The "Real" America

When John McCain, Sarah Palin, and any number of Republican candidates are on the campaign trail, the like to score easy political points by talking about those "East Coast Elites" and "Big-City Liberals" who are out of touch with "real American values." The other night on The Daily Show, author Sarah Vowell made the excellent point that when Sarah Palin visited ground zero in New York, she reiterated how we would never let this happen again, yet as soon as she leaves New York, she's talking about what a cesspool it is and how it's not the "real" America. "If New York is America enough for al qaeda," Sarah Vowell said, "it should be America enough for [Sarah Palin]."

There is a tale of two America's that only exists in elections. People joke about "fly-over" states, and about the East Coast elites and West Coast liberals. People like Governor Palin and Senator McCain spend their time talking to the people on "Main Street" about how they represent real American values, and demonizing Washington, Hollywood, and the Northeast. What makes the south and midwest the real America, though? When the Pilgrims first came to the United States, they landed in the Northeast. When the American Revolution was sparked, it was in Boston. When the battles were being fought, it was in Concord and Lexington, Trenton and New York. The Founding Fathers were meeting in New York and Philadelphia, and all that existed of the America we know was on the East Coast.

All of our history and the people who founded our nation were East Coast elites, and yet at some point it became politically effective to trash Massachusetts, New York City, and Washington, D.C. They talk about how the people in rural Iowa are "real" Americans, and those of us in cities are all living lives of sin and depravity. Not only is this insulting to people like me, but it's insulting to anyone who understands the history of the United States. For instance, Republicans like to insult those Ivy-League liberals (even though many of them went to the Ivy League schools), but the prototypical Ivy League school, Harvard, was founded by the Puritans who landed in Massachusetts in 1630. They believed deeply in the Bible, but also believed deeply in education and learning from the ancient cultures of Greece, Roman, and others. From these earliest days, through to the present, when people first came to America, they came to the cities. This is where they integrated into American life, where they began to build there fortunes, and from where they then branched out to tame the west. If everyone in America came from somewhere else, then all these first settlers of the west and the south came from the East Coast.

And today, what can be more ridiculous than to claim that Kansas is the real America, and that Massachusetts is not. The most densely populated states are in the Northeast. In a nation that defines itself on the will of the majority, more than half of the people in the United States now live in cities. To say that they are not the "real" America is not merely wrong, but is an insult to America, because that is where most of Americans live. And, I assure you, they are all real. New York has our nation's oldest and most respected newspaper, and Boston has many of our most respected Universities. Washington, D.C. houses our nation's history in it's Museums, and our every branch of our federal government. Major cities from Atlanta to Nashville to Seattle are the sources of our culture and music, and Los Angeles creates the movies and television shows that all Americans watch and love. Yet, we in the city don't claim that the people out in the suburbs or on the farm aren't real Americans. We are all Americans, and it's time for people like Sarah Palin and John McCain to insult the majority of Americans in order to rile the affections of those who live in the sparsely populated states.