I must confess, I didn't bother to view Governor Sarah Palin's acceptance speech for her official nomination as the Republican party's vice-presidential candidate. After viewing the last two RNCs, I pretty much already knew the script. However, I did read it. And, unfortunately, it confirmed my decision. It was petty, pandering, divisive and filled with distortion... everything I've come to expect from the Republican party.
But that didn't bother me as much as reading the responses generated across the media. Mrs. Palin was viewed as "strong" and "tough," with many people crediting her "small-town" values as a reason that people should not underestimate her. And there's the rub. Because a lot of people seem to feel (and have written) that "liberal elites" have not shown the proper respect for Middle America. The perception is that big-city liberals condescend to and despise small-town America. Well, I'm here to set the record straight...
We do.
At least I do. Because, to me, Middle America isn't about "small-town values," it's about hypocrisy, ignorance and intolerance. Middle America consistently votes against its own interests by putting people in office who have absolutely no problem screwing them and, by extension, the rest of the country over. They ignore the fact that Republican economic policies have routinely led to their own economic hardship. For want of having a President with which they can "share a beer," they are willing to cede the country to the richest 1% under the myth that these people have somehow "earned" their esteemed position and should not be "penalized" for success. While I won't deny that many of the wealthy are hard-working and their success well-earned, I don't think enough credit is given to the average American worker who makes that success possible. It's a perverse form of self-hatred that allows Middle America to support the very people who out-source their jobs and ignore their communities. These "small towners" have no problem being used, discarded and disregarded only to have Republicans court them every four years with promises of prosperity, most of which go unfulfilled after the election cycle. More often than not, the reward for their donations and activism during campaigns is more economic hardship courtesy of their own party.
As for their "small town values," the vaunted "Christian" values of compassion, tolerance and forgiveness... how often have these values been selectively applied? There are still small towns across this country in which minorities could not own homes for fear of violence. As Hillary Clinton's campaign illuminated, there are many small-towners who will refuse to vote for a person simply because their skin is dark. They oppose abortion yet support the death penalty, fear terrorism yet care little when the citizens of other nations endure poverty, starvation, oppression and genocide. Small-towners believe that things like habeus corpus, due process and human rights don't apply to people who oppose American interests, regardless of validity. Small-towners believe that government should not force them to subsidize the building of roads and schools via taxation but SHOULD force people to share their "values." They ignore one of the most basic rules of a healthy human existence... that your rights end where someone else's begins.
The truth is that small town America has an inferiority complex. Almost every four years, it punishes the rest of the country for a perceived slight that, frankly, exists only to the extent that "liberal elites" feel that small town America is hopelessly stuck in the past. Small town America is still in love with a past that represents a time for many in which certain groups did not have a place. These excluded groups WANT a place and time has finally given them the opportunity to have it. The American dream should be attainable to ALL members of our society, an idea that is not accepted by many in small town America. Their "values" extend only to those who look like them, think like them and "feel" like them. That's the America of the past. The past is gone and there is no turning back.
So if the so-called liberal elites "hate" small town America, it's because they feel that small town America is holding this nation back. Small town America's love for the past is preventing everyone from moving into the future. They refuse to accept that no party or group has a monopoly on values and, most importantly, no one has a right to impose their values on others. An essential component of human existence is the ability to accept the rights of others. Indeed, many liberals should remember that the ideals represented in small town values aren't passe... self-indulgence and excess aren't any more productive than ignorance and intolerance.
Maybe one day we'll get past these differences. Until then, it seems as if small town America will continue to seek vengeance against the "liberal elites" even at its own expense. And liberal elites will continue to hate them for it.
James King is a semi-retired technology consultant just trying to survive in Bush's America. He is a POW of the Culture Wars but, unlike John McCain, has yet to be freed.
Stereotyping in politics is what makes certain precincts get bragging rights.
Disclaimer: I've lived on the prairie, in a midwest college town, a large Great Lakes city, in New York City and DC, a year in Copenhagen, and a few years in Rocky Mountain resorts. For the past 30 years I'm retired in East Tennessee.
In general, I surmise all my zip codes were in the Red Zone, and I continue to call myself an FDR Democrat. One thing I'm sure of--it's hard to pinpoint a certain person's political chart. And impossible to learn what makes a precinct tick.
This article, like many others we all write, takes a Generic Voter and turns him/her into a voting block. Scratch deeper and GV leans, but does not fall, into a definite category. Geography, commerce, culture and population density may form a general background for GV, but he/she tends to buy what is advertised. In all the places I've lived, I see WalMarts and McDonalds, cell phones and broadband, with a well-defined dress preference among the young. Rove sold his clients like he would have sold a Ford Focus or timeshare apartment.
So maybe what we need to understand is that provincialism begins at home and most of us never left it.
by
Margaret Bassett (31 articles, 1963 quicklinks, 30 diaries, 1279 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 1:52:02 PM
Thank you for the response, Ms (Mrs.?) Barrett. I hope it is apparent that I used the word "hate" figuratively and not literally. The article is written for those who view the world in absolutes... I'm hoping they will understand that their side of the yard is not as clean as they think. I don't think anyone, liberal or conservative, LIKES abortion or taxation, dependence on foreign oil, etc. But I think progressives understand that not every problem has a simple solution and not every position can be expressed in a single sound bite.
by
James King (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 2:08:00 PM
I am an extremely liberally oriented person who lives in a small town. I recommend it to all and predict it is the wave of the future.
No traffic, no commuting, no long lines anywhere. All the facilities of a big town except symphony and professional theatre. A four-digit phone number because most of us share one prefix. Local produce. DSL, etc. And you never really need to fire up the gasburner because everything's close.
No terrorists, no crime, little drug dealing (I think). Hardly anybody locks their doors and we know our next-door neighbors better than the people in the next apartment down the hall in big city because we needed the privacy in the urban anthill and here privacy is only broken by conscious effort.
Buying a house here is less expensive by about sixty percent. You couldn't buy a foot of Michigan Avenue for what an acre of land goes for here. This is a great place for first-time home buyers to start.
Nearly self-sufficient except for spare parts and other exotic inputs. Your politics and faith are your own business. Well, you may not belong to the clique who run city hall, but that doesn't change anything.
All in all, many very cosmopolitan world travelers like me here, some own homes in foreign countries. The extent of LBGT here is astonishing for such a small sample of population. Nobody seems upset about it, it's a fact of life and none of anybody's business. Of course that guy with the six-o'clock shadow and the stiletto heels is drawing a few looks, but no overt reactions. I imagine he or she may find that getting a job requires a certain appearance.
In fact it may be entirely a GOP lie that liberal elites don't like small towns. Hard to know, haven't seen any yet. All our liberals are down-to-earth.
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martinweiss (20 articles, 4 quicklinks, 11 diaries, 362 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 2:27:13 PM
can often surprise you, but as a "group" they border on the brain dead. I spend (waste) too much time trying to fight off feelings of contempt for people who are afraid to confront authority.
Why don't they value their own opinions, the common sense that whispers to them? Why do they sit on their hands, refuse to speak up, duck their heads and accept the local Bully and the national Fascist when they know better?
Beats me.
by
Laudyms (0 articles, 854 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 436 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 3:26:40 PM
I don't hate small town America or big neighborhood America.
I just hate America because it seems like everything it does is based on advantage, force and fraud, and lies. I'm just a nobody who likes the company of this friends.
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John Hanks (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1373 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 5:21:48 PM
...it's all fast-food chains, Pep-Boys, strip malls and concrete toilets all the way out to the cornfields that are being taped-off now for McMansion "subdivisions" and "developers."
"Small-town Amerikkka?" What a foogin JOKE.
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waldopaper (11 articles, 3 quicklinks, 25 diaries, 430 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 5:57:49 PM
yet doesn't realize that while they receive farm earmarked subsidies, bridges, roads, levees, and other infrastructure programs lose funding altogether, leaving them to fend for themselves during times of troubles.
They don't want their taxes raised, but don't understand why their schools are neglected and don't produce while the standards are continually lowered.
They want low cost commodities, but don't understand why factories close and jobs are off-shored from the US. Living a lifestyle on credit that their future "Loved Ones" will bear the burden of repayment
They oppose abortion, but support the death penalty, and the War of Terror as it's waged both domestically and abroad. While killing scores of hundreds of thousands of innocent life while filling the world with despicable hatred for the US.
Small town America doesn't mind surrendering liberty for security and receiving neither, making it the laughing stock with its self-appointed Executive pontificating of supporting "Freedom and Democracy" around the world, while shredding the Constitution and enacting laws such as the Patriot Act and sequestering the personal information from telecom companies, libraries and credit card companies. So as to create complete personal files on law abiding citizens.
They believe in the lies and deceit of 9/11 with the lame excuse produced by Bu$h & Co., while they fill the coffers of the MIC and graveyards of rural America with "Kissinger Stupid Soldiers", who bought the line of wearing a uniform and medals to die in the name of corporate profits.
So the US which makes up less than 10% of the world's population can continue to consume more than 35% of the Earth's natural resources, and export violence, chaos and pandemonium in exchange.
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Stanimal (0 articles, 4 quicklinks, 23 diaries, 668 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 6:38:57 PM
Unfortunately too many of them that do stupid happen to live in the small towns across America that have been as devastated by the looter capitalist economic polices that the same Republican snake oil salesmen regularly come around looking to bag their limit of suckers by placing the blame on those mean, nigga lovin' godless libruls....
I mean at what point do you stop sugarcoating this shit? Those so called "liberal elites" also include but are conveniently unmentioned the northern big city counterparts of those small town folk embittered and clingin' to thar guns and religion.
This is a class war folks and as long as we can be divided and pitted against each other by the charlatans who run the rigged 3 card monte game of two party American politics we ALL will continue to lose.
So give a bit of thought as to who is really stupid and who are being played as chumps so that the John McCain-George W. Bush-Barack Obama-Joe Biden-Clinton run national crime syndicate can continue to exploit the emotions of the salt of the earth folk to go forth to the polls and continue to vote to lock their children and grandchildren into a cruel system of debt slavery and poverty that BOTH parties are a part of in this biggest of con jobs.
Just some thought as to why resentment occurs, I would strongly advise my southern brethren as well as the rural heartlanders to stop listening to multi millionaire shills like Rush Limbaugh and get to their local libraries where they can start to do some of their own research.
Are y'all afraid of the truth?
American Me
EE
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Ed Encho (8 articles, 18 quicklinks, 56 diaries, 394 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 6:54:32 PM
People without education ALWAYS dislike those with one. 'Liberals' happen to be generally well educated, hence their viewpoints. Ignorance is THE big breeding ground for hate. And that right there is maybe the reason republicans are against education. Hate is their tool to steer the great unwashed toward their own distruction.
Veteran '66-68 Ok, ok...so so I flunked out of college and got drafted...but I still know how to read.
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Roger (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 388 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 8:28:36 PM
Maybe you wish small towns were ignorant and hateful. It would simplify your prejudices. But it is just not so. Small towns have the time, space and wherewithal to be intelligent, compassionate and extremely well educated. Here is a cross-section just like the one in Manhattan or San Francisco. The rural location limits popular music on the radio-- little Monk and Coltrane-- and even that not so much. And the Dixie Chicks get played here just like in Austin. Plenty of Rap and heavy metal, punk and on and on.
I guess what I'm trying to convince you is that small towns still believe in America, perhaps more than urbanites, certainly more than the GOP. We know we are being fed a buncha bull by the media and we know the last eight years have been a travesty. The people are the same as big towns. Only the atmosphere is different. It is more like 1960 here. All the wires are not underground and rush hour is in dozens, not thousands. The pace is slower but just as penetrating. The library gets all the NYTimes best sellers and the schools teach science, not religion in science and biology.
Small towns are not like some torrid novel. They are like America used to be before it became a rat race. Plus they have traditions of grace and elegance and family life going back to the 1830's. No gangs. Your kids can go outside and play without any problems. The hospital is first rate, the doctors are up to date. A town with a major university that working people can afford is just down the road and the community college is surprisingly non-denominational. America is still a going concern here in spite of the GOP.
Anyone who puts down small towns doesn't live in one.
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martinweiss (20 articles, 4 quicklinks, 11 diaries, 362 comments)
on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 9:25:03 PM
has improved since it became possible to telecommute, allowing a person to pursue a meaningful career while enjoying the benefits of a small town. I'm sure this has improved the situation a lot for rural progressives as they have more company, but I recall as a child feeling threatened in a small southern Utah town when my father let on that we were Buddhist, so I know what Mr. King is talking about.
I live now in a very small town in Japan, which I love, but I get my intellectual stimulation through books and the Net. Here, anyone with any aspirations or talent goes to a big city, mostly Tokyo, and the others are either very elderly or frankly naive and mostly reclusive. My attempts at socializing are met with hostile gossip, followed by a friendly visit from the bored policeman who's been assigned here. The mayor is on record on TV saying newcomers are not welcome in his town. They have nothing against foreigners per se, just anyone who hasn't lived here for at least three generations, including spouses who married in. Most places in Japan are not like this, I admit. But hostile, ignorant small towns really do exist, and not just in America.
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Patricia 0rmsby (3 articles, 5 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 156 comments)
on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 9:21:28 AM
Small town America is very little different from big city America these days, as the have all the accoutrements and amenities that big city folk enjoy, including that most insidious one, a television set to which they assign credibility.
As it stands right now, there are really no small town values that differ from big city values due to the homogeneity imposed on our society by that ubiquitous television. That is probably the reason that so many people, urban and rural, are so easily sold on what they are led to believe are small town traditional values.
Nobody is living those virtuous values. Nobody, or at least very few, have ever experienced living the values in question. They are simply pining for the values represented in that miniseries due to a manufactured nostalgia. The people who wrote that miniseries have no first hand experience of "the life" themselves, and to those very few who may have, say "Hi!" to your parents, June and Ward Cleaver.
As a consequence, for most people, those down home small town values are whatever the guy they believe says they are; and the guy they believe is an advertising/marketing/public relations flack.
For myself, I kinda like Webb Wilder's prescription, "Do good, eat your food, grow big." It has a simplicity that I challenge any of the flacks to best.
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John Sanchez Jr. (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 1266 comments)
on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 7:28:12 AM
Like Margaret said, Provincialism begins at home, wherever that home may be. If small town were merely a rhetorical device, ignorance, hate and blind acceptance of MSM propaganda would not be integral to the rhetoric. Small towns breed a kind of personal acquaintance that discourages one thing big cities have: small minds.
The kind of insular society that enables a mayor in Japan or a police chief in St. Paul or a Governor in Alaska to legislate a de facto ostracism of "strangers" cannot be afforded in small American towns. There are way too many very smart farmers trading beans on the NYMEX and engineers selling blueprints on the web and foreign-owned factories making copper wire and penicillin for export, and ad agencies selling TV time for anybody to have the gall or the tolerated ignorance to be able to afford to sell anybody short. In my little town we even manufacture small airplanes.
In many ways it is a freer society here, not so calcified as the power structure of big cities. Smart is essential to success in a way that is extraneous and superficial in urbania, where connections are more important.
Ozzie, Harriet and Ward and June Cleaver are still viable here, along with the genuine wonder of Beaver and cynicism of Eddie Haskell. But we here have to keep open minds unlike urbanites who must wear blinders to see their way home.
American Innovation and Ingenuity are at home in a fertile environment like rural and small town America. This place is much more like the America Jefferson idealized and imagined. In the 21st century, small town America has all the advantages and none of the drawbacks and institutionalized despair of the urban corridors, plus we have local produce without needing to ship food ten thousand miles. Small towns are viable in ways big cities can never be.
Here is not the ignorant mind-set of Faulkner or Tennessee Williams' dark drama. We are no longer and cannot afford to be out of the loop.
Come to any small town. You'll be able to relax and take a breath. No pressure, haste is wasted effort. And the people have the time to be kind, curious, compassionate and understanding, not to mention sophisticated. A code of personal honor has currency here unlike the siege mentality of metropolis.
by
martinweiss (20 articles, 4 quicklinks, 11 diaries, 362 comments)
on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 10:31:25 AM
I find your views disingenuous at best. Republicans aren't peddling their wares in major cities, they are doing it in small towns where people are less informed and more receptive to positions based on hate and fear.
Feel free to disagree with my article... after all, it is a free country. But to present "small towns" as meccas of progressiveness, intelligence and enlightenment is disingenous to say the least. I won't deny that there are probably many that are, but that is far from the norm.
I get the feeling you wish to engage me in an argument of semantics. I'd much rather that, if you disagree with my sentiments, we leave it at that. I'd like to think that we are both intelligent enough to understand that no example covers every circumstance and no generalization is completely accurate. If you wish to debate the rhetorical nature of the article, I do not intend to oblige you as I've made it crystal clear. I won't argue with you regarding what is obviously a bias on your part to small towns. That is your choice. But please do not make the spurious claim that your small town exemplifies the small town experience. Having lived in a few myself, I can state unequivocally that it does not.
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James King (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments)
on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 11:08:14 AM
I live in a rural Sierra Nevada town with "liberal elites", aging hippies, LGBT, tons of artists, retirees who've paid their dues, tree cutting land developers, 300+ real estate agents and a plethora of small minded people who read their bible instead of their U.S. Constitution and only follow the teachings of their histrionic overzealous christian ministers. Unfortunately, some are able to be elected to public office where they impose their small minded religious views instead of following the Constitution.
For example, several years ago, as executive director of the county arts council, I created an art exhibit which was hung in the county administrative building to commemorate California Arts Day. Our county is known for its outstanding artists. When our "Sarah Palin" supervisor saw several pieces depicting women's naked breasts, she went into screaming fits and demanded the art be removed because it would traumatize young children visiting the building. Since she had not read the First Amendment to the Constitution, she had to be told by county counsel that she was in direct violation and the county was about to be sued for censorship. A very small minded ignorant American who unfortunately, as an elected official, represents the rest of us.
I'm voting for Obama/Biden. I've already experienced "Sarah Palin's" gun-toting, fanatical christian values style and we absolutely cannot afford to have her as the Vice President.
by
Penel (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 44 comments)
on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 11:26:04 AM
Your censorship experience took place in a small town...
and I recall several that took place in big cities.
Chicago - a School of the Art Institute student exhibit featured a painting of the late mayor Harold Washington wearing women's underwear. What did it mean? Beats me, but aldermen from the city council seized it until forced by the courts to return it.
Chicago - an art exhibit featured an American flag placed on the floor with a shelf holding a book in which viewers were invited to write down their comments. The book could not be reached except if the commenter was standing on the flag. The outcry was clamorous and the institution exhibiting it finally withdrew the installation.
New York City - a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit of photographs featured one image depicting a crucifix immersed in a jar of urine. The outcry resulted in continuing efforts on the right to defund the National Endowment for the Arts.
New York City - an art exhibit featured a collage depicting the Virgin Mary that included elephant dung among the materials of which it was comprised. The exhibit prompted the notably apostate Catholic Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, to appoint himself as the official arbiter of public taste and morality, and attempt to have the exhibit closed down.
These are just a few notable examples. The example is the same in the city as it is in small towns, there are just more people to notice it in the city.
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John Sanchez Jr. (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 1266 comments)
on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 1:39:25 PM
I live in a rural Sierra Nevada town with "liberal elites", aging hippies, LGBT, tons of artists, retirees who've paid their dues, tree cutting land developers, 300+ real estate agents and a plethora of small minded people who read their bible instead of their U.S. Constitution and only follow the teachings of their histrionic overzealous christian ministers. Unfortunately, some are able to be elected to public office where they impose their small minded religious views instead of following the Constitution.
For example, several years ago, as executive director of the county arts council, I created an art exhibit which was hung in the county administrative building to commemorate California Arts Day. Our county is known for its outstanding artists. When our "Sarah Palin" supervisor saw several pieces depicting women's naked breasts, she went into screaming fits and demanded the art be removed because it would traumatize young children visiting the building. Since she had not read the First Amendment to the Constitution, she had to be told by county counsel that she was in direct violation and the county was about to be sued for censorship. A very small minded ignorant American who unfortunately, as an elected official, represents the rest of us.
I'm voting for Obama/Biden. I've already experienced "Sarah Palin's" gun-toting, fanatical christian values style and we absolutely cannot afford to have her as the Vice President.
by
Penel (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 44 comments)
on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 10:31:13 PM
