A bad case of metropollyanna, that one. Not quite as insulting as the proposal by a couple of clowns from Rutgers University to turn my home into a Buffalo Commons, and certainly not as demeaning as the idea that we’re so hard up out here that we’d seek the honor of burying New York’s garbage in our backyards in exchange for a few jobs driving the bulldozers. But the attitude is the same and the diagnosis fits.
Metropollyanna is the belief that sooner or later everyone will move to the big city and live happily ever after. Its symptoms include the notion that most of America is merely something to be flown over. In its advanced stages, metropollyanna produces delusions like the one in that article: that out here in the sticks everyone is panting to hear what the ladder-climbing snobs at Elaine’s and in the Hamptons have decided to tell us this week.
We get the same books, and some of us actually read them instead of coloring them in. We have people who can string together the odd phrase and produce something worth reading. We enjoy debating ideas, and art and all that other heady stuff. Hell, some of us went to the same Ivy League universities. I even know someone who once changed planes in New York City, but after a few years he quit lording it over the rest of us.
At this stage in the conversation, outlanders are usually accused of jealously refusing to acknowledge that New York is “the capital of ideas.” Maybe once upon a time it was. That was before we had fax machines and CompuServe. Nowadays you don’t have to be within walking distance to be “in the loop.” You just need the equipment and the imagination to use it.
It’s now possible to live wherever you want without resigning from the national discussion about how we’re going to learn to be better human beings, to quit poisoning our planet, to achieve peace, to not leave our heirs grid-locked by debt or to find meaning and happiness while leading useful and interesting lives.
After a day of feeding my fax machine, I prefer to look at mountains rather than traffic, and in 25 minutes I can be in my waders, alone in a canyon, being made a fool of again by wily trout. More power to you if you prefer the big city, or if it’s home and what you want, but please, let’s not be place-ist. These days, where you live is only a comment on where you live. It is not a comment on your capacity to participate in the world of ideas. Technology is unraveling that part of the original need for cities, and most of my big-city friends agree and act accordingly. New Yorkers seem to be the exception. The rest of us are still expected to kiss their rings and inquire anxiously about the intellectual wars raging in the salons. Right.
My suggestion to those unemployed New York writers is this: come out to listen instead of to talk. On that basis, we’d welcome them. There are thousands of places where they’ll find people who can help lift them out of their ruts and offer perspectives that may be valid, even delightful, despite not having been hatched within 10 blocks of Central Park.
If that busload of self-impressed New York writers come looking for blue-collar blues in the rust bucket, of course they will find it. They could also find some hicks leaning against a fence post and slurping colas, if that’s what they want. If that were all we had out here, I’d probably move to New York myself and strive to acquire the same superior airs. Those turnip-truck stereotypes are no more the truth about the non-New York America than the presumption that a visit to the Big Apple automatically includes a mugging
There are interesting people out here, doing very interesting things, inventing new stuff and trying to make a difference. Come look for them. You may be pleasantly surprised. It’s boring out here only to people who are themselves boring.
When I was young and foolish, I thought we should all bow to the East to receive wisdom. Having paid my dues in the megalopolis, I now know ’t aint so. Because it’s easier to live out here, there’s more time to read and think and write. Some of us actually take advantage of that opportunity. The scale of things makes it easier to put our ideas into practice, and that in turn makes life risky and interesting.
Since we’re stuck with the disadvantage of bucolic ZIP codes on the return address, we’re forced to make sure the stuff inside the package is better if we want to succeed in our crafts. And many of us do succeed. Not all the poets out here are housewives writing blissfully about their gardens; the graphic designers have learned that there is life beyond Helvetica and Times Roman; and the novelists are trying to give us more than formula sex, violence and cynicism.
If New York writers are unemployed because nothing is selling, they have a choice between bemoaning the ignorance of the peasants or finding out what is going on in this country that’s worth writing about, even if it means they may have to cross the sludge-brown river to get to it and even though it can’t be used as grist for yet another (yawn) angst-ridden tome about some failed relationship in Brooklyn.
They may be running out of material in New York but there’s no such problem out here. Those New York writers are welcome to come on out and help themselves to the original stuff, fresh where it’s made. But only if they leave their metropollyanna behind.
