One of my pet peeves is small-town smugness. People who complain about the mythical “smugness” of those in the big city who allegedly think that they’re so much better than their rural counterparts. Anyone who follows politics knows this strategy well. And don’t get me wrong — I love small towns. I come from one, and it is my eventual plan to return to a rustic little place where no one can find me.
But I find this reverse-smugness (as I call it, since it tends to be smug anti-smugness) annoying. And one of its most common themes is, of course, the idea that small towns are better than big cities. Because that sort of self-centeredness isn’t a problem, it’s just pride. Gregg Easterbrook joins the fray this week on ESPN.com as he discusses the small-town football drama Friday Night Lights:
A defect of much American fiction and filmmaking, often produced by people who live in tenured pleasantness in academia or luxury in Los Angeles, is to depict the rustic town as a dreadful place. Small towns are — what’s the word I am looking for — small! There will always be a lot less happening on the Texas plain than in San Francisco, Manhattan or Cambridge. If people were not willing to live in rural small towns to farm, mine and maintain rail and power lines, luxurious life in Hollywood would pretty quickly fall to pieces. Plus, if you hate small-town life, you can always — what’s the word I am looking for — leave. Some people live in little or rustic towns because they like them, an idea that almost never appears in American fiction or filmmaking.
Of course, the whole concept of Hollywood’s distaste for rural America is a farce. The “big city slickster gets stranded in Noble Small Town America and reexamines his life and his values” storyline is one of the most cliched and overused themes in existence. See Cars and numerous other movies released annually for examples. (And note how many movies do, in fact, exist almost exclusively to deride city life, a la The Brave One.)
And for the record, I’m pretty sure big cities are the last places that need the powerlines in rural towns to exist. On a cultural note, people like Easterbrook who apparently think that farming and power production doesn’t take place in suburban San Francisco are no better than smug Hollywood elites who think that culture and art doesn’t take place in small towns.
Easterbrook writes for The Atlantic and The New Republic. He should know better than to get caught up in absurd and non-existent culture wars.
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