© 2010, UrbisMedia
America has never gotten over its rather precipitous dumping of its agrarian and small town origins. They linger virally in our national marrow ready to be summoned by next drawling political hack for imagery to soothe the disgruntled and amuse the dim-witted. Reagan’s “Morning in America” called for the return to a Capra-esque land in which the likes of James Stewart ran the banks (even while Ronnie was in cahoots with the despicable Mr. Potter.)* The imagery lurks in Libertarian dreams of government so small you can, as Dick Armey (I think) once said, “you can drown it in a bathtub.”** And now Sarah Palin , the small town girl from Wasilla has taken up the trumpet of return to an American arcadia that is as mythical as a dreamy Grant Wood landscape. It was Wood, a “regionalist” painter of small towns and farms, who, in attempting to countervail the influence of the urbanscape in art, claimed that the real America was not in its big cities, but in the hinterland. Palin, of course, was the mayor of a town smaller than the average gated suburb, and governor of a state with a population smaller than a medium sized metropolitan area. For her, smallness is a habit of mind.
But statistics have a difficult time overcoming illusions. America became an urban nation (more that 50% living in urban areas) in 1920, but surveys showed that the more we became urbanized the more we seemed to pine for our rural and small town past.*** Cities were, and are, of course, also the places where most immigrants have come to make their stake in the American Dream; indeed, they built much of its infrastructure. But “they” (never “we”) were “different,” and their numbers were always scary, especially to white, Anglo-Saxon Americans. And cities, being more complex social and physical constructs, required more government, more bureaucracy, more regulation. Their very growth in size evoked fear. And so, smallness, or “scale” (that used to be a liberal concern, as Justice Louis Brandies warned), became a political mantra of conservatism. As late as the 1970s, for example, Ronald Reagan’s “re-birthed” America was announced with his campaign rhetoric: “an end to giantism, for a return to the human scale—the scale that human beings can understand and cope with . . . the locally owned factory, the small businessman, who personally deals with his customers and stands behind his product, the farm and consumer cooperative, the town or neighborhood bank that invests in the community, the union local”? Never mind that Reagan grew the size of government to unprecedented levels, especially with expansion of the military budget. Never mind that Republicans have overseen the great emigration of American industry to foreign shores and American capital to Wall Street and Cayman Island money laundries.
Ever since, politicians have been tapping into this rich vein of nostalgia, anti-intellectualism and anti-urbanism to present voters with a dreamland where life is simpler, government all but no-existent, pretty much everybody has a nice pale complexion and a gun, and therefore are “real” Americans. The last president, born in urban Connecticut, affected a drawl and bought a ranch; his vice-President (b. Lincoln, Nebraska) likes to shoot little birds (and the occasional human) and wear cowboy hats.
The most recent rustic revival is contemporaneous with the election of a Black man from a big city and what are considered “elitist” East coast universities. So-called “Tea Party” political activists want to return to revolutionary era America (many wear tricorns to their outings), even though hardly any of them have milked a cow or lived in a small town without a doctor, much less a geriatric center. Not all of the “teabaggers” are racists, but the last thing they thought they would see in their lifetimes is a president who looks like the little Black lawn jockey holding a coach ring. It is not an image that fits the America they “want back.” They want an America with a vestigial government that regulates and taxes nothing. They want mythical libertarian self-sufficiency. They want politicians who start their days with prayers breakfasts. They want farms and small towns back, and the values they believe inhered in them.
The facts are however, that farms have become the most governmentally-assisted segment of the national economy. There is far more “welfare” for agriculture than there is for the urban worker. Most small towns that remain owe their existence to the Federal Interstate Highway Program that webbed them into metropolitan areas. Others dies like Mayfies at sunset. Another claim that the “real Americans” make is for less regulation and governmental intrusion into their lives. This comes from their Libertarian allies who think we don’t really need to know anything other than how to be selfish. These days the Red states that border the Gulf of Mexico would probably wish for more, not less, governmental regulation of the offshore oil drilling industry (but don’t count on it). Still, they can detest big government, but love big business (until it moves to China or screws them out of their pensions.) Then there is governmental expenditures, the absolute worst attribute of the big government they detest. Never mind that the greatest portion of that is defense spending (over 10 times that of the next country, China), and that two wars are being financed “off the books” (by China). We don’t see Palin and the Teabaggers calling for a return of the troops.
There might have been a moment—as there was probably in all of our personal lives—when myth and reality intersected. Or at least we though it did. We all have those sublime mnemonic baubles, but more and more we wonder if they are better in the remembering than they were as experienced. No matter. That’s life, and if we can keep our dreams and realities in some degree of perspective and appropriately cognitively quartered, we need not deprive ourselves of how life “might be” rather than how it might have been.
We live now in a time susceptible to much illusion. Nostalgia is a big sell [DCJ Archives, 60. 9: Nostalgia Porn 9.17.2009]. Fantasy even better. Lord of the Rings, and Chronicles of Narnia and now Avatar, feed us emotional pablum, and kids spend increasing amounts of time in video worlds of their own interactive making, or hankering for fifteen minutes of YouTube fame. But political ideology is serious business that has real consequences—who gets and who doesn’t, and who lives and who dies.
Those wonderful “folk” that Palin is talking about are the Teabaggers who have slithered up out of the small towns, suburbs, gated communities and even parts of big cities to chorus that they want to “take back [an] America” that exists mostly in their imaginations and Capra films. Playing early American dress up day at some protest is not being an early American patriot, not when you get to go home in your white neighborhood and watch yourself carrying signs depicting Obama as Hitler on Fox news. They like to play with their guns and think they are a “militia,” but they are more likely to shoot themselves in the foot (or in the head when their un-regulated insurance company denies them health care).
The harsh reality is that our Norman Rockwell wonderland small towns were and are mostly places devoid of the graces and those rustic and oppidan gentilities that were refined on the back lots of Hollywood (the despised dream factory of those Jewish conjurors) but existed nowhere else. Go to Palin’s mystical America today and “Main Street” is a row of fast food places, dark bars, convenience stores and thrown up Jesus traps, and further on, that staple of the American ex-urban landscape, the Wal Mart. Palin’s Wasilla is a dingy and depressing, two-bit, one-horse burg of strip malls, where the local paper announces a rising number of rapes
A lot of people are going to have to make a choice. They are going to have to decide between holding on to there cherished myth of the Saturday Evening Post cover-Sarah Palin America that never was and never will be, and the reality of a modern, complicated world that requires a social and political system that they have been conditioned to loath and fear. They need to get real. Following then likes of a woman who couldn’t name a newspaper or book that she read, and claims she can see Russia from her home, is to hook your future to Myth America.
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© 2010, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.1.2010)
*I assume that I am not presuming too much on your movie memory here. We’re talking aboutIt’s a Wonderful Life here, not some obscure piece of Italian neo-realism. It’s shown on TV every freakin’ Christmas. If you don’t know this movie you are not a real American, and probably a Muslim (not that there is anything categorically wrong with being a Muslim, mind you).
**Excuse me, Dick, but should that drowning have taken place while you were making your fortune as a member of government? Maybe we should just drown the hypocrites while we still have an unpolluted ocean to do it in.
***Clapp, “The Wellsprings of Antiurbanism,” in Michael Thompson, FLEEING THE CITY: STUDIES IN THE CULTURE AND POLITICS OF ANTIURBANISM, (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, Fall 2009)