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The lionization of Small Town USA that the right wing and the media seem to embrace has been bugging me. Nothing against them, but how many people live in small towns anyway? If the Heartland is so great, why are the populations of many of these states not booming? Then I came across a recent article addressing this very point.
Written by Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz of Brookings, and apparently to be published in the next issue of The New Republic, it’s worth a read. The gist of the article is that most of us live in one of a few hundred metropolitan areas, not Small Town USA. In other words, the idea that Small Town USA is Real America is a myth. It’s not clear whether Sarah Palin lives in a small town at this point:
In fact, even the "small town" of Wasilla, Alaska is fast becoming a satellite of the state’s largest city. Wasilla is nestled in the Matanuska-Susitna, or Mat-Su, borough (boroughs are Alaska’s equivalent of counties), and the borough is part of the Anchorage metropolitan area.
Not that she’s likely to change her stump speech. Myths don’t die easily. However, it would be nice if some of the people in the media would wake up.
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The GOP needs to show that they are not elites Bush is a Prep school elite who got into school cause his dad was rich. McCain is an admiral’s son. Sarah support the rights of hunters to hunt wolves from airplanes apparently hunting from your truck is too common.
I agree with TCU – this is their usual head fake to try to distract from the fact that the major figures in the party are members of long standing, well to do, long privileged family dynasties. It plays well to certain populations in the base, and makes them somehow feel ‘included’ despite the fact that they really are not, never have been and never will be because the party basically stabs them in the back every…single…time. It also plays into the rural vs. big city claptrap, with the idea that ‘those people who live in the sinful big cities are all liberals…or ‘those other kinds of people who don’t look like us, act like us, don’t speak English etc. etc.” This is a very old, worn message, but it does play to certain beliefs and weaknesses. It’s almost a part of the American mythology – remember that old joke about the city slicker(and it’s always a city slicker, by the way) who stops to ask for directions from an elderly farmer sitting on his porch(cue banjo music from “Deliverance”)and abuses the old man for not being able to tell him how to get to where he wants to go. and the punchline from the elderly farmer is, “Well(spitting in the road on the city slicker’s shoes), I’m not lost, now am I.” (cue crowd saying, “Yee ha!”
In other words, they almost have to put this out.
Oh, and just as a ‘truth in whatever’ point: I live out in the country and until several years ago, made part of the family’s living raising sheep, goats and chickens.
I am sickened by this “small town America” thing, too. Next person I hear who uses the phrase, “Small town values,” I’m going to say, “Oh. What ARE those values? Please enumerate.”
I’d love to know what the flying heck these magical “values” are. I grew up in a small town, where I found the adults practicing:
- adultery
- theft
- gossip
- laziness
- gluttony
and so on and so on and so on. Small town people are nothing special at all. Nothing magic in the water.
Well you just haven’t drunk Peggy Noonan’s magic Cool Aid:). Actually any place where rich republicans are not has value if I could find such a place I would move there.