Scribbling

When I first heard about the report of Barack Obama’s reputed gaff, I started searching for a printed copy of what he said. All of the clamoring had me thinking that the earth had opened up and swallowed the offender as his words were so egregiously insensitive and categorically inaccurate. It is completely unimaginable to me that Hillary Clinton started totting our the word “elitist” to describe Obama’s remarks. For starters, all of the presidential candidates and most of the people who hold high political offices and the cadre of political operatives who serve them are, by definition, in an elite group, which is not a matter of ascribing worth or valuation but a blueprint of our current political architecture. The town in which I was born and lived until I went to college was one of those small communities in the north that had already celebrated its tercentenary anniversary by 1963. By that time there were visible signs of decline in the living conditions from its more colorful and historic past. Around that same time the famous news team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley released a televised documentary that they filmed in my hometown about AnyTown, USA. I can remember the hue and cry of the residents after the film aired! Most of the residents who appeared on camera were mortified at their presence on film: their words were often banal, silly, and bore a chilling similarity to some of Swift’s Yahoo’s. Bitterness and prejudice were openly expressed although one might imagine that some of the speakers entertained the notion that they were somehow too coy or evasive or even distractingly metaphoric in their responses to reveal their ulterior motives. While the good, solid, work-a-day ethos remained alive and vital to most of the town’s residents, it was the base, retaliatory, deprecating, loathing that trumpeted from the humiliation brought on by the folly of a few that resounded throughout the community. Of course the most popular excuse offered by those folks who appeared less dignified or circumspect that they had thought themselves to be was that they were tricked into saying what they said. Unfortunately they gushed their corrosive drivel both on and off camera and unquestionably displayed their obvious lack of decorum, control, and discretion. As a town, there were enough definitive remarks in the televised interviews that laid to rest the notion that racism was not alive and well; however, to be fair, there were enough different prejudices and insults expressed to qualify the town as an equally opportunity offender, although in 1962-63 this would have been an anachronism.

At first the rawness chafed by the town’s less than gracious performance seemed as if it would never heal. But, after a while, like most small towns, the embarrassment dissolved into whispers and finally fell back into the torpor which probably accounted for some of the indiscretions in the first place. Grace Metalious had burst onto the popular literary scene only five years earlier with her steamy expose of small town hypocrisy and sexual mores with her novel Peyton Place so it seemed a natural progression for small town parochialism to leap to conclusions drawn from popular fiction: a neighbor published a novel shortly after the town’s national humiliation aptly titled, This Cesspool Called Life.

The town’s Emperor’s New Clothes experience went the way of all flesh, my apologies to Samuel Butler, and time, the soporific that it can often be, drew down the curtain of ire and indignation that had awakened the community, and it returned again to its unconscious slumber. Small towns or small groups are often characterized by the barriers they erect to wall themselves off from forces they consider dangerous or which, threaten their status quo. Tradition, values, religion become ingrained and stale from lack of exposure; they lose that elan of vitality that the persistence of creative tension ensures. There are times when great virtue stands out, but more often virtue is compromised by the stagnant urgency to eradicate change or novelty, particularly if the health of the community depends upon the scrutiny of regular self-examination.

45 years later, my hometown still exists, some residents might quickly add that it is much diminished from the status it enjoyed only a generation ago. Some businesses and manufacturing operations have closed down completely while others have been reduced to skeletal organizations that no longer reflect their former robustness when a they were among the primary employers for the town’s populace. Property taxes have skyrocketed to offset the void left by the exodus of flourishing enterprises. Many of the once proud historic residences that lined the main street are abandoned, or inhabited by street people while others have been used as a dump and are now filled with trash and refuse. The downward spiral that indicates a loss of vitality and creativity is often compounded by the growing antipathy of residents of a town or members of any similar organization and the resentment that builds from the belief that the root causes of decline are wholly external to the town or organization itself. A tendency to cling to the familiar, to distrust or demonize the unfamiliar, the unknown, or anything that appears to be different grows as the spiral tightens. The circling of the wagons into a we-they dichotomy is region independent: similar, if not identical responses will not be out of place in the north, east, south, or west. I don’t doubt there are many towns or organizations, which do not succumb to a sort of vicious entropy; however, if we are honest, those of us who have lived in or were raised in a small town, know full well that Barack Obama’s words captured the spirit and sentiments often spoken by the residents of those forgotten towns living on the edge of a time they fear they will never recover.

Tags: elite, prejudice, small towns, values