwise aren't good folks and bad folks everywhere.

But let's not worry too much about this artificial brick wall between city and country. Although, with television and computers, it probably means less now than it ever did, the divide between simple village folks and scary big city folks (or civilized city folk and degenerate provincials) goes back as far as civilization itself, and provides some of our most entertaining narratives, from "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse" to 1930s movies like "Nothing Sacred" and assorted Frank Capra films, and on down to "Deliverance" and "Field of Dreams." Politicians routinely exploit these stereotypes, but how many people really believe them any more? Country people, especially, all have relatives in the big city, although the reverse isn't always true.

I was raised in Tennessee, with the notion that California was chock full of crazy liberals. After 14 years in California I'm pretty sure the crazy conservative population is, in sheer numbers, similar to that of Tennessee. Meanwhile, Californians I meet are surprised that a Southerner can put a coherent sentence together. And in Switzerland each tiny canton slurs the others. It's human nature.

[medardo]

Great article. It's most important that the flipside of these subtle snipes by the republicans are exposed. They try to monopolize patriotism and righteousness. I guess they rely the public's amnesia. Their party leads in membership of chickhawks and bathroom "footsie" busts in airports. The anti-big city and anti-elitism tact is probably wearing thin though. In this economy we want to get the guy with the grade point average in there, no matter how urban or rural his background.

[219e2ndst]

Ms. DeSanctis has pointed out yet another of Sarah Palin's monumental booboos; with the passage of each day, it becomes more and more evident that she is inadequate to the task for which she has been chosen; she is an embarassment to the Republican party and to John McCain; great article, well written and right on.

[ronrol48]

Thanks for your article, I'm from a small town in Western MD, 70 miles from big scary D.C. and Baltimore.lol I always hated every election time, one party or the other always tried to divide the voters between "US" ( good , small town,rural people) against "THEM"(bad, big city, urban people). Now as this election season is drawing to an end the Republicans are going full force in dividing people. I think that Obama's inclusive message is drawing people from "All Walks of Life", because were all affected from the economy wherever we live. I hope when Obama does get elected he continues this inclusive approach and his cabinets is filled with qualified people from "All Walks of Life"