WHO’S OUT OF TOUCH?

FROM THE LAND OF GUN RACKS & PICKUPS:

YOU’RE THE RUBES, NOT US

         Attacks on Governor Palin for hailing from a small town and having small town values has again raised the issue of how provincial the mainstream media and the Obama campaign thinks us voters in fly-over country are. And predictably, the conservative media has kept the issue alive by coming to our defense.  Well, thanks, but it's a mistake to think voters in small-town and rural America are meaningfully disturbed by such put-downs. We're not that sensitive. Most of us who live out here have a solid psychological supporting sense, based upon what we witness each day of Metro-Elites (“MEs”) like Senator Obama, that people who come from big cities or select college campuses actually lead far more provincial lives than we do.

        The opposite view, of course, is an article of faith among MEs themselves. But in fact the people who have access to the widest diversity of views and voices in America are not ME’s like Senator Obama but the caricatured NASCAR  Gun-Rack-In-His-Pickup hayseed in flyover country sprawled on his scruffy sofa in front of the idiot box tossing a few beers after work. (No doubt in the cartoon imagination of ME’s, half in the raw). The snooty, unflattering view from the cities and faculty lounges is likely that of a man simply exhausting himself in intellectual inactivity before stepping over his bowling bag and collapsing in bed for the night. In fact, night after night, whether it’s the tube or the silver screen or leafing through national magazines, this inelegant Yahoo clutching a beer in his hairy fist is actually drinking in, sip by sip, year after year, the whole urban cocktail of congestion, indifference, energy, homelessness, incivility, excitement, and frenzy. Trash talk, loiterers, hustlers, vacant lots, side-by-side housing, iffy neighborhoods, glittery street lights, gleaming skyscrapers, board rooms, gilded luxury hotels, sweaty delis, jack-hammers, mobsters, urban music and urban chic and double-parked delivery trucks is this Neanderthal’s daily cup of tea.

Over the years he gets a pretty good sense of the heartbeat of city life.  No one can wholly get into someone else’s life, but even though this yokel may be a landscaper or snowplower or handyman or nurse or retail clerk or farmer or small shop owner or in the trades who lives in the middle of nowhere, each of them ends up, without any special effort, being grounded in a much wider context of what America looks like than people who live in cities. They’re not only regularly exposed to how-to articles in the local paper on the proper butchering of deer, know the taste of the pump and appreciate the aesthetics of a well-worn tool (in a much deeper place than people who have a token hammer in their kitchen junk drawer), they also know a good bit about crack houses and cat houses and penthouses and flop houses, about hailing cabs, about the challenges and grievances of homosexuals and other minorities, about apartment buildings with security buzzers on inner vestibule doors, and about the various struggles for survival of city folks - from junkies and teenage street thugs dodging police to working-stiffs much like them (with jobs) fighting for seats on buses and subway cars as well as working-stiffs not much like most of them (with positions) fighting for cabs and promotions.

While the lives of most so-called cosmopolitan Americans take place almost wholly without the presence of people who live in small towns and on farms, my neighbors hang with city people almost every night.  If they don’t have access to major league sporting events or concerts or gourmet coffee or wine shops or bagel shops, they still know about these things.

In other words, the national metro/coastal-centric entertainment and news media, expands our life experiences beyond our own community and culture on a daily basis. In contrast, the media almost totally separates ME’s from the reality millions of their fellow Americans are living. ME’s are only infrequently enriched in terms of a larger American culture by the country’s dominant media outlets.  ME’s who feed their minds and souls every day after work on gallery art or literary movements or street life or museums or ethnic foods or bookstores or the theater or surviving the Hood, may promote and revel in the diversity of a busy city life, but in actual fact they don’t gain the same feel for the texture of America as a pluralistic society as everyday people who live in my neck of the woods. People out here have a better sense of what life is all about in America because news about how tens of millions of Americans live their lives never reaches ME’s. The same big city TV and Hollywood glass screens that are windows into urban culture in every home in my town mostly reflect back to ME’s the scenery ME’s see around them every day. For them it’s mostly all darkness behind the picture screens. Shut in on themselves watching and reading national media that mostly provides them with information only about their own lives, ME’s never really become acquainted with the landscape of America. Living in a house of mirrors, they have no view of it.

A simple example. Former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo was once asked to relate the incident from his childhood that best illustrated the kind of man he remembered his father to be. What stood out in his mind was the aftermath of a stormy day when the almost 40 foot blue spruce in the Cuomo’s front yard fell over in heavy winds. A lesser man would have written the tree off. Not “Poppa.”  He told his sons, ‘we gonna push ‘im up, he’s gonna grow again.”  Though the governor and his brother were skeptical, their determined father directed them to get ropes and by God, the three of them pulled that tree back up.

This icon of the urbane, polished American, despite the fact he has probably traveled the world and despite his obvious broad intellectual instincts and his extraordinary reassuring measure of sophistication, still viewed his father rescuing a 40 foot pine tree, as a defining, dramatic, singular event in the universe.  What “Poppa” did that day still stood out in his mind, decades later, as an heroic act.

I’m not criticizing the respect the governor accorded his father’s resolve. However, it so happens that pines have relatively shallow roots and are upended by strong winds or the weight of wet snow quite often.  When they fall, my neighbors routinely pull them upright and re-plant them by themselves.  It’s certainly not an everyday event, but I’ve raised up probably five or six blow-downs thirty to forty feet tall since I moved out here from the city - and yes, all by myself.  It takes a lot of work, but it’s certainly nothing extraordinary at all in the lives of people out here.

This is but one small example of the many routine things that go on in my neighbors’ daily lives that MEs are not tuned into.  And it’s what puts Obama in a double bind in regard to winning our votes.  Because he lacks leadership experience, because he appears to have done more seat-of-the-pants “informing” than “deciding,” the only way he will connect with us and win our votes is to persuade us he will make right decisions on our behalf because of analytic and process skills he’s developed out of his own personal experiences.  But as far as most everyday people out here see it, that’s as much his weak suit as his unproven leadership experience. Though he may be bright and well-educated and swap stories at political soirees in elite venues about places he’s visited traveling across America and even around the world, from our point of view it seems he hasn’t been around the block. Comments about gun racks and religion and the rest too often reveal what little insight he and his equally uninformed circle of ME advisors, have into the extent to which their own life and experiences in America are not life in its entirety in America.

In our March primary here in Ohio, Senator Obama lost every rural county to Senator Clinton for a reason. Call it reverse-elitism, but it’s really hard to take seriously his adolescent (to us) assurances that if we elect him President he will have the wisdom, experience or perspective to bring good judgment to bear upon policy choices affecting the lives of us voters who live out here in the boonies.