Small Town Hicks and Simpletons, Conventional Wisdom, and Quotes

This post is more about what urbanites know - or think they know - about those simple, ignorant, dull but colorful people who live in small towns.

What got me started was this quote:

"If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; If you would know, and not be known, live in a city."
Charles Caleb Colton (1780 - 1832)
(The Quotations Page)

Around 1700, he may have been right.

Who Was Charles Caleb Colton?

After a little nosing around, I found this micro-biography:

"COLTON, Charles Caleb Colton (c 1780-1832) clergyman, sportsman, gambler, suicide, and author of the aphoristic Lacon (2 vol. 1820-1822)"
(Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Edinburgh, W.R.Chambers, 1914)
("Introducing Reverend Charles Caleb Colton," The Charles Caleb Colton Website)

("Lacon" - "Lacon: or, Many things in few words: address--to those who think," by Charles Caleb Colton - is available online on Google Books.)

Vegetating in a Village - and Loving It

I've lived in a few cities, and in a town so small that the most prominent citizen was a turtle made out of truck wheels. That doesn't make me an expert in urban and rural cultures, not a certified one anyway, but I couldn't help noticing a few things along the way.

For example, small towns and cities are both populated by people. Some are alert members of vibrant societies. Some aren't. And a few are jerks. I haven't noticed any great difference in the ratios between, say, San Francisco and Dunseith, North Dakota.

I've lived in a small town, Sauk Centre, for the last 23 years. It'll be 24 years around the end of this month. This isn't the idyllic land of Huck Finn clones and wooden apple barrels that one stereotype of Small Town America would predict. It isn't the cesspool of inbred sociopaths and religious nuts of another stereotype. And it certainly isn't the abode of comic simpletons you see in "Green Acres" reruns.

Life in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, isn't perfect: but it'll do. Like the title of one section of my Brendans's Island website says: "I Love It Here!"

As for vegetating in a village; and the tranquil, slow pace of small town life: I think that each of us determines how much we use our brains; and how much we try to do. If anything, I'm busier here in Sauk Centre, than I was when I lived in San Francisco.

What 'Everybody Knows' May Not Be So

Sometimes conventional wisdom is right. Like 'if you drop a hammer on your foot, it'll probably hurt.' Sometimes, not so much.

C. C. Colton's assumption about vegetating in a village - and the anonymity of urban life - has some basis in fact. In a city, it's virtually impossible to know everyone you see downtown by sight. There's just too many people for that. On the other hand, my experience was that I got to know people in places I was at frequently about as well as I know people here in Sauk Centre.

But I'm getting off-topic.

Reverend Colton's observation about people who live in villages may have been somewhat accurate. In England. Around 1800.

Two centuries later, I doubt that there are any Brigadoons in the British Isles. Here in America, there are spots where cell phones won't work and you need a satellite dish to get television programming - but living 'off the grid' is an option, not a necessity.

I was going to write more about stereotypes and the reality of urban and rural living, here in America, but it'll be easier to copy something I did in April, 2008:

This may not happen again for a long time. I agree with part of an article in the Huffington Post:

Californians as a group "are a people in a state already surfeited with a smug sense of superiority and, as an ironic consequence, a parochialism and insularity at odds with the innovation, prosperity and openness for which California is rightly known."
("Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter"
Huffington Post (April 11, 2008))

Urban Sophisticates / Small Town Hicks: Reality Check

For decades, I've seen indications that the stereotype behind "Green Acres" and similar comedies is not merely false: it's inverted. (Green Acres fans: please don't take offense. I thought the show was funny, and nobody came off as particularly sharp.)

Stay with me, please: I'm not trying to create another 'victim' group.

The stereotype is:

• Knowledgeable, up-to-date, broad-minded city folk
• Ignorant, decades out of touch with current events, dangerously narrow-minded country folk

There may have been a time when this reflected reality. In the days before the Internet, television, radio, telegraph, and the printing press, a person's - or a community's - knowledge of the world depended largely on personal, face-to-face, contact.

In a time when people seldom traveled more than a few miles from the place they were born, those who lived in cities had an enormous advantage over those in the country.

People who lived in cities had opportunities to meet and talk with many more people than people who lived in the country. And, city dwellers were more likely to meet people from other cities, or even other countries.

Where the country bumpkin might know the king's name, the city sophisticate might know what the king had for breakfast that morning, and be comparing several versions of what the king and the ambassador from abroad were discussing.

That was then.

Old Assumptions Meet the Information Age

I just got through listening to, and watching, a message that the Pope read, for the American people, in anticipation of his visit next week. I plan to watch part of it, although I'll be over a thousand miles away, in Minnesota.

That message is available to people living in downtown Manhattan; Winnemucca, Nevada; and Sauk Centre, Minnesota.

A person doesn't have to live in the heart of a great city to be informed. Not now. For example, I live in a small town in central Minnesota, with a population of about 4,000.

The stereotypical small town hick might, possibly, know who was president, but wouldn't be informed about affairs outside his little twarf. This resident of a small town, in a few minutes, pulled together this list of headlines:

• "Sludge Tested As Lead-Poisoning Fix"
  ABC (April 13, 2008)
• " Police: Spears has minor accident in Mercedes"
  CNN (April 13, 2008)
• "American Says Its Flights Are Getting Back to Normal"
  The New York Times (April 13, 2008)
• "South Korea Confirms Fourth Outbreak of Bird Flu Virus"
  eFluxMedia (April 13, 2008)

And, glanced through the stories.

Living outside a major metropolitan area no longer means being isolated from national and world events.

In fact, I suspect that people in rural areas are more knowledgeable of urban conditions, than the reverse.

It's not that rural people are smarter, or more interested.

What's going on in urban areas permeates the media. It's hard not to know something about New York City, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities.

• Real-life minutia, from the latest grass fire outside Los Angeles, to traffic problems in New York City, dominate the news. It takes a major tornado outbreak to get something that detailed about life in the heartland on national television.
• Fictionalized accounts of life in cities dominate entertainment media. Having lived both in urban and rural America, I know from personal experience that "Law and Order," for example, does a better job of portraying urban life, than "Green Acres" does for rural living.

Wake Up, Everyone! It's a New World!

I don't expect that 'sophisticated' people in California, and elsewhere, will give up that "smug sense of superiority and ... parochialism and insularity" any time soon. It's too comfortable a garment to cast off easily.

But, people who really believe that the natives of rural Pennsylvania are armed and dangerous xenophobic religious chauvinists are living in a world of yesterday: one that never really quite existed.

It's time for the rest of us to get on with the business of living in the Information Age.
("The Effect of Information Technology and Media Preoocupation with Urban Events on the Relative Sophistication of Urban and Rural Populations," Another War-on-Terror Blog (April 13, 2008))

I plan to be back Wednesday, with another regular post for the Sauk Centre Journal.

Related posts:

• "Small Town America: Bucolic Scenes, Bison, and Cable Television"
  (November 15, 2009)
• "Thucydides, Al Tingley, Myth and Me"
  (September 2, 2009)

Thucydides, Al Tingley, Myth and Me

I live in a small town in America, but I wasn't born in one.

I grew up in a college town with a population of a hundred thousand and climbing when I left. I've lived in a number of places, from Dunseith, North Dakota, to San Francisco: and found something attractive about all of them.

I've lived here in Sauk Centre, a town with about 4,000 people, since early 1986. I like it here, too.

Town Historian? Well, Sort of

Not too long ago, someone called me the town historian.

That wasn't quite accurate, the way the word is used these days. A historian is generally thought of as someone who looks for documents about dead people and past events; reads them carefully; then writes a report on who they were, what happened, and why.

That's not what I do. I've been a historian of sorts, but that's another story.

On the other hand, I'm a historian now, in the way that Al Tingley and Thucydides are: Someone who actually experienced the events that he or she is describing, while making an effort to be sure of the facts; but having a point of view.

'Things that really happened' is history. Or, "the aggregate of past events", as Princeton's WordNet puts it.

Quite a few people think that myth is 'things that didn't really happen.' They're right - sort of.

Mayberry RFD, Peyton Place, and Myth

Say "Small Town America," and people who don't live in one - and some who do - are likely to recall Mayberry RFD; Lake Wobegon; Harper Valley and their PTA; or Peyton Place.

There's only one problem with those examples: none of them is real. Like Brigadoon, they're settings for a story. Or, in the case of Harper Valley, a song that told a story.

They are, arguably, mythical Small Town America: the contemporary equivalent of the 'kingdom far away' where Cinderella and Jack the Giant-Killer lived.

Mythical settings are fine for story-telling. An unnamed petty kingdom somewhere 'out there' lets a storyteller enhance elements of reality, making the story more entertaining and memorable. And, highlight selected ideas and beliefs.

Note: "mythical" doesn't necessarily mean "not real." One definition of a myth is "a traditional story accepted as history; serves to explain the world view of a people" (Princeton's WordNet)

The first part of that definition is what's behind the widely-accepted meaning of 'myth' as something that's 'not real.' The second part, myth as a story "to explain the world view of a people" is what I have in mind, when I call Mayberry RFD and Harper Valley 'mythical' places.

Ah, the Simple Bliss and Tranquility of Small Town America

Or maybe it's the ignorance and squalor of of small towns, those havens of hypocritical bigots. Depends on who's telling the story.

I don't think that people in small towns are particularly gifted when it comes to ruining their lives, and the lives of others. No more so than people who live in places like San Francisco or Chicago.

But then, I don't see big cities as dens of iniquity, set to trap youths with vain promises of fame and pleasure.

On the other hand, I've been around enough to know that big cities offer opportunities for self-destruction that aren't quite so available in small towns. Still, we're not all that isolated from what's now and wow.

Small Town America's No Brigadoon

For example, police found a meth lab a few blocks from my home in 2003.

December of 2005 was a bit more eventful than most. The month started out with about $20,000 of shot-up windows - including one of ours - and drug-related arrest across the street.

That arrest across the street was the end of an incident that started with a domestic assault and gunshot in a town down the road. What I called Version 3.0 of the story came out in local papers in early January. A 'resolution' of sorts for the incident where kids decided to spend time shooting at windows came in September of 2006.

Small Town America, Twice a Week

At least, that's the idea. The Sauk Centre Journal has a new entry late every Wednesday and Sunday - circumstances allowing.

Those biweekly posts will be copies of what appears on the Sauk Centre Journal, with the occasional additional comment.

Now, it's high time I start working on today's entry.

Related post:

• "Sauk Centre Journal: The Blog"
  (September 2, 2009)