Posts Tagged ‘Small Town Values’
We the People…
This town isn’t big enough for the both of us.
You know, it feels like just a few weeks ago that I was writing about what the heck the McCain-Palin campaign means by small town values.
Now it seems that not only are small towns (again…this means what?) the sole bastion of American morality, but in fact, in the bizarro world inhabited by John McCain and Sarah Palin and their cronies, somehow despite being at least five generations removed from “the old country” to the point where I can identify only the vaguest of non-American nationality, I am not truly an American by virtue of living in an area with more than, let’s say roughly, 5,000 people.
Hell, I don’t even live in a real state. Which I suppose can be explained by the fact that Virginia is technically called a Commonwealth, however, those pesky income taxes that don’t go to the feds or to my local county seem to still go to Richmond to help support “real” Virginia.
The McCain campaign is stooping to this bizarre Orwellian mantra of “All citizens are Americans but some citizens are more American than others” and I have an idea why: Obama’s life completely belies the standard Republican narrative of the American dream. Here we have a hard working, essentially self-made son of an immigrant and a woman from Kansas for god’s sake. But the immigrant father was a dark skinned African man. The mother was white and not particularly religious. And the son had the audacity to go to the best schools that would accept him and to excel, to break down barriers, to find Jesus, to work to make the world a better place for black people in this country and to be a Democrat. And really, it’s those last that are the real issue here. Let’s be honest.
So, since they can’t harp on the self made American dream – which usually ties in nice and tight with the old-fashioned conservative values mantra – they’re looking for a different hook. The tried and true “some of y’all just aren’t American enough for the rest of us” is not new. But it is odd to see it trotted out in such force, not just by media surrogates, but by the candidates themselves. In some ways this is another example of McCain campaigning like Bush, the original “uniter, not a divider.”
This campaign strategy has the odd effect of both being grotesquely offensive and almost relieving – I’m not entirely sure I want to live in Sarah Palin’s America. But I don’t really appreciate her and McCain thinking they get to decide who really belongs here either.
Where the Schoolhouse Ends.
Plans to blog the debate last night were derailed – apologies to anyone who stopped by for live action coverage.
There were three things that stood out at me last night. The first was that while McCain clearly had some massive coaching from his staff on actually trying to show a modicum of respect to Obama, he really didn’t succeed. It wasn’t a bad performance – he was definitely smoother than he’s been before, but I actually came away from this one feeling strongly not so much that Obama had won, but that McCain had lost.
His “WA WA my feelings are hurt because you didn’t denounce Lewis as a reverse racist for daring to call Sarah and I out on the fact that we are tacitly encouraging racism and xenophobia, even as we pretend we are against it” was laughable. Seriously Senator - if you have called out everything you thought was inappropriate about your campaign, then you’re fine with your running mate implying Obama is a terrorist. Good to know.
Second, I thought that it was telling that McCain was criticizing Obama for class warfare, when he evidently doesn’t believe that it is possible that a plumber (named Joe or otherwise) could possibly make $250,000 or more a year. McCain kept harping on the idea that this plumber (read, uneducated, blue collar laborer) would have his taxes raised under Obama’s plan – never addressing his actual income, and implying that gee, if a plumber will have his taxes raised, then what might happen to you, nurse, or you teacher, or you tradesman. How fucking offensive that evidently McCain doesn’t believe – and doesn’t want the American people to believe – that a plumber might be able to make as much as a lawyer or a banker or a politician. If a plumber makes more than the east coast liberal elite, then his whole narrative is blown to bits.
My big issue with the debate – the one that really stuck with me and made me both laugh and want to throw things at the tv was McCain’s education proposal. McCain, the man whose convention was all about “small town values” and small towns being real America and city dwellers being over-educated elitists, used Washington, DC, New York City and New Orleans as his education examples. He referred repeatedly to wanting to give every American the sort of choice that the Obamas and the McCains have in terms of where to send their suburban dwelling children. However, having “school choice” presumes that there are multiple schools to choose from. So, in an urban area with multiple public schools at a given grade level in the same district and a bumper crop of private and perochial schools to choose from, school choice – be it charters, vouchers, open attendance systems can work.
But what about those “real Americans” in medium and small towns and rural areas? Just because a school is surrounded by corn fields and small town values, it doesn’t mean that property values and taxes are high enough to maintain high quality schools across the board. What choice is there but to go to an underfunded consolidated school, if the only other options are 30 miles away and not much better? I sure didn’t have a whole lot of school choice when I was in high school – it was the cash-starved public school, the Catholic school, the Baptist school or the university lab school (which tended to wildly occilate in quality every few years). And that was a lot of choice compared to elsewhere in farm country. Poor kids, kids with parents who don’t give a shit about their education, kids who graduate without knowing how to read, kids who need ESOL programs are not limited to urban areas.
Vouchers do jack for these kids; or for the thousands of kids who don’t win the voucher/charter lottery. Playing checkers with kids’ education and moving them around the board doesn’t change the fact that the board is warped to begin with.
Was I born in a small town?
Backtracking a bit, to things that were hot talk last week but that continue to intrigue me. Consider this part of an ongoing series about what certain terms and phrases mean. See also elitism and feminism.
Today we’re going to talk about Sarah Palin’s small town values. One part of this is, of course, ”what are small town values?“, which TDS has handled much more aptly than I, but I’m also curious about what even qualifies as a “small town” which could have such values.
Web analysis varies – less than 10,000 people? 5,000-15,000? Does Park City, Utah, population roughly 8,000, have the same values as Hope, Arkansas, population roughly 10,500? Which has more “small town” cred? Why? Why should it matter?
Who can claim STVs? Only people who currently live in a town of less than 10,000 people? How about college towns where the permanent residents number in the 10k range where the population doubles between September and May? Does it matter whether the students vote locally or absentee? Can you have small town values if you grew up in a small town, but move to a city? How about just a town of 20,000 in a conservative county? What if you were born and raised in New York or San Francisco or Boston or (OMG) Washington, DC (which a lot of people like to characterize as nothing but an overgrown small town that thinks its something because we have a lot of marble buildings) and then move to a town of 7,000 people to get away from it all? If I live in a suburb of 3000 people (I don’t. It’s 18k+ as of the 2000 census, which is still smaller than I anticipated.) but work in a city of 10 million, can I have small town values? Only between the hours of 6 p.m. and 8 a.m.?
It matters, of course, because here we have one of only two seriously electable political parties/presidential tickets playing identity politics of the worst kind – vote for us, say the Republicans - not because we have policies that are going to actually help you pay your mortgage and put food on the table – but because we are like you, just with designer clothing and high paying jobs.
It’s easy as one of those damn liberal elitists to automatically equate these so-called small town values as essentially being what we call small mindedness or ignorance. But it’s really not that simple. Small-town vs. big-city, Red State vs. Blue State – what these phrases are is code for differs, but in the end, it’s just more us vs. them, which completely ignores that for better or for worse, we’re all in this together.
Ooh, purple!
The point of this election should be what is best for the majority of Americans wherever the hell we live. It should be about improving the US’s stature in world affairs. It should be about a better life for all Americans, from the CEO worried about falling stock prices to the Ivy League professor worried about tenure to the factory worker worried about layoffs to the family facing forclosure and homelessness. It shouldn’t matter where our ancesters came from or what our middle name is or what color our skin is – this election is about all of us and what we want the Unites States to be.
