Reply #74: You bring up a very good point and one that has been irritating me... [View All]

[TygrBright]

...for some time, now.

The "heartland" of American has long moved away from the vaseline-on-the-lens shot of the sunrise over rolling farmland, with the silo on the horizon, and the workworn-looking middleaged guy in overalls piling into the 15-year-old pickup truck to head into the little Main Street diner to handshake the candidate and listen earnestly to her/his soothing babble about "values." Hasn't been there for DECADES.

The percentage of Americans who live that image is tiny and getting tinier every year. Yet the percentage who idealize that image, who are deferential to that imaginary utopia and all it putatively 'stands for' seems to hold steady or even gain every year. WTF is up with that???

If you go by demographics, your basic American "heartland" is the diverse billions who live in the urban-suburban megalopoli on the coasts, plus a couple of central congloms like Chiwalkee and Fort Dallaston. The teeming, striving billions whose "heartland" roads aren't placid rural two-laners but slashing eight- and ten- and twelve-lane interstates where they nevertheless spend hours at a slow crawl every day, trying to get back and forth from a cobbled-together, barely-held-onto cheap-labor income that keeps them teetering on the edge of the abyss. The countless people in every skin shade whose breakfast doesn't involve telling Flo whether they want cheese on their grits or ketchup on their home fries, but telling Lupe or Tranh which combo number they want from the dollar menu.

Yet we persist in this weird self-identification with, and mythologizing of, and consequent reverse-elitist snobbery about the "plain folks" who are vanishing as fast as the black-footed ferret. Whose lives and values, appealing as they may be, have as much real relevance to the problems and issues of someone living in suburban Baltimore, or downtown Oakland, or inner-ring Miami as "CSI" has to real law enforcement.

bewilderedly,
Bright