There was an article yesterday in the good ol' Washington Post by a fella named Will Wilkinson (March 17,2017) that harps on a theme I have tried to remark upon again and again when it comes to the state of US politics and, beyond that, even just US culture: Americans seem to have some sort of massive grudge against, as well as a massive fear of, their cities. The article was titled "Why Does Donald Trump demonize cities??" and the subtitle "...because they show that the liberal experiment works."
The article then went on to basically explain (so it would seem to me) how DT has tried again and again to demonize cities (despite having lived his entire life in one) and how he used his demonization of the cities to rally rural voters around him, to take the presidency and win so on and so forth. Much of the article devotes itself to trying to explain just why cities are not the hellscapes that DT paints them to be, about why cities are not all that bad, or murderous, or awful, etc etc etc..on and on and on it goes.
What this writer never really touches on, however, is the fact that there is really no debate, you see, about whether or not cities are good or bad, just like there is no debate about whether or not abortion or birth control has been invented, or not. The truth of the matter is that Cities and well-built cities have been an absolutely vital part --if not, hands down, the most important part -- of any truly developed country for the past ..uh..what...3,000 years. I have tried to stress again and again how an epic Republic such as Ancient Rome was not based around her "beautiful little small towns" but her titanic cities, and the same goes for Greece and Byzantium and Egypt and wherever else you want to name. These civilizations did not heed the rural rhetoric of the people living in the far off sand dunes and tiny little river towns in the Twilight Zones of the "empire", in order to keep themselves running. They listened to the people who lived - where else - but in the direct middle of their biggest cities. Yet in the United States, this is , for some reason we are told, not necessary. Cities to the United States are .... in some sense, almost actually irrelevant. Not only irrelevant but, just like the article writer said, demonized, resented, despised, and not liked.
Many people find this distaste for cities in the US culture "mysterious". Like many other things in the US, they know not from where it has originated. It seems as though it has come simply out if no where,randomly, to poison us now...and in fact my chief problem with this article by Mister Wilkinson in the Washington Post is that it actually paints the entire rural vs urban divide as though it is something that DT just randomly started, even though that is not **at all** The case. The fact of the matter is that the United States has never learned to love or respect or understand its cities, in the same exact sense, not surprisingly, that the United States has never truly developed, in my opinion, a healthy relationship with intellectualism or literature or music or many, many other things....*yet*. I understand many people might be completely, what, 'flabbergasted' , at this idea I've presented - that the USA has not developed all of those things to the 9th degree-- but, in my opinion, it realyl hasn't, and anything that it has developed is, in truth, only really...well..quite recent.
For this is the straight truth of it, when the sun sets: The United States only really recently got done developing ... and in fact, I am not quite sure I would even consider it fully developed *yet*. Oh I know I know I know! How could I say such a thing? Am I an imbecile? What am I talking about? Of course the United States is develoepd you scream and cry! Look at New York! Look at Los Angeles! Look at all those cities we have! We are so obviously developed! We are te worlds greatest country!So rich! Blah blah blah blah blah .
Yes, we have a lot of stuff, but we also * do not have a lot of stuff ** and uh...when you actually look beyond your little NYC or LA borders out to the heart of the country, you begin to see this in a huge , massive way, to the point where I no longer comprehend how this is even a surprising conversation, or an unheard of 'thing'. You also begin to see the truth of it when you look at certain historical facts like, say, the fact that New Mexico was only made a state in the year 1912. Or even the fact that much of New York City wasn't *really* built or completed until after a year like 1912, *after* all the immigrants from Italy and Ireland came, so on and so forth. To Americans I suppose 1912 sounds like a long time ago? Sorry, but it is not. That is like last night in the history of the world. Don't forget: Cities like London and Rome are over thousands of years old now. How on earth is it possible to compare cities that have been **in development** for thousands upon thousands of years to something like New York City, or beyond that, another city that is even lesser than NYC, that essentially was largely incomplete until the middle of the 20th century in a way? It sounds ridiculous, but this is exactly what many people here try to do. They seriously thinki ts just all 'exactly the same', and I do think it causes a massive misinterpretation to take place, even with Mister Wilkinson there. They think they can sit and put American cities up agaisnt European cities and go toe to toe. You simply cannot do that. Its like comparing apples to oranges. Its not to say that one is worse or better, really, but rather to say that one has been in development for thousands of years,a nd the other only jus got started.... and this changes everything....including, yes, our nations political conversation, and whether or not we "Demonize" or do not "demonize" our cities .
If you look at a map of Europe and then the USA, you see, the first thing you should really start looking for is the manner in which Europe is **unbelievably** densely populated in comparison to the United States. In fact, when my friends from Europe have come to visit me, and I live in an old Italo neighborhood in an industrial New Jersey city that most rural Americans who voted for DT would be, I can assure you, utterly petrified and hateful of, they have told me that they think my city is, well, not really a city, in some certain sense, because, for starters, it is so spread apart that you must drive all over it no matter where you're looking to go (no bicycles here, except for bums) and secondly, it's well, as a direct result of that fact, a sort of lonely seeming place to the Europeans! Get it? This city here that I am in, a city that rural Americans would consider utterly urban and awful and to be avoided, actually seems almost like a rural area, to many Europeans. It seems lonely, solitrary, and empty.
And it's lonely seeming because many a European is accustomed to walking outside and greeting a world outside their front door, or perhaps 15-20 minutes from their front door, that to us Americans only tends to happen for us during an adventure to Disney World, or the shopping mall, or, of course, the absolute biggest cities and areas we have, like Times Square or the direct center of Philadelphia et cetera. The truth about almost 95% of America, after you have lived long enough or just understood how truly densely populated Europe is, is that even the areas the Americans think of us being densely populated are, in truth, from a European perspective, pretty quiet, and vacant, and even sort of tranquil, believe it or not. It all starts to seem like the Wild West, with the tumbleweeds blowing by.
It's true, again, that Times Square and Los Angeles & Miami etc are overly congested and brimming over with people, and those areas are, I suspect, just as exciting and wild for Europeans as they are for us (and most Europeans would not want to live in such overly congested areas, just like we don't, I feel) but, once you are out of those wildly famous tourist areas, everything here in the States really does start to get kind of quiet, and this even, believe it or not, includes most of the Brooklyn and Bronx and Queens style neighborhoods that many Americans in the red states probably think are "The most congested places" on Earth but are in fact very often just residential areas and quiet suburban seeming roads, that just so happen to be one little 10 minute train ride from Times Square etc. Take the street my mother grew up on, for instance, which , if you look at it from a map or even if you hear the story told from a person who lives on it at this very moment (like, say, a Puerto Rican) , or some white kid who just came to try and 'gentrify it', you would be told it is a street that is wholly urban, and even a part of the frightening, dangerous "ghetto". It is astreet that at this point is now considered one upon which someone who knows how to street fight would be being raised upon... more or less. A rapper representing the hellish cityscape that Trump so often references in speeches would perhaps be born on it now, and he would be able to point back to it and get away, entirely, with calling it an urban spot....
Take my European friends to it, however, and it just looks like any other residential suburban American street. It will look just as lonely to them, and in the middle of no where to them, as the street I'm writing this dcoument from, which is 15 minutes down the road, and widely considered to be, by Americans, "infinitely safer" (since no one ever appears on it, ever, on foot, aside from dog walkers). The only difference , in truth, about the street my mother grew up on ,versus this , is that now the houses on the old street have been reconfigured to fit 3 families instead of one -- which *does* mean more people are walking around in the area but, still, not nearly as many as you will often find in a European spot, and also - the next problem - there is often no real place for these people to meet up and congregate at, in an American urban area, anyways.
This is, in fact, another big problem I came to start noticing (i call it a problem, at least) after I got back from my own personal European adventure, where I was endlessly comparing and contrasting: There is often no real spot, aside from the front of a convenience store or perhaps a basketball court or a little park, for Americans in many urban areas or residential areas on the outskirts of urban areas, to meet up! I think this is a very very bad thing. I don't like it. Meeting your fellow americans is not really encouraged here.
The Italians have their piazza. We have...what? Nothing. There's no where to go on foot here for regular citizens, I feel, many times, and this is proven statistically when you look at the rates of obesity in America: We have a hard time trying to find a place even so much to walk around in......
And this again contributes, I swear it does, to the entire dilemma that is the rural mindset here in the States, which our political discussion always tips "mysteriously" in the direction of: Even people in the middle of many American cities are actually often running with a rural idea in their heads, because even when you are smack dab in the middle of the Bronx, you might wind up being wholly isolated from your other Americans, since there is simply no piazza to meet up at, there is no real s treet action in a certain sense. I wholeheartedly believe in a way that many of the American inventions got invented as a result of this intense isolation Americans have always been living with, evne if they don't realize it. The Television, the obsession with the video games, the sports broadcasts, the Hollywood movies, all of it starts to make some sense when you start to keep in mind this idea of how horrifically isolated and far away from each other we've always been here. It's almost as though, if the Americans did not create those things, they would have lost their minds, entirely. The Internet is almost like an artificial piazza of a sorts that Americans created for themselves.
And its because the truth, even about many of these so called "urban american" areas where there are many people and a lot of congestion, is that the only people who walk around in them or who have a spot they congregate at tend to be delinquents and other such 'down on their luck' sorts. It would, as i said, be mind boggling to me to see any of my older relatives pedaling around this neighobrhood, in which we have now lived for a century, on a bicycle. Nobody would do such a thing. Meanwhile, in Europe, my friends take the bicyclyes out and go pedaling around nightly. Even peopl who are 70 years old. And when they go pedaling they very often pedal 5 minutes from their house and straight into highly congested areas where there are not cars but instead dozens if not hundreds of people on foot on a Saturday night, and those people are not delinquents, but just normal ,regular people, not threatening, not armed, nothing of the sort. The Italian cities that I saw , both small and large, cities that I am told are suffering from a debilitating economy that is in ruins compared to the United States economy, seemed more alive both economically and culturally than my own here in New Jersey, by literally light years. My city center here in New Jersey looks as though a literal bomb has hit it. Everything is closed, the signs are falling off the storefronts, the lights are flickering, many unlit, glass windows shattered, huge factories vacant and abandoned, people who look like zombies wandering all around, and plice officers - tons of them - armed with guns turning around every corner. I would not blame any rural citizen for driving into it and wanting to turn right back around to go back to the Twilight Zone of empty prairies the second they got into it, becayse that's in fact the same reaction I always have myself, and its *my own city*.
The fact about me is that I grew up for years , right here in the center of what many rural citizens would call a Bronx type area, listening to Johnny Cash songs and just wishing I could go to some place far, far far away from here, in the Twilight zone, and the reason I had this dream was because 1. I knew I would never be able to afford to move to a "safe" American city area, like Manhattan, thus it was worthless to dream of and 2. I also knew that I of course didn't like where I was because it was so troubled- and so where else was there to dream of *except* , as I am saying we do even in our politics, the rural boonies, or at least the suburbs that seme, to many of us born and raised in "cities", like rural boonies? I went on dreaming the Johnny Cash dream of riding a horse and shooting a shotgun in Nebraska, more or less until my European voyage, when I, for the first time ever, realized that cities are not always evil, and deranged, and violent or "unbelievably loud and boistouers" etcetc. I had to literally leave the continent in order to start to see that cities are not always "insane". Hence what you can glimpse from this personal experience of mine is that, had I never gone to Europe and seen this strange other style of city, I probably- so it would seem by the choices I was making musically-- would have started running **instinctively** with the idea that the red state voters have the right idea about everything, because the red state voters seem to represent what everyone in America is dreaming of, deep down ...which is, to put it bluntly, living in the middle of no where, with an enormous driveway and 4 car garage, having your own swimming pool, being 30 minutes from a single convenience store, and walking outside and hearing nothing but ... what... coyotes and wolves howling in the woods - and of course crickets chirping -- all night long.
I think the plain truth here is that the American dream itself, from a certain vantage point, is actually kind of unhealthy, and always has been, because the core of the dream is not so much about success, as it is really about getting away from everyone else and escaping to some distant "island" of your own making, and for many Americans the only thing that matters about this island is that its in the middle of no where, completely secluded from everyone else, so on and soforth. The entire American idea of success forever revolves around "escaping" what they see as the damnation of the City, around fleeing for far flung suburbia, around having a garage that can, again, fit 4 cars, and a shed in which you can put a bunch of tools you will never use but you can point to and say you're oh so proud of, blah blah blah. The American dream, in truth, has always been a dream of pure escapism, and nothing more...an escapism that initially began with just escaping Europe ...and then turned into a dream that even now includes escaping what many rural voters are interpreting (even if they dont consciously realize it) as "the new Europe"...which is of course New York City and LA and blah blah blah. The American Dream has always been about this ecapism and nothing more , and whats incredible to me is how few pweople really seem to realize that this is in fact the entire sickness that we have been suffering from. It's as though they are blocking it out in some way, not wanting to accept it, or see it for what it is, and I suppose one reason fro that is because we are actually still very much solely operating in these two extremes.
In my opinion Americans do not have a "Real" debate when it comes to their politics, they really just have a fight between rural constituencies, who are as high as could be on this escapism drug, and then the urban constituencies, who, you'll see, are always kind of confused, and scattered, frightened, criminalized and disorganized - or, of course, simply far too rich and living "too posh" in some unreal area like Manhattan. There's almost no real middle class American city perspective. You're either dead poor and illiterate in it, or you are super rich. Big big problem,this, because it leads to no real debate.
I think a real debate, and maybe this is just me, but I think a real debate wouldn't be this extreme, you see, it would be more finely tuned ... I'm not sure how to put it, really, but what we have here isn't a debate between two people who are sort of similar (which in most other fully developed countries is the case) but rather a full on boxing match of sorts between two ideas that really could not be any different than the other..... and again, the reason that the rural debate tends to win , I think (for the Republicans seem to take the cake more often than not, if you look at the history of past 100 years) is because urban americans often dream of a rural life...but the rural americans do not dream of an urban one, literally at all, it would seem. Americans who "make it" and move out to the suburbs or to a heavily rural area (like many in my own family have done) do not look back at their decision and think that they have lost anything; they instead look at it and think that they have escaped something treacherous and horrific.
In Europe this wouldn't really be the idea, even for people raising families etc. You would be well-aware of the fact that you were missing something, and that you were far away from smething really fun, come Friday or Saturady night, when you wanted to just take a little walk around the corner. Hell you would be aware of it even in the middle of a lazy afternoon when you just wanted to take a walk outside and ride your bicylce. Again, stateside, someone moves out to the suburbs and they think they've got it made, they thinkt hey've just stepped into the greatest lifestyle of any lifestyle that ever existed and ever shall exist. This makes all the difference, and this is the REAL reason why cities are demonized as hellscapes and nothing more in the USA debate...
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logging off
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