Every now and then, my ex-colleagues at the Stranger put out some decent writing. The most recent example: The Urban Archipelago—It’s the Cities, Stupid. Credited only to “the Editors,” it’s a 6,000-word manifesto praising the intelligence, progressivism, and open-mindedness of city dwellers (i.e., the target audiences of papers such as the Stranger). It asks us to see the Great National Divide not as one between regions or states, but between city folk (including college-town folk) and country folk (including exurban folk), between the enlightened Us in coffeehouse-land and the ignorant Them in Wal-Mart-land.
It’s self-servin’, of course. But it’s passionately written, and it’s got a practical point.
On election night, the Democrats held their party at the Westin downtown. The Republicans held theirs in Bellevue. The Big Two parties have market-segmented themselves to the point where there are few true “swing” districts. Dems are the City Mice—the ol’ ward-heelers and union organizers, the immigrants, the intellectuals, the scientists, the culture vultures, the free thinkers, the internationalists. Repos are the Country Mice—the oil and mining and highway lobbies, the back-country bigots, the “Real America” zealots.
One of the big historical differences between the US and Europe has been the former’s rural socio-political power. Henry Ford, when he wasn’t out funding proto-Nazi books, used to vocally promote the automobile as the machine that would free “real” Americans from the tyranny of decadent “urban” culture (which then was a code word for Jews, not blacks) and preserve the US as a wholesome, Protestant, Caucasian place. Cleaned-up versions of this ideology were cited in the ’50s to support the then-new suburban sprawl phenomenon.
But it hasn’t just been right-wingers citing the alleged purity of country life. Commune hippies, nature poets, earth mamas, NPR essayists, radical ecologists, tree-huggers, and the occasional indie filmmaker have, over the years, bought into the “city bad/country good” line.
I grew up in what was the country at the time (it’s now total McManison sprawl, just down the road from that proposed NASCAR race track site). I got myself to a real town as soon as I could, and never looked back. I believe in cities. I believe in urban culture, in urban diversity, in urban leadership, and in urban innovation.
Yet I also know there can be open-minded people in small places and closed-minded people in large places. (Cf. racial antagonisms in Boston, Chicago, Philly, L.A., etc.) But in cities there’s hope for coexistence. There’s hope for a better tomorrow in all sorts of aspects. In the exurbs, there are only gates and fences and big moats of parking and dreams of retreating to an idealized, never-was past.
