Palin to City: Drop Dead

In defense of Both Sarah Palin and Gerald ford, neither one explicitly said "drop dead".  But last night, Sarah Palin's sentiment, like Ford's 33 years ago, couldn't have been any clearer.  Sarah Palin is small town with a lower case 's' . If you're from a big City, she doesn't get you, she doesn't want to get you, she thinks you're less of an American than she is, and she doesn't have your interests at heart.

It's nice that Sarah Palin is a hockey mom. I like hockey moms.  I live in New York City, with a population of a little over 1000 Wasillas, and we have more hockey moms than Wasilla.  We also have baseball, football and basketball moms.  We also have doctor, lawyer, physicist, and college professor moms.  We also have construction worker, subway train conductor, and house painter moms.

We have all kinds of people in my City, and in all the other great Cities of America.  We even have small town farmers, fishermen, and oil field workers, because they move here too. American Cities are where Americans come together to do great things.  With all due respect to the populations of Wasilla, and the state of Alaska as a whole (I understand they number 9K and 960K respectively), we number in the MILLIONS, and our achievements are amazing, and part of what makes America great.

I don't begrudge Sarah Palin's fondness for, and pride in small town Alaska.  But the implications of her speech are clear.  When she spoke about how hard working her small town folk are, she meant that we don't work hard.  When she spoke about how small town folk serve and fight for their country, she meant that we don't.

Sarah Palin embodies a small minded, anti-urban bias which is offensive.  According to her backwards reasoning, if your work doesn't involve a tractor or a pick up truck, it isn't hard work.  You might think you work hard if you get up every morning, push into a crowded subway, so you can put food on the table for your family.  But you weld the steel girders of skyscraper, or you spend 80 hours a week in an office, or spend 48 hours on call in a hospital, or risk your life pulling people from burning buildings, or do anything which isn't rural and/or small in scope. So your work doesn't really count. (Maybe it's only real work if you can drop the 'g' from the verb. Farmin', fishin', these are jobs that sound right. Investment Bankin'... not so much).

What offends me most is the notion that City people do not fight for their country.  It's a slap in the face to the parents of soldiers from the 5 boroughs of New York.  It's a slap in face to the parents of soldiers from all the great Cities of America. It's saying that their sacrifices don't count, because their children grew up in the projects, or the row houses, or the high rises, or the brownstones, or the tenements.  It only counts if they grew up in the corn fields, or the tundra.

Did she intend to dis all of Urban America? (yeah...I said "dis"....there are millions of us, and that's how we roll.)  I'll tell you one thing, she certainly didn't try to avoid it.  She's running to be vice president of the entire USA, but she didn't say one word that makes me feel like she even cares about my American experience.  She's from a small town, and if you're from a small town, she's like you.  But if you're not from a small town, she has nothing to say to you.  You are not her constituents.  If you live in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburg, Baltimore, Atlanta, Dallas, St. Louis, Las Vegas, Miami, Detroit, Newark, or any of this country's other thriving, vital, dynamic, creative, wealth producing, urban centers, Sarah Palin doesn't get you, and doesn't think of you, and isn't interested in what you care about.

Comments

[Don]

Why should she care about you?

You've exhibited that she has a 0% chance of getting the urban vote

[Laura]

Don, a candidate is running for national office, they should want to serve the *entire* nation as that is what the job calls for. When someone lives in a city, it doesn't automatically mean they wouldn't vote for someone who came from a small town, or vice versa. Nor is it appropriate to assume that ONE opinion is representative of an entire population.

That sort of thinking and behavior is not only inaccurate, but divisive, and it's certainly not what our country needs from anyone, least of all our politicians.

We need representatives who are willing to work together and, when ideas on policy differ, not stoop to ad hominem attacks.

[Mamma A]

Dear Famous M.,

Instead of answering your blog on Sarah Palin, I am going to tell some stories about the neighborhood you grew up in and must have been silently citing as exemplar as you rebutted Sarah Palin’s small townishness and smallmindedness. She could never understand that our Lower Eastside, Sodom and Gomorrah back in the day, always was a small town with close family values. Except we call it a Co-Mmunity (pronounced thus) i.e. where people of various color live.
Today is HOWL, two weeks ago Charlie Parker, strange encounters, encounters with strangers. Once these strangers would have been unremarked here.
The L.E.S. is not dead. Yet.
Entrances to the Park are already blocked off for the HOWL festival today. (Do a dance it doesn’t rain). Its impresarios speak already of this 2008 happening as an artificial occasion, one they charitably hope will inform the bland anomie of the new residents, who perhaps tell others they are living in an “edgy” neighborhood (their parents wouldn’t have let them come here in 1979). Once upon a time “it” just happened. If “it” became safely interesting, written up in the papers, the happening would be exported, but we’d always come up with something new as five or six years ago, for example, HOWL replaced Wigstock.
Last year was the jumbo event: HOWL reached the half century mark and we all, with distinguished poetical voices conducting us, read the whole damn poem in honor of Allen. Try as they may, today’s festival will have less energy –not because different young artists and young addicts and young (how shall I call them?) homeless tribes of Goths, who are being actively invited to participate, aren’t welcome or don’t fit in with older generations of Beats and Hippies and Nuyoricans and Ukrainyetz – but because they don’t actually live here anymore. The Park has been scoured, the gates are locked at midnight. King Canute sweeps back the tide of wealthy NYU students colonizing the tenements in which Allen Ginsberg and countless other starving artists, sexual adventurers, young polypharma experimenters came to live among whatever flavor of immigrant had previously colonized the block onto which they moved, whose languages they were obliged to learn a few words of, exotic smells in the hallways inviting lunch in one of the holes-in the-wall on the Avenue. Greeting. Joining. Allen would have liked the crazed King with his broom because he was one himself, plinking futilely on his harmonium to the gentry in his last years.
Did you ever meet him through Papa? C. house-sat for him in Cherry Valley thereby beginning the family migration up to Leatherstocking country. But only P. really hung out. You can guess why.
Okay, back to the Park. The concrete bandshell, once serving as a stage for refugee classical musicians gone dangerously funky as it became a dormitory for the homeless, was torn down during Operation Pressure Point. Now stages are trucked in. The acoustics aren’t so good, but the lawns are kept pristine.
The stage is already being set up this morning, some entry by the locals already cut off. I stroll in scoping out an itinerary for when the Park will be crowded. Before the bandshell are two great trees, now so old and girths so thick they block the view of any stage. You know them. You could see them through your window in winter. One has become the Hari Krishna tree. Fresh garlands are tenderly hung every day on its bark. Often the old Chinese folk do their crack-of-dawn Tai Chi under the Hari Krishna tree’s canopy.
Today a faint sprinkle drives others under the trees. A group of Mennonites are humbly singing hymns, deliberately eschewing the bombast of the same hymns sung as Gospel in our few remaining storefront Baptist churches. (Praise the Lord). They don’t know they are singing under the Hari Krishna tree!
The L.E.S. lives. Goddamn! Or words to that effect.
I take my presumptuous self, neck festooned in all my Catholic medallions and now added: several chunky wooden rosaries given me by the DR kids from the Center in order that I greet properly the Black Madonna of Tindari next Monday on 13th Street, I go up to one of the Plain folk and engage him in talk about the festival and invite them all to proselytize amongst these, a crowd of strayers from the Word: obscene poets, half-naked trannies with headdresses made of turf planted with flowers, timbale players, orange Hari Krishna devotees, etc. "Prospective converts?”
My gentle Plain man thinks not. “We’ll leave soon. We wish to remain apart from the forces of Dark.”
I say: “Stay, Allen Ginsberg would have thought you folk Holy -- as he would have found the druggies and trannies and runaways, this tree, the sidewalk, the child’s diaper Holy.” Of course, I omitted Holy Assholes ( I won’t digress into his NAMBLA affiliations.) I start to preach the Gospel of Allen.
He asks, “Don’t you believe in the existence of Dark and Light?”
“I’m not a Manichaean,” I say; “I believe that there are no clear boundaries between Light and Dark, rather the boundaries intersect in: Us. Us. Therefore we must love across the boundaries. Love the least of these.”
Not for nothing have I been an historian of the Early and Byzantine Church. I know Scripture. Don’t mess with me.
He switches to OT. I know the stories but not the Talmud. He explains that he and his brethren must keep themselves apart.
“I understand,” I say, recognizing the same arguments of the Chasidim (this time my pointless asides have a point, just wait) whose menfolk won’t look me in the face to greet me when I visit my friend in Crown Heights in the Rebbe Moshach Schneerson’s community, “But Scripture does not forbid sending our love across the divide of Light and Dark. We can love the Light within them [whoops switched into Quaker theology].” To make my gestures towards his Manichaean cosmos useful as we talk, I have scuffed a line in the dirt by the Hari Krishna tree.
He backs away from it. “My wife, my wife,” he invokes several times. as if she is wolfbane to my past-my-prime professorial temptress. Ha. She arrives, the very picture of dumpy Plain, and with stern face urges him back into the fold..
I lost my own chance to proselytize, but I didn’t do badly. He was intrigued.
That encounter reminded me of another recent L.E.S. adventure. Last week on a balmy afternoon I was sitting outside the Center on Ave B with one of my teenage “youngsters” aka criminals. A. had been picked upon cruelly several days before, and I had allowed it to happen.
The other boys, handsome PR and DR and Black, whose features make a single gradated spectrum from European to African, were ragging on A.’s hair and his nose, and his Catholic school shirt, amd his superior Peruvian Spanish. Unlike any of theirs, his straight black hair sticks up like a brush when it is cut short and perimeter shaved into patterns a là Puerto Rican tonsorial fashion. His nose is immense, broad and slightly hooked with flaring nostrils. His head is almost rectangular. I know his mother V., a fair woman of Belgian and Spanish extraction. Her ex husband, whom A. now hates, must have been Quechua.
Remorsefully I searched among my books for an illustration of a famous Moche ceramic portrait vessel which resembled A. These late 1st millenium ACE vessels (my memory ain’t so good) are one of only few major traditions of fully representational portraiture. You’d have recognized the guy on the street. I brought the book on pre- Hispanic Andean art with me and made several color xeroxes to give him. But A. was rightly sulky and recalcitrant about “having a private chat” with me.
I told him that when he was a man he would look like this handsome Mochica aristocrat. In fact, he actually will! A. bloomed. “You would look like him now if you wore your hair long and pulled back into a pony tail or braid.” I was thinking of the coal-haired Bolivians who “work like immigrants” 16 hours daily in food places in the ‘hood but cannot, like their predecessors legal and illegal, live here and raise their families here. (As can neither you nor your sister, both now well-salaried, raised here)
A. began flipping throught the book for patterns to use for tattoos to be inked across the street in a parlor patronized by the other kids but forbidden to him by his mother. “I’m going to grow my hair long after the school pictures. I’m going to be Indio.”
All in half an hour’s chat. Damn, I’m good. Mostly I was relieved; long standing quarrels at the Center can be dangerous, and this one was partly my fault.
I was basking there in my smug laurels when a Chasid passed, looked, then stopped. Once upon a time, passing Chasidim were unremarkable, as you remember well. They lived on the Lower Eastside. We see them now only on High Holy Days when they return to the old synagogues. This one was a short, flabby but rather handsome blue-eyed blond of early middle age. “What is this place, may I ask?”
I gave him the AGYP drill.
“You are not Puerto Rican, nu?” (N.B. double negative=positive. Keep waiting). Good guess with my WOP cheekbones and red blond hair. He continued to keep a considerable distance between us as he gazed into the windows of the Center (he was already transgressing injunctions not to look into the faces of women not of one’s family – he’d better stand back).
I told him I was Italian.
He beamed and came closer. “I’m going to Italy next week on business. You could tell me things?”
“Not now; I’m busy. Come back in half an hour.”
“In half an hour we could go out to dinner?”
You betcha! In all my adult years on the L.E.S. I haven’t said five words to a Chasidic man who wasn’t selling me something. He was crossing the great Manichaean divide that Mennonite fellow would invoke today. Absolutely forbidden.
Half an hour later, dusted off and covered up as demurely as I could in summer clothes, I went down B with him to find a vegetarian restaurant. We didn’t, but he said it didn’t matter
He picked at his food and didn’t drink the Mai Tai he ordered. He didn’t want his father to smell alcohol on his breath, he explained. He lived with his father. He was still unmarried. A virgin.
Yeah Right. (Remember Sidney Morganbesser’s famous double positive? I dated him twice but I was too young (and too stupid) for him).
He’s married. He’s no virgin. Don’t Chasidim see to it that all young men are married as soon as possible that they might not be distracted from their studies or tempted by trayfe schikse harlots?
Well, I could see where this was going.
What could he wear in Italy that women would not know he was Jewish? I decided to take his questions seriously. I ventured the Italian uniform of a well-cut sports jacket and jeans, beard or grizzled shave, but added that he needn’t disguise himself, he ought also wear his yarmulka and tallis, that he would receive more overtures if he were visibly stranger furastiere.
No. He wanted to know the secret handshakes that would make it possible for him to approach Italian women. “What does it mean they should wear a short skirt and spread their knees”
Nothing, of course – even when they are on a topless beach.
“So which swimming suit, the little one?”
He must have had a swig of that Mai Tai after all, for suddenly he was declaiming that he could please these women, but with his mouth only, nothing elsewhere -- he should remain a virgin.
Oy Vey. Somehow I got him pointed towards the Williamsburg Bridge so he could walk it off before he got home to his wife. I hope to see him sulla spiaggia on the Rialto in a wet Speedo with his tallis draped nonchalently around his neck like a towel.
Number three. I didn’t say there would be so many. Two weekends ago was Charlie Parker. Once the very best end of summer. Holy Max Roach drumming on anything that resonated: drum, rim, lampost, friend’s head, chair leg…. Hari Krishna tree. Last couple of years I go only to wave to old friends. The music has become a little limp.
At the Charlie Parker festival (See? I’m coming to it) I ran into a South African friend I had been too embarrassed to call after my long silence the last 18 months. I had to make out his face among others squinting and waving at me. Then we were hooting in each others arms. S’bu is a Romance Languages Literature professor and translator of Le Petit Prince into KwaZulu. He is also a rabid jazz fan, and our friendship consists of learnèd exchanges (he’s learnèd I not) about cross-cultural mythologies and turning each other on to unknown bassists. That evening my brother came downtown with your father and we had the Great Debate (the Great Charlie Parker Debate cf. the Great Thanksgiving Debate?) about African Anthropology over pasta until the wee hours.
I found S’bu because I must know, but not by name, four thousand people here. About as many as Sarah Palin knows from Wasilla. The Loisaida is a small town. Well, I used to know them – now the population is transient and too self-absorbed to think of speaking to neighbors unless they dry clean their clothes.
A.’s mother died about the same time as Mamma D., but she was unable to get to China to be at her bedside. I told her to close her dry cleaning store next door and come with me to the Garden. I bought a bouquet and vase, gathered up some incense, candles, silver bowl, and the gilded paper money I so blasphemously use as notepaper. We found a spot by a goldfish pond and buried two stones for our Moms with messages wrapped around the stones. We lit the incense. A. asked if she could burn the paper money. Then we were on our knees sobbing, A. rocking making her three-time prayers, not a word of which I understood, I folding my hands saying the prayers my mother forbade but secretly longed for. Weeping. Weeping. The shrine remained undisturbed until the flowers faded and I smoothed the dirt over the place we buried the stones and burnt the incense.
Lower Eastside Co-Mmunity (please pronounce it correctly) endlessly organizing to fix each other up and grudgingly get along.
Oh please, Sarah Palin, don’t erase the L.E.S. and all the other urban enclaves of people with our different family values.

Mamma A

[Greg Montgomery]

A few thoughts on the Palin phenomenon. First and foremost, "Fuck you, clown." No, I mean no slight to the Governor from ALaska, rather I refer to the that gem from oral culture about the ultimate quick wit retort. It's a story in which a man goes to the circus, thoroughly enjoys himself until something aweful comes his way courtesy of The Clown. "Will the man in seat A12 please stand up." He does. "Well there is the horses ass, where is the rest of the horse ?". The roar of laughter. Our hero is stung to his soul. After many weeks pass the man slowly regains his self and resolves to attend Comeback School. Many years of intense study go by when one day the local paper advertises the circus coming to town. I do the story no justice here because the point is in the telling and mine is still to come. Of course, as fate would have it the clown calls his number. The man stands. The clowns repeats his stock joke and the audience laughs uproarously. Then they sense the intensity in the man. The crowd falls silent and the man speaks, "Fuck you, clown."

My mind had been scratching quietly all week over the memory of the Palin speach, pawing for the root of the deep iritation it had brought me. Then it occured to me what she had intended and what she had done that bothered me. The GOP crowd had loved her because she had spoken truth to power. Their truth. The essence of which is paraphrased by our hero above.

Sarah Palin did something no conservative had been able to do. She deliberately delivered a deep insult to Barack Obama. In the same stroke she insulted his liberal base by trashing the very idea of community work, those who would make it their work and by extension all of modern urban life. This was anything but unintentional. There is a fault line that divides our country more than economics, class, or political affiliation. It's the rural/urban cultural gap. In the cities we feel we are moving ahead, collectively solving our problems. We deeply yearn for harmony. We want to be better. Unfortunately this has the effect of turning us off to those in the rural areas who don't share our taste for diversity and civil progress. And from where they stand it shows. We do not much care for them and they know it, no less than we bear their disdain.

From where most of small town America stands, whether we're truly leaving them behind or we just think we are it's all the same. There's a turning away. And it is this turning away that the GOP smashingly exploited with Palin, like a one megawatt power line finding its ground.

Why does this work? Why do the cities never strike back? Two reasons that I can think of. One, in terms of the electoral college the wilds of nation still have it on the city dwellers. Another reason, perhaps, is that deep down many of us do acknowledge an inate wisdom that is rooted in our countries rural and small town past. The GOP exploits this part of our myth more expertly than we liberals have dreamed of doing for the metropolitan chapters in the story.

So if I could counsel Obama- yes I can dream - I would say two things. First, I don't care how you do it in fifty words or five hundred I want you go to her with one unmistakable message. You can guess it.

And after that. Let's find ways to undo the turning away. An example. Go to the folks in Montana who drive 100 miles to work every day and let them know that their countrymen in the cities are putting up mass transit, using less fuel and driving down the price of gasoline. Maybe there's something they can do in return.

I wrote the above last night and I have been heard. Today Obama said, "You can put lipstick on a pig..". I love this man.

[Scared citizen]

Time for Ms. Palin should go back to her small town, along with all the g's that she's dropped.