Vignettes from scattered locales shed light on our polity.
Location Matters!
Vignettes from scattered locales shed light on our polity.
By Conor Friedersdorf,  November 19, 2008
On a September morning several years ago, I knocked at the door of a new tract home in Rancho Cucamonga, California, having arranged to interview its owners. They were recent transplants from Illinois who bought their house, sight unseen, on a broker’s advice.“Care for some coffee?” the wife asked once I’d come inside.
The husband poured himself a cup too.
“Let’s talk out in the backyard,” he said. “Or do you think it’s too windy?”  
In fact, it was as beautiful a morning as I’ve seen. The previous evening, gusty desert winds swept away the smog that choked San Bernardino County for weeks on end. Thus we headed outside onto a small patio, where the husband, stopping short just past the threshold, stared agape at the mountains.
“Honey, look at that,” he said.
“My God,” she replied. “It’s beautiful.”
As it turned out, husband and wife were unaware that their home boasted a mountain view—in fact, they never knew that an 8,599 foot peak rose just several miles from their back door, for prior to that morning the hazy Southern California air obscured the horizon.
Strange as it may seem to move to the foothills without knowing it, I cannot fault the couple for their myopia. Transplanted to an unfamiliar region, I’d doubtless be ignorant of something that looms as large for locals, or so I expect after living in three regions and visiting several others.
Every election year we’re reminded that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible.” It’s true enough that the principles of the founders unite us, as does the national defense, the Olympic games and network television. There is, however, a limit to our unity, one wrapped up in a lot of disparate concepts, including controversial ones like federalism and multiculturalism, but also uncontroversial ones: the pride of Texans, the Midwesterner who wants his child to attend nearby college, the inevitable return of most Californians to the Golden State, the Alaskan or Hawaiian vividly aware of her locale’s singularity.
I’ve always gotten along well enough with my fellow Americans, or at least the ones I’ve met. I haven’t stumbled upon or sought out snake-handling churches, NASCAR hotbeds, or hippie farms where everyone prances around naked, but I trust I’d like most of their denizens too—not that I’d want to live in their subcultures, though they’re welcome to do so.
Perhaps my attitude is uncontroversial—most Americans are, upon reflection, live and let live. But I worry that too often, the over-culture we share blinds us to the importance of local circumstances, the significance of regional differences and the need to accommodate them.
Is this all too vague?
So that I might be clearer, I offer a few vignettes that converge around what I’m trying to describe—a polity whose diversity ought to inform how its people interact.
It is enough to begin by saying that location matters.
2.
The city of my birth, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the place I grew up, greater Los Angeles, California, are each known, among other things, for their delicious Mexican food. My maternal grandparents are from Louisiana. My mother is part French Cajun, part something else European.
Nevertheless, the recipes she’s passed on to me include exceptional homemade guacamole, Prime Rib enchiladas made from Christmas Day leftovers, a particularly tasty taco salad that tops every variety I’ve sampled, and other Mexican dishes so much a part of my childhood that when my father’s Indiana relatives visited my parents for the first time, they assumed, based upon my mom’s cooking, that she must be partly Hispanic.
Imagine my surprise, at age 14, when on a road trip with my grandparents I sampled Albuquerque Mexican food. Served alongside the fare I’d long known were pillows of flatbread called sopapillas.  The waitress instructed me to bite off a corner, pour in honey and enjoy. At the time, and perhaps even today, one couldn’t find sopapillas in California, at least in any of the dozens of Mexican restaurants I have frequented.
3.
Though California is a place more cosmopolitan than most, a magnet for Americans from all over the nation and immigrants the world over, it is comical to look back on my own narrow perspective on the world after growing up there.
The anecdote that makes me look most foolish concerns the Golden State’s famously sunny climate.
Though I never knew a white Christmas, my elementary school classes always decorated the classroom walls with snowflakes made by making scissors cuts in folded up pieces of paper, then unfolding them to reveal patterns meant to show that no two snowflakes are alike.
As it happens, I never stood in falling snow until age 22, when I spent a Spring Break driving with my friend Mikey Gardener from Los Angeles to Seattle (mostly to visit a young woman at the University of Washington I’d developed a crush on while studying abroad). We arrived on a rare snowy day in that city, and I asked Mikey to pull over the car.
“You’ve never been in falling snow?” he said incredulously.
“Nope,” I said. “Do you think there will be snowflakes?”
 
“Huh?”
 
“It would be cool to see snowflakes.”
“Wait a minute!” he said, already starting to laugh. “How big do you think snowflakes are?”
I’d already figured my mistake.
“Oh man,” I said, feeling sheepish. “I always imagined that there was snowy weather, but then there was this separate thing called snowflakes that were like what you made in grade school. As if it was the difference between rain and hail.”
“Nope,” Mikey said. “These are snowflakes.”
Even after this experience I persisted in thinking of scarves as merely decorative accessories for several years. I’ll never forget my surprised delight, on a December day in Paris, when I purchased a scarf at a stand on the street, wrapped it about my neck, and felt warmed.
4.
The farthest I’ve yet ventured below the Mason Dixon line is the Commonwealth of Virginia, where I spent a long weekend this autumn exploring as widely as time allowed.
A roadside gun shop and firing range suggested itself as my first stop. Though a lifelong city-dweller, the inventory of rifles, shotguns and knives didn’t faze me, nor did the 2nd Amendment bumper stickers. But none of the time I’ve spent among hunters and frontier types in the foothills of Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains prepared me for the souvenir shop across the parking lot, where alongside “Virginia is for Lovers” mugs and the deer print t-shirts found in any Bass Pro Shop were every manner of merchandise celebrating the Old Confederacy, bearing its battle flag and denigrating union soldiers.
As the weekend wore on, I realized how ignorant I was about the extent to which some Virginians obsess about the Civil War. Children’s bibs and teddy bears that bore the Stars and Bars grated the most, never mind the “it’s about heritage” canard. Menu items in diners were named for Civil War battles. A museum was erected to celebrate the doomed battlefield efforts of young military cadets who fought for the Confederacy.
Arriving late in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and intent on staying within walking distance of the old downtown, I found myself checking into the Stonewall Jackson Inn, where I stayed in the Robert E. Lee room. The item that most surprised me was a shot glass that contained a small figurine of a Union soldier at the bottom—the idea seemed to be that every pour would re-enact his ritual drowning. I do not pretend to understand the relationship between Virginia culture and the Civil War, let alone to interpret what it says about the commonwealth, though I confess to finding nostalgia for the Old South deeply weird. It is likely, in fact, that in relating my observations I’ve revealed myself to be naïve, or hopelessly confused, or perhaps even unfairly antagonistic toward many Virginia residents.
5.
Even parts of Virginia that felt more like other places I’d visited—the lovely college town of Charlottesville, for example—had quirks I’d never have expected. Is there anyplace on earth where young men wear seersucker trousers in such large numbers?
6.
Shortly after that couple in Rancho Cucamonga noticed the nearby mountain range, the whole of it seemed to catch fire. Flames glowed molten orange behind its ridges and peaks one October night, coiling unseen until the wee hours when the desert winds ceased their swirling and began to gust. The arid, tangled brush covering the foothills ignited everywhere at once, menacing thousands of hastily evacuated homes. I embedded with fire crews on its front lines as they attempted to protect living rooms and family portraits.
Back at the newsroom, a few miles away, ash fell like snowflakes onto the parking lot. Reporters pounded out copy, lungs burning from inhaled smoke. The electricity went out.
It was chaos on a local scale.
The people who best kept their heads were members of the Alta Loma Riding Club, a local equestrian group. Many of its longtime riders remembered the last fire that swept through the area a generation before. They’d drilled regularly in the intervening years so that when disaster struck again, horse trailers would be rushed to the acre-plus lots on the edge of town, evacuating all animals safely and without incident.
Sometime later, as Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, I watched the botched evacuation effort and the subsequent chaos in horror. How could one community fail so spectacularly to protect its humans, even as I’d witnessed another prepared so thoroughly than even their horses were saved?
Were the hurricane in Rancho Cucamonga, I am confident far fewer lives would’ve been lost. I’ve got some inkling about why, though I can’t be sure that my analysis is sound.
7.
The thunderstorms in the mid-Atlantic region are madness.
In a sensible climate, you can poke your head out the window in the morning, assess the weather, and dress appropriately. The nation’s capital does not enjoy a sensible climate. You'll wake up on a sunny summer morning, a cloudless, azure sky outside your window. As a way of saving on electric bills you shut off the air-conditioning, flicking on the ceiling fan and throwing open the windows so that the apartment isn't intolerable upon your return.
Outside you wonder whether you should've slathered on some sunscreen… even as a man passes you at a street corner carrying an umbrella. How odd, you think. Then you spot a woman similarly accessorized. Gazing up at the sky you see blue stretching toward every corner. Paranoid people all around, you think. Forty-five minutes later, having walked toward the national mall for some sightseeing, the sky suddenly clouds over and torrents of raindrops fall.
More bizarre is that Midwesterners fear little old earthquakes, the mere shaking of the ground, some saying they could never live in California for that reason, even as they are perfectly accustom to gargantuan funnel clouds forming in the sky, sometimes without warning, ravaging trailer parks, sending uprooted trees careening into houses like missiles,  and lifting whole buildings off their foundation.
It’s terrifying.
8.
In hindsight, I think it’s experiences from my youth in California, and from traveling abroad, that rendered me so unprepared for Virginia’s peculiar relationship with the Civil War. As a kid in Orange County, I knew a lot of Japanese Americans, and school history courses always taught about the internment during World War II, an event that always seemed like ancient history, though it happened in the lifetime of my grandparents.
Later, when I got to travel around Germany, where my maternal grandfather served during the Berlin airlift, I kept looking at elderly men and women, and marveling that they were alive during the Nazi era. What did they do during the Holocaust? I couldn’t help but wonder.
As I reflected on WWII, it seemed more and more remarkable that a nation my country warred against in the lifetime of my grandparents now welcomed me as a tourist, that I could walk across the old line separating East and West Germany without even realizing it, and that the whole of Germany I saw, whether in Munich or Berlin, seemed so utterly disconnected from its Communist past—never mind its Nazi past—that I could hardly believe it was the same country. Perhaps even more spectacular was the transformation of Prague in little more than a decade, or Krakow as a burgeoning destination for Western backpackers. How is it that so many Europeans in their 20s and 30s live relatively disconnected from history so recent, whereas some Virginians seem to cling so much more tightly to symbols of a conflict fought in the 1860s?
9.
CNN is headquartered in Atlanta.
On a solitary visit to the Atlanta airport, on a two-hour layover, I heard more Georgia accents that I’ve ever heard on CNN. In fact, the only Southern accent I’ve ever heard on CNN belongs to James Carville.
The radio show This American Life, produced at a public radio station in Chicago, features more regional accents incidentally in its once a week programs than all the networks and major cable news stations combined. The result is an ear-opening look at how diverse our country really is.
Were a foreigner to rely only on American newspapers to learn our language, he or she would be completely ignorant of the fact that the word “like” is used more often as an idiom in conversation than as a verb.
10.
In New York City, expectations about the farthest distance it is reasonable to walk, the smallest kitchen it is reasonable to inhabit, and the circumstances under which it is reasonable to honk a horn are singular.
11.
Another danger in California’s foothill communities: attacks by mountain lions. Occasionally a hiker is mauled, or else a mountain biker, as on the 2004 occasion I am remembering, when the victim knelt beside his bike to fix a flat tire and found himself eaten alive.
Shortly afterward, the Los Angeles Times printed an op-ed, titled “Walk Softly and Carry a Big Gun.” An excerpt:
Please bear with me. I am an Alaskan, and Alaskans, for better or worse, are given to looking down on the rest of the nation. We mean no offense; it is just in our nature, and because of our place on this Earth, which leads us to be confused from time to time when we visit the Lower 48.
I am puzzled now by the strange way people here are dealing with mountain lions – which is to say, letting them kill you....
I don’t know much about big cats. We don’t have them in Alaska, and the few I have encountered southward were pretty spooky. They are elegant creatures, and I do respect them. I do not go where they are without the means to protect myself. And I keep my eyes peeled. It is in my genes not to be eaten by bears, large cats or anything else.
Why would anyone go into mountain lion country without the means to protect themselves from attack? I notice the police are armed. The wardens and rangers are armed. Indeed, anyone with any clue where they are would be armed.
I’ve since been on numerous mountain bike rides and hikes in California. I’ve never once seen anyone carrying a gun, or thought of carrying one myself. Intellectually I am in total agreement with the Alaskan, but I am also pretty confident that I’ll never take his advice. I’d be more uncomfortable carrying the gun than risking its absence.
* * *
So it goes for many Americans when it comes to matters of local custom or upbringing or regional quirk: our proclivities are indulged at certain costs, sometimes rationally calculated and other times not – which is not to say that every iteration of American life is equally virtuous or wise, but rather that going our own way is a surer path to happiness than being forced to go another.
My reaction to the foregoing is a renewed appreciation for federalism. Let the federal government safeguard constitutional rights, defend the homeland, and carry out other enumerated duties. Leave matters that remain to local actors.
Of course, that’s a contentious proposition in America. Thank goodness the anti-federalists of the Civil Rights era won, though I regret the slippery slopes they greased.
If nothing else, however, my incomplete survey of American diversity refutes those paranoid about the intentions of all federalists. Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley fought the wrong battle – and later apologized for so doing – but acknowledging as much doesn’t make less real our regional differences, or less attractive the prospect of letting states handle most matters unconnected to civil rights.
Should any other matter be federalized? Environmentalists have the strongest case, and I’m inclined to go along.
But those who categorically object to federalism must somehow contend with America’s size, varying proclivities, distinct needs, and regionalism, lest the differences in our polity turn citizens who’d otherwise co-exist amicably into antagonists.
Why stoke an all-encompassing subculture war that no one can win?
Copyright 2008  www.Culture11.com
