I'm A REAL Fake American

I would like to address Sarah Palin’s recent comment about “real” America and also all of the babble about small towns in this election in general. First off, let me say that Ms. Palin DID apologize… kind of… by saying that she was sorry if people “misunderstood”. I think that “misunderstood” is one of these words like “exceptional” that Ms. Palin only has a vague understanding of herself. You are “misunderstood” when you present an idea that can be taken in more that one way, and someone takes it in a way other than what you meant. The rule here, though, is that there has to be some leeway in the meaning of your words. For instance, if you want a lot of paper clips, and ask your assistant for a handful of paper clips and she only brings you two or three, you just have to understand that her hands are smaller than yours (to steal an allegory from Gib Whiteman).

So help me out here… let me give you Ms. Palin’s comment… which seems fairly unequivocal to me… and tell me how many interpretations there are for it. She said “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.” Here’s the way that I read it – cities… and, presumably, city-dwellers… are not the best of America, we are not very hard-working, not very patriotic and anti-American. This statement strikes me as what would be called in a debate class an “either/or statement”. Either/or statements are unequivocal, meaning not open to interpretation or debate. Or maybe I’m just not bright enough to see any other interpretation. Help me out if you do, please.

So what does Ms. Palin’s apology mean? Sadly, I think that it means that she doesn’t think her words out very well before she says them… probably one of the reasons that the Bush loyalists love her… she reminds them of their hero. Also like Bush, she presents very complex ideas (such as hard-working and patriotic) in such simplistic terms that the authors of the Dick and Jane books would look at them and go “Oh, come off it!” I’m flashing back to “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” here. She isn’t sorry that she said it, she’s sorry that it bit her in the ass. Like a little kid – she’s not sorry that she did wrong, she’s sorry that she GOT CAUGHT. That’s one thing that peeves me about the modern republican party – it’s okay if you don’t get caught seems to be their mantra.

I’m also a little confused about whether that makes me a “real” or “fake” American according to Ms. Palin. I mean, I was born in Altus, Arkansas (population 80 at the time, about 800 now), a town that passed small and hit tiny on it’s way to nonexistent. I was raised in Chugiak, Alaska, which had a population of 26,000 in 2005, but was much smaller when I lived there. Still… a very small town. After that, I moved to Anchorage, which currently has a population somewhere around 260,000. No longer a small town, but still a VERY small city. I currently live in Renton, Washington, which currently has a population around 50,000, but lived for a while in Seattle (population around 580,000), which is my favorite city. I live in cities now because I love cities. I was tickled pink a couple of years ago when I visited some loved ones of mine from high school, when the husband of the couple referred to Anchorage as “the big city”. So… what I’m wondering is, where is the cutoff between “small town”, “large town”, “small city” and “big city”? To my loved ones in Fall River, Kansas (population 156), Renton would probably seem like an unbearably big city, although it’s twice as large as the town in which I was born. To someone in New York (population 8,000,000 plus) Seattle must seem hopelessly rural. So I guess that makes me a REAL fake American.

Look, I don’t like big cities. I live in Seattle instead of New York or Los Angeles because I choose to. Although I like cities, those cities are just too big in my opinion. But that doesn’t mean that I think any less of the people who live there. Several of my loved ones throughout my life have come from New York or Los Angeles.

So what’s with the romanticization of small towns in this election? I think that it’s largely that small towns contain largely what the republican party considers it’s second “base”. Their first base, of course, consists of the very rich, big city people that the republican party verbally denigrates, so this kind of nonsense is nothing more or less than playing to their base.

Personally, having come from small towns, I get a little sick of hearing Ms. Palin blow the inhabitants of small towns with talk about how wonderful and law-abiding and hard-working these people are. And I’m not saying that they’re not – simply that they are no more or less so than people in cities. There are crooked people, and lustful people, and kinky people in small towns, just like in big cities. The difference is that in big cities people are living right on top of each other, so it’s harder to hide these things and easier to indulge in them. And yes, for a thief or a rapist it’s much easier to find victims in big cities, where you have ten or twenty or more residences within the space of a block than in a small town where you have one residence every mile or so. Your odds of finding an unlocked house or car, or vulnerable victim are exponentially increased in a city.

Realistically, though, you also have higher per capita rates of domestic violence and drug abuse in small towns than you do in big cities. Anchorage has the highest per capita suicide rate in that nation. Ms. Palin’s town, Wasilla, has been called the Meth Lab capitol of the world. Texas, which, like Alaska, is mostly small towns with a few cities thrown in has the highest per capita murder rate in the United States.

Also, people in small towns have a very “It’s none of my business” attitude. People like Ms. Palin like to trot out the idea that people in big cities will just walk past someone laying on the sidewalk, whereas small town people won’t. Well, Ms. Palin, you have to understand that, in a city, that person may be hurt, or they may just be laying in wait for someone to get close enough for them to steal a wallet or purse. Sad but true. And let’s face it… in Wasilla, or Chugiak, or Fall River you may see a person lying on the sidewalk once per year or so… in a city, even a fairly small city like Seattle, you see ten or twenty or fifty every day. It does eventually get to the point of “am I going to spend my day doing the stuff that I need to do, or am I going to spend my day checking on every person that I see in a potentially sketchy situation to see if they’re hurt, or drunk, or just waiting to rob me?”

So what am I trying to say here, at the end of it all? Well, I believe that it was the eminent philosopher and mage Pogo Possum that said “People is people.” People living in New York are no more or less righteous or patriotic, or gentle or loving than people in Frog Balls, Booger Holler or Bug Tussell Arkansas. People is people.

But, Ms. Palin would do well to remember something that Bill Maher said recently. “Big cities have one thing that small towns don’t… VOTERS!”

Obama for president.

Peace.

Randal