The new issue of The University Bookman is devoted to regionalism and conservatism. Here's one of the essays, Gerald Russello's lovely homage to a sense of place in Brooklyn, where he lives. Excerpt:
I need not shop at a superstore, preferring instead the many family-run businesses in my neighborhood. We buy produce directly from farmers, do not need to drive a car for weeks at a stretch, and we live within five miles of where my grandparents were married and my ancestors are buried. This is not some "crunchy con" fantasy. Oppressive congestion, dirty subways, and rude pedestrians aside, this is Brooklyn, too.Some years ago, there was a book published with the improbable title Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (1985), focusing on the middle-class neighborhood of Canarsie. That is pretty much the Brooklyn where I grew up, though as a good citizen of the adjacent neighborhood of Mill Basin I always thought the Canarsans a little suspect. This is the Brooklyn where "the city" was a long subway ride away, a trip to be taken only in extremis, where mothers called their children home over the hot asphalt on a summer night, where backyard radios murmured baseball scores in the evenings--no one could afford air conditioning, so we were all outside--and where the liturgical rhythms of church and synagogue dominated the chronological calendar.
I'd love to read you readers' thoughts about what's particular and pleasurable, or at least admirable, about the place where you live.
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Scott Walker @11.39AM: To be fair, Sarah Palin took a shot at him first. Well, not him personally, but urbanites in general.
I was the earlier 'your name' that asked "Why bring it up?".
To be fair, Sarah Palin took a shot at him first.
Palin wasn't part of Rod's posting nor was her name mentioned in any of the early comments. Rod wanted to know what readers like (or don't like) about where they, not other people, live. I asked the 'why bring it up' mainly in response to none of those places sound ideal to me. He did the exact same thing he whined that the "Sarah Palins of the world do."
Eramus -
Actually... no. I stated a personal preference. I attacked no one. I made the point, that based on her Palin's statements, I was not a real American.
The fact that those places don't sound ideal to me is only because I have no point of reference upon which to enjoy them based on my lifestyle and life experience. My lifestyle is not better. Just different. I like crowds, operas, theatre, movies, art exhibits. Other people like hunting, fishing, wood carving, snow machine racing. I've never fished. I've never shot an animal. Does that make me better? Heck no. Does it make me different than some posters on this board? Yes.
I like where I live in Los Angeles. But the traffic, smog, and hectic pace are not for everyone. I get that.
It wasn't me who said that "small town America is where real Americans live". You maybe think of why someone would say that, rather than my reference to it.
To use your own words... "Why bring it up?"
I think it is ridiculous to favor small towns over large cities or vice-versa. Both small towns and urban areas both have good and bad things about them, and whenever I read any romatic biased essay saying either place is ideal, I know that the author is full of crap or full of a nostalgia that exists only in his/her mind. I think of Sarah Palin right away when I hear any excessive praising of regionalism or small towns. I don't think it is unjustified to associate Sarah Palin with such an excessive belief in the unadulterated goodness of small towns. She brought this issue up again and again during the campaign, so its totally accurate to think she thinks the small town is an ideal place. My thoughts, as I said, are more realistic - small towns have good and bad things about them, just like big cities and suburbs. Its great to like the place one lives in and write about it, but its very defensive and strange to have to present your place as the ideal place for goodness in the world to florish, as Sarah Palin did. Palin obviously has some kind of inferiority complex or else feels as though she has to live in a place better than others.
Forget "conservatism," please. It has been Godless and thus irrelevant. As Stonewall Jackson's Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
”[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It .is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth."
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
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