But basically, for Americans who grew up in small-town America, small-town America is the underdog. For NY Jews, who learn as soon as they experience the rest of the country that they're considered essentially foreigners, it's the same deal, with love-hate re: American Jewish culture and self-mockery acceptable, but only if coming from other Jews. It's really quite similar, far more than one might think, because even if the NY Jew looking to make it in the big city doesn't have to move geographically (although some will go to L.A., etc.), there's a sense many have - and depict in their art - of having left behind a stifling, narrow-minded world.
I agree with the general point about the nature of the love-hate relationship, and that the particular dynamics of that relationship preclude certain forms of expression, at least if you're trying to not be a jerk. More simply: the corollary of "nobody picks on my little brother but me" is "I probably shouldn't pick on someone else's little brother." A generally unappreciated bit of etiquette, but no less relevant because only honored in the breach. The appropriate pop-culture reference is that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry thinks the dentist has converted in order to be able to tell Jewish jokes: he's pretty clearly trying to arrogate to himself privileges (in that case, humor) that are not his. The midwest analogy is probably something like Detroit 'ruin porn': it's a dysfunctional city, and not a nice place to be, but the perverse glee outsiders seem to take in Detroit's failure is unseemly and rude, at best (if you want to make someone from Michigan angry, this is the easiest way).
There's an important wrinkle here, which is the problem of solidarity or symbolic identification, which involve some figurative mental work in order to identify with people one otherwise wouldn't identify with. I tend to think these sentimental or sympathetic relations are very important to politics, but they do involve a blurring of the line of identity such that wrongs committed against another person or group of people become, in some relevant sense, the objects of my direct concern. But it's no doubt possible for symbolic identification to happen without dragging along more uncomfortable or questionable behavior.
That was a bit of a tangent. Two other, shorter notes: I think that people who leave, and conceive of their past environment as stifling and narrow-minded, are usually exaggerating for reasons of comfortable personal narrative and not reflecting reality. This is approximately the basis on which I feel comfortable dismissing Leo Strauss' theory on persecution: if you really want to say controversial things, it's possible to do so (plenty of people did), and the number of circumstances in which a person's options are literally silence or death are limited. Second note: I'm not sure people in middle America, apart from Palin's rhetoric, really believe themselves to be 'underdogs,' except in the sense that everyone in America believes themselves to be underdogs, including both teams that are in the Super Bowl, World Series (this is why "nobody believed in us" is a sports cliché).
To get at the broader issue, when Palin speaks of Real America, it's important to remember that everyone ends up feeling the victim, both the self-identified "Real Americans," sick of being dominated by the coastal fake-Americans, and those who don't count as Real, most of whom are not directing the culture and had nothing to do with the fact that so many TV shows are set in NY, but who are nevertheless Jewish, or gay, or otherwise likely to feel more comfortable away from the Real.
Again, generally agree. Then again, I left Michigan as soon as I could and have not been back to my hometown since 2004. I am not much of a Real American anymore. Here's it's probably appropriate to mention that I'm not sure Palin's rhetoric is so much reflective of how middle America sees itself as constitutive of a certain kind of emerging self-narrative. As an anecdatum: I'm not sure, in my youth, that we ever spent any time thinking about the coasts at all: if you wanted a big city you went to Chicago, and if you wanted someplace warm, you went to Florida. I'd never heard of or thought about the midwest as 'flyover country' until sometime last decade, and I don't know that it would've bothered me at even my most rabidly conservative. That is to say, much like Blue State-v-Red State, Palin's shtick is an attempt to create a new way of talking about politics and American life that creates new resentments rather than tapping into old ones. The resentment is not pervasive, as I attempted to indicate by referring to Bob Dylan's reasons for leaving Minnesota (with which a large number of midwest kids can identify) and Scott Fitzgerald's ambivalence towards both coasts, which includes an equal ambivalence about the midwest. All of which is to say, Real America should always and only be used sarcastically, and I feel like it's in part the job of people with more common sense than that to counteract the narrative as much as possible.
With respect to Twin Peaks, the real reason I hesitate to make ascriptions to Albert's character is that he takes up so little screen time. So when Phoebe says "I see Albert as bitter in a sense because he knows that he, unlike Dale, can't just as easily live in the big city as in a small town," I can't sign on because I just don't think there's enough evidence either way. (She has watched it more recently than I have, so it's possible I've forgotten something.) The other reason is that, well, I grew up in a small city. There was one Jewish girl in my grade of ~370 people. So there's a lot that I didn't know about Judaism and Jewishness, and for a long time. (We did all watch Seinfeld, of course.) Though that's changed somewhat, there's obviously a lot I still have no idea about. Among those things is that the name "Rosenfield" should read to me a Jewish, rather than German, which was my first thought. The American Jewish experience is largely foreign to middle America, except for The Chosen and Schindler's List and Seinfeld, and that foreignness, to the point of invisibility, is its own kind of problem. I'm just not quite convinced that it's anything more than thoughtlessness.
1 comment:
Lots to respond to. Probably not getting to all of it...
"I think that people who leave, and conceive of their past environment as stifling and narrow-minded, are usually exaggerating for reasons of comfortable personal narrative and not reflecting reality."
Maybe so, but I'd make an exception for gays. If you're straight and from a conservative small town, or Jewish and from a suburb you remember as "Jappy," you would have been an insider, if somewhat bored, had you stayed put. But if you're born into a minority whose assumed natural habitat is the city, things are probably quite different.
"I'm not sure people in middle America, apart from Palin's rhetoric, really believe themselves to be 'underdogs,' except in the sense that everyone in America believes themselves to be underdogs,"
I certainly don't know how it goes in middle America among only locals, but one finds, for example, at colleges in the Midwest that attract many students from the Northeast, a resentment based on the assumption (sometimes founded, sometimes not) that Northeasterners will be snooty and will view them as hicks. That, and it's my sense from both offline life and numerous blog posts/interactions that at least some Americans are bothered by the overrepresentation of NY in entertainment and literary fiction, bothered not merely because too much of the same gets boring, but also from a sense that this is NYers' cultural imperialism, akin to how the U.S. is viewed abroad.
"All of which is to say, Real America should always and only be used sarcastically, and I feel like it's in part the job of people with more common sense than that to counteract the narrative as much as possible."
Agreed, kind of. Only kind of, because I do think there are some who identify as being from an America more real than, say, NY or L.A. Quotes or a tone that implies them is still necessary to refer to that which some consider Real, but it needs to be clear that Palin's speaking to an at least partially sympathetic audience.
"With respect to Twin Peaks, the real reason I hesitate to make ascriptions to Albert's character is that he takes up so little screen time."
For those of us who study representations of Jews in the arts, it's often a case of, there's some Great Work in which a Jew makes only a minor appearance. (The inevitable usurer in 19th C French novels, for example.) If what you're looking at is to some degree how a writer depicted Jews, to perhaps a greater extent what the limits of possibility were for depicting Jews/ for Jews at the time, if a realist novel set in the the present, then even a brief appearance is enough to make for a data point.
"Among those things is that the name "Rosenfield" should read to me a Jewish, rather than German, which was my first thought."
It's the context. His attitude, and the fact that he's from the big city. And the way the locals (one, at least) garble his name.
I was thinking more about "Twin Peaks" and foreignness, though, and there's also a good amount for those thinking about representations of Asians and Scandinavians to work with. Albert, however, is thus far the only American-yet-foreign character. Josie's portrayed as an exotic beauty, but she's actually from Hong Kong, not Asian-American.
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