Alumni Review Point

Our Towns: A Place-ist Lament

Where does small-town America fit in a culture reliant on big media and big politics, asks an avowed ‘place-ist.’ By Bill Kauffman ’81. Illustration by Michael Osadciw.

Small-town America is vanishing, though the rest of the country doesn’t seem to much care. Oh, front porch imagery is still useful for corporations selling pickup trucks, but those of us who live in neither city nor suburb have no place in the national discussion.

When not acting as props in such sham spectacles as the Jessica Lynch homecoming, we’re supposed to deaden our souls by watching Friends and Sex and the City and reading about the amours of Angelina Jolie. Our rulers expect us to care more about Baghdad than our backyards. And all the while, our small towns fade away.

From Maine to Montana, the fabled small town, source of national pith and myth, is disappearing into a Great American Nothingness. Perhaps we should consider what is being lost. And how it might yet be saved.

We can start by insisting upon the uniqueness of each small town, each little village, in our beautiful land. We hear a lot of sanctimonious guff about “diversity” these days, but defenders of small towns are the real tribunes of diversity. You might call us “place-ists.”

Place-ists insist that every place has a history, customs, accents, and concerns that are irreducibly different from every other place. We believe that one town is not pretty much like the next, whatever the frequent flyer-mileage collectors of the NYC-LAX nexus might think. The differences between my Batavia, New York, and your town go well beyond the last names of the night-shift managers at Taco Bell and the Auto Zone.

If we are to preserve our America, we must support local businesses whenever possible; the chains mean homogeneity, and homogeneity spells death. We must protect the landscape, both natural and architectural, from the ravages of a misguided “Progress.” (This “Progress,” by the way, is usually subsidized by government for the benefit of a well-connected few.) And we must start honoring those who stay instead of stray: the men and women who put down roots, not those who flit about from suburb to suburb, chasing the elusive gods of money and status.

Mobility is the great sickness crippling America, withering its civic life and killing its spirit. But it remains undiagnosed, its symptoms misascribed, for only the mobile have microphones and cameras and printer’s ink. You never hear about the millions of stay-at-home Americans, doggedly loyal to their little hometowns; we play the unheard music.

Oh, occasionally some country singer might warble a maudlin tune about how grand the home folks are—not that he actually lives among the home folks anymore.

“Mobility is associated with psychiatric casualty rates among both adults and children,” wrote two researchers at Walter Reed Hospital who studied the emotional imbalances of peripatetic military brats. But don’t hold your breath waiting for mobility to become a political issue. For what is Washington, D.C., if not one vast homeless center, sheltering the lawyers and former student council presidents of Everywhere, U.S.A.?

The mobiles, it would seem, have won. They dominate our three capital cities: Washington, New York, and Hollywood. Certainly our two major political parties have nothing to say about the importance of staying loyal to one’s hometown. By and large, their leaders have forsaken their hometowns, except when cameras are near at election time. The bipartisan policies they support, from corporate subsidies to sending our soldiers abroad to fight the Empire’s never-ending wars, serve to scatter Americans far from their home places.

Like Washington, Wall Street is the enemy of Main Street. The companies traded on the stock exchanges are infamous for their disloyalty to the towns in which their factories and stores are located. And as for Hollywood? The stupidity and vulgarity of its products are matched only by the contempt they reveal for Middle Americans, who are usually depicted as drooling bigots or sex-crazed morons.

And yet most of us, even those stranded in faraway cities, sense that something is seriously amiss in America. The corner store is being swallowed by Wal-Mart. Volunteer fire departments are losing members. Reality television supplants reality.

But it’s not too late. Let the revival of small-town America (and the urban neighborhood) begin with you. Shop locally. Turn off the TV. Watch a high-school game instead of mercenary pros. Plant a garden. Have coffee with your neighbor. Laugh. Commit place-ism—with joy and impunity.

Bill Kauffman ’81 is the author of five books, most recently Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive (Henry Holt/Picador).