In his recent post Urban Dwellers and Terrorism BooMan made a number of good points. But at the very end, he wrote:
I just returned to NYC from three weeks in one boonie neighborhood (Maine subclass thereof, living mostly as a native, not as a tourist) and I beg to differ.
I wrote a comment on his post, and now it’s a stand-alone post of its own.
Read on if you are interested.
BooMan writes:
C’mon. BooMan.
You KNOW better.
A couple of points:
1-A massive percentage of the talented leave home if home is not exciting or challenging enough. Like in the boonies. Many suburbs, too. They go to the city. If they grow up IN the city but are stuck in an ethnic ghetto of some sort, they still leave home. Upwardly mobile. And they still generally stay in or very near the city. SOME city.
Gene sink. The good genetic material leaves, the not so good genetic material stays.
Duhsville, USA is the result. I just spent 3 weeks in the boonies of America. Duhsville. Bet on it. I’m back in the Bronx. Almost the only intelligent people I met in rural/tourist Maine…and I was in the “rural” section. Bet on it again. (Dealing with the natives on the level of basic medical services, construction and maintenance, etc)…were from “somewhere else.”
“Awayuhs”, in the local dialect. Russians (LOTS of Russians, working in fairly menial jobs…sharp as tacks in comparison to people who are the results of 200 years of gene sink), Mexicans (Yup…Mexicans), people from elsewhere who are there making money off the tourist trade, vacationers from (of course) the cities and the occasional Mainer who got an education and came back to rip off the locals…lawyers, doctors etc. (Saw a sign up there…”Holistic Lawyer”. Deep.) Lesbian and gay male refugees digging in for the long haul.
Dassit. That’s all she wrote.
MASSES of fat, brain damaged, plodding inheritors of the genetic leavings of generations of Maine losers who stayed. Going to WalMart was like reading a Stephen King novel. Casting by a Down East Fellini. So was walking the halls of a hospital. Patients, visitors AND staff.
Deep.
I have ALSO been privileged to be in a similar situation in the boonies outside of Atlanta. Same process, same result.
Except less tourist money.
Gene sink.
This is not to say that there are not decent, intelligent natives living there. There are, of course. But less of them every year. My family has been there for 40+ years, and I have spent a LOT of time there myself. I know the neighborhood. We are talking percentages here, not absolutes.
I have also lived in devolved white ethnic ghettos in New York and Boston. Irish and Italian. Tipping into white flight where even the genetic leavings leave in fear of…the other.
The black/brown/beige other.
And in that black/brown/beige world the gene sink idea does not apply with the same force.
It’s there, of course, but that old American black saying?
If you brown…stick aroun’
If you black…get back!!!
That saying has a corollary.
If you white…you CAN go “somewhere else.”
But the darker you are, the harder it gets to leave the ghetto. In fact, African-featured (and other dark-complected races as well) bring the ghetto WITH them in the sense that white Americans SEE their difference and ghettoize them from the get-go. In their own minds.
The ghetto-go.
One ghetto TO go, coming right up.
So blackness tends to CONCENTRATE the genetic material in a proscribed neighborhood to some degree. A well functioning society appears where more of the superior genetic material stays home and becomes the political/business/cultural elite. (Because after all…where the fuck are they gonna that will really be much better? Maine? I think not.) Witness the Harlem Renaissance. Which happened at the same time in EVERY urban black neighborhood in America to one degree or another. Only the lovely CIA-run crack epidemic (and its predecessor heroin thing) succeeded in breaking THAT system down.
No Boonies Renaissance, to my knowledge.
No Little Italy Renaissance either.
No Suburban Renaiassance.
But cities?
In major cities there is one or another “renaissance” every goddamned GENERATION.
Why?
Because that’s where the smart people go.
2-You GET smart when you live in a city. You must get smart. You are challenged to survive, and the challenge is largely mental.
I sit in subways here in NYC city and watch tourist yahoos with the imprint of generations of gene sink on their faces try to figure out a subway map. Duhsville. And I watch city-bred ten year olds navigate the same system with ease. Smartsville.
And…there are VERY intelligent predators here. On all levels. I would MUCH sooner deal with bears and wolves than muggers, shake and bake store owners, crooked cops and massively corrupt politicians. Hell…all it takes in a large rifle and some common sense to deal with most country predators. (Unless you are some death wish/Steve Irwin type, of course.) But in the city? Watch OUT!!!
They keep the herd sharp, these urban predators. Be smart or be gone.
Tolerance?
Sit cheek to jowl with 279 different races every day of your life. I got yer “tolerance”, right HERE!!!
Or…go sit in a rural diner with 15 complaining, gene-sinked, mentally and physically obese fools and listen to them complain about those ragheads an’ niggers. (As long as you kin blend in well enough to disappeah, a’course. Ayuh. Talent with regional dialects helps no end. Ayuh. WICKED good coffee.)
City dwellers are not “tolerant”. They just know that criminality is an equal opportunity employer.
Vive la cité!!! (I am SO glad to be back!!!)
AG
Gotta go to work now.
We’ll talk…
AG
I see you had a wonderful time up in Maine.
I don’t really buy into your gene sink argument for why urban dwellers are better people.
It may explain why, over time, there is a brain drain from remote areas with little opportunity for white-collar jobs. But book-smarts are not the only factor in determining someone’s tolerance, decency, or merit.
As I said in my diary, urban dwellers are more attuned to what it takes to make us safe from terrorism because they live with the people that are most alienated from Bushism. Because they know their own neighborhoods, which are the likely targets. But that doesn’t make them better people.
You write:
Snark, I suppose.
I was there on a sad journey. Helping to care for my mother, who took a hard health hit in August. She will survive, but she will never be the same. We will not do the nursing home bit…hell, the hospital staff was barely compentent, and they are the local heavies…and she needs someone with her pretty much 24/7. I was doing my part as the family put together a care situation in my brother’s house. This didn’t exactly improve my feelings about what’s going on up there, but I have seen Maine’s magic up close and personal for 40 years.
I grew up elsewhere…NYC and environs, mostly… and my family moved there in the ’60s. To get away from all the pernicious urban influences that turned me into a rebllious artist.
So my younger brothers turned into rebellious bar fighters. The hardest of the hard country boys. In sheer self defense. In many respects, they never recovered.
The fisheries and lumber industies are fucked. Unemployment is rampant, as are drunkeness, insanity, domestic violence and incest. My mother taught the resultant bumper crop of emotionally disturbed and retarded childern until she was over 80 years old.
Maine is not what you think.
Underneath all the “Over the meadows and through the hills, to Grandmother’s house we go” shit, it is just Appalachia. Appalachia made geometrically worse by a NASTY climate.
Ignorant, provincial, and cold-spirited.
Sorry, Boo.
Not my favorite ghetto.
Go vacation somewhere else.
AG
I live in a small town in Wisconsin, 15,000, but half of that is the university, so the place is swarming with highly educated highly liberal folks.
Sometimes it seems that intolerence of small town and rural folk is one of the last allowed prejudices.
College towns are just the city going to school.
AG
I think you’ve overstated the case. Yeah, the city will always attract folks looking for a certain level of culture that there is not the population density to support in rural areas (although it can be done; it’s just harder to accumulate a critical mass to have something like an orchestra), and (more likely) the opportunity the city offers for certain types of careers that are not (or were were not until the internet came along) possible in the countryside – say, stock broker or fashion designer. And the city certainly offers a level of anonymity if you happen to have a lifestyle or belief system different than your peers. And the city offers many options for specialized purchases not available in rural areas – like buying, say, wholesale gems or Roman antiquities.
But for all of that, there are still plenty of morons in the city – I know; I’m related to some; they live in Philadelphia. They may be able to read a subway map, but they have precious little knowledge of basic -and potentially important – information about the natural world. Like what poison ivy looks like, for example.
Or why the National Park Service can’t keep the deer from wandering onto the Blue Ridge Parkway so traffic can flow unimpeded. As if the purpose of going to the Blue Ridge Parkway was to drive it as quickly as possible and still have time to get the kids to MickeyD’s by noon! Or why instead of spraying their rental cabin in the mountains with bug bomb because there are ants in the bathroom they should just find and fix the leak that is resulting in the wet wood whose odor is attracting the (carpenter) ants. Or the difference in appearance between an ant and a termite.
I had a next-door neighbor in Kansas City that called me over to her porch on my way out the door to work, all in a tizzy, because she had finally caught the raccoon that had been plaguing her, in a catch-and-release trap provided by animal control. “There is is!” she said, gleefully. “Uh, Mrs. —, I hate to tell you this, that’s not a raccoon; it’s an opossum.”
My mother, who until her honeymoon never left Philadelphia except for a train trip to NYC as a teenager (to sing on “Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour”), refuses to believe she descended from apes. “If I had to descend from something, I descended from Bambi!” “Uh, OK, mom…”
Maybe I got cured from my urban pretensions when, shortly I married Mrs. K.P. (who’s from outside Kansas City), I attended a cookout in Missouri where I was offered “mountain oysters” – “You’ve got to try them!” “They don’t look like oysters… Are they some kind of freshwater shellfish?” “Yeah, yeah, they’re like abalone.” (The grins should have warned me – I had seen similar grins when offered gooseberry pie: “Are you sure you don’t want ice cream with that?”) Or when I decided to imitate Tom Sawyer and try a persimmon – “Most of these red ones look kind of rotten. I’ll try that orange one – it looks pretty fresh.” “Suit yourself…”
In my experience, city people are far less likely to have any idea where their water comes from and what happens to it on the way to the tap, or where the poop goes and what happens to it when you flush, than country folks. And those are two pretty fundamental facts of life right there…
Of course, if you only buy gold from a downtown jeweler you trust, you may not need to know what “fool’s gold” is and why it’s called such (one look will tell you). And there’s precious little practical use for knowing the constellations, or the names of the trees, plants, flowers, insects, fish, etc. with whom we share the planet. But if all you know of the world we live in is culled from “Bambi,” and nature is just something that gets in the way of a timely lunch with the Burger King, you’re not going to be likely to support things like the Endangered Species Act or the Kyoto Protocol – and then we’re all fucked.
I am not saying that here are not morons in the city.
Just talking percentages.
I swear, if you shaded a circle 150 miles from the middle of any great city, a circle that changed from the deepest blue (More “intelligent”…I know, it can’t be empirically measured. Not really. But subjectively speaking…use your own definition.) through to the palest yellow (for lack of said intelligence), the change would be gradual and constant. Deep blue-> blue->blue-green->green->pale green->yellow->pale yellow.
Percentages.
AG