By Michael Winship
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 16 April 2008
Having grown up in a small town, I'm always struck at how rarely movies and television shows and other art forms capture the quality of life there. The false notes are thumped as discordantly as the "Moonlight Sonata" on a badly tuned spinet; the citizens portrayed as homicidal mouth breathers, amusing rubes or country sages with an unsullied rustic wisdom that astonishes visiting city slickers.
Some get it right. A weekend attending a conference in Columbus, Ohio, ended Sunday at the small, Victorian boyhood home of one of my literary heroes, James Thurber. In his short stories and reminiscences, it was his "sure grasp of confusion," as a magazine once put it, his understanding of small town, family dynamics and foibles that instantly won my heart, even at an early age.
And though Thurber, like me and so many others, wound up in Manhattan, exploring the anguishes and delights of the big city, he himself wrote, "My books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus."
So, it was with a mixture of bemusement, bewilderment and vexation that I've been watching the furor around Barack Obama's remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser, the ones that have led to accusations of elitism and belittling folks from small towns.
With the critical Pennsylvania primary a week away, this is the Obama sentence that, as Thurber would say, has torn up the peapatch: "It's not surprising then that they [small town people] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
The response to this by the media and the attempts to exploit Obama's words by Senators Clinton and McCain have been mind shattering in their hypocrisy and cynicism. As political operative Bob Shrum wrote in The Huffington Post, "Ironically, Obama's the one raised by a single mother. He's the one who only recently finished paying off his student loans. He doesn't know what it's like to have $100 million. The opponents who are attacking him are the ones who inhabit that financial neighborhood."
First, place Senator Obama's words in greater context. Here is more of what he ACTUALLY said, ending with the sentence in question: "Here's how it is. In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, they feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it.
"... Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Different, huh? Especially, as Salon.com's Joan Walsh pointed out, when you consider what Obama added after the spittle hit the fan. "They're frustrated and for good reason," he said. "Because for the last 25 years they've seen jobs shipped overseas. They've seen their economies collapse. They have lost their jobs. They have lost their pensions. They have lost their healthcare.
"And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we're going to make your community better. We're going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And, of course, they're bitter. Of course they're frustrated. You would be, too. In fact many of you are."
For the full article see: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_041608A.shtml
No comments:
Post a Comment