« ESS - Emacs Speaks Statistics | Home | Deceived, and a Plea »
the best dang blog post in a while
By stephen | October 7, 2008
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
First, let me announce that my personal blog is, for the most part, defunct. As I delve deeper and deeper into finance, financial econometrics, and economics in general, they become an even bigger and bigger part of my life, such that it makes very little sense to maintain a personal blog. Finance and economics are personal to me, so consider econsteve.com both my personal and academic blog.
With that said, I want to link to a fantastic blog post I read today, from one of my favorite blogs, BLDGBLOG. The post itself, is titled Minor Landscapes and the Geography of American Political Campaigns. It speaks about how many politicians seem to be framing their discussions around a nostalgic view of America that no longer truly exists. The first few paragraphs give a good preview:
If you’ll excuse a quick bit of landscape-inspired political speculation, I was reminded this morning of something I read last year on Boing Boing and which has stuck with me ever since – and that’s that there are more World of Warcraft players in the United States today than there are farmers.
Farmers, however, as Boing Boing and the original blog post it links to are both quick to point out, are often portrayed in media polls as a voice of cultural and political authenticity in the United States. They are real Americans, the idea goes, a kind of quiet majority in the background that presidential candidates and media pundits would be foolish to overlook.
If you want a real cross-section of Americana, then, you’re supposed to interview farmers and even hockey moms – but why not World of Warcraft players? This is just a rhetorical question – it would be absurd to suggest that World of Warcraft(or architecture bloggers) somehow have a special insight on national governance – but, as cultural demographics go, it’s worth asking why politicians and the media continue to over-prioritize the rural and small-town experience players.
Some other good points:
- it increasingly feels to me that presidential politics now deliberately take place in a landscape that the modern world has left behind. It’s a landscape of nostalgia, the golden age in landscape form: Joe Biden visits Pam’s Pancakes outside Pittsburgh, Bush visits a soda shop, Sarah Palin watches ice hockey in a town that doesn’t have cell phone coverage, Obama goes to a tractor pull.
- Put another way, it would certainly be frustrating to think that a candidate doesn’t understand how a cattle ranch or an alfalfa farm operates, or that a candidate has no experience with a small town and its parent-teacher associations and so on – but it is extraordinarily troubling to me to think that a candidate doesn’t understand how, say, New York City functions – or Chicago, or Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, or Phoenix – let alone the globally active and thoroughly urbanized economic networks within which these and other international cities are enmeshed.
I think that this blog post does a good job of being politically neutral. It is not about partisan politics, but the general feeling that our perception of America - as a collection of small towns - is not what it really is. U.S., like the rest of the world, is urbanizing. This is not to say that small town life is bad. I haven’t experienced it much, but the parts I have certainly had their pleasantries (fresh air and nice scenery). However, if you want to relate to the majority of Americans, you need to have urban experience
Topics: Uncategorized |
>> However, if you want to relate to the majority of Americans, you need to have urban experience.
Great, another damn elitist metro-sexual liberal telling me he doesn’t like the country being portrayed as people working for a living instead of sipping lattes and writing whiny blogs with the rest of the urban elite.
I’m sorry the country doesn’t represent you as much as you would like, but I’m glad there’s still enough of us stupid folk still out growing food, breaking rocks, or all the other mundane menial tasks to support your urban lifestyle.
Posted by: Texan on October 8th, 2008 at 2:20 pmthe notion of ’small town values’ has always been really interesting to me. the urban landscape in America is hardly the oasis of tranquility and simplicity that we’d all like to think it is. small towns are more likey to be inhabited by people who, because of urban sprawl, economic turmoil hits first and hard. city folk are able to hedge themselves from the most pressing things like oil prices and commercialized agriculture, but in “the country”, they’re all but unavoidable.
Posted by: Wendy on October 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pmsteve’s not saying you need to pander in either direction, but that the small town, iced-tea-sipping-on-porch imagery that politicians try to conjure up is sort of deceitful. they do it becuase even people in small towns can say, “yeah, that WOULD be nice” and there you go. romanticism and nostalgia take over the entire political spectrum and you’ve got everyone thinking that their candidate is someone that can will the country to look like it did in 1950’s Chrysler commercials.
plus, duh, liberal hippie latte-drinking bloggers get free wifi. so, who’s the senseless one? BOOYA!