Smug NYC voters sneer at us "rednecks"
(All emphasis ours)
Striking a characteristic New York pose near Lincoln Center yesterday, Beverly Camhe clutched three morning newspapers to her chest while balancing a large latte and talked about how disconsolate she was to realize that not only had her candidate, John Kerry, lost but that she and her city were so out of step with the rest of the country.
"Do you know how I described New York to my European friends?" she said. "New York is an island off the coast of Europe."[The Ponderosa: Madame, speaking as a Western New Yorker -- they can HAVE you.]
Like Ms. Camhe, a film producer, three of every four voters in New York City gave Mr. Kerry their vote, a starkly different choice from the rest of the nation. So they awoke yesterday with something of a woozy existential hangover and had to confront once again how much of a 51st State they are, different in their sensibilities, lifestyles and polyglot texture from most of America. The election seemed to reverse the perspective of the famous Saul Steinberg cartoon, with much of the land mass of America now in the foreground and New York a tiny, distant and irrelevant dot.
Some New Yorkers, like Meredith Hackett, a 25-year-old barmaid in Brooklyn, said they didn't even know any people who had voted for President Bush. (In both Manhattan and the Bronx, Mr. Bush received 16.7 percent of the vote.) Others spoke of a feeling of isolation from their fellow Americans, a sense that perhaps Middle America doesn't care as much about New York and its animating concerns as it seemed to in the weeks immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center. [The Ponderosa: We're taking steps to make sure that doesn't happen again, sweetie.]
"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' "[The Ponderosa: How does this man know where they'll strike next? After all, Usama specifically threatened the Red States last week.]
City residents talked about this chasm between outlooks with characteristic New York bluntness. Dr. Joseph, a bearded, broad-shouldered man with silken gray hair, was sharing coffee and cigarettes with his fellow dog walker, Roberta Kimmel Cohn, at an outdoor table outside the hole-in-the-wall Breadsoul Cafe near Lincoln Center. The site was almost a cliché corner of cosmopolitan Manhattan, with a newsstand next door selling French and Italian newspapers and, a bit farther down, the Lincoln Plaza theater showing foreign movies.
"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness [The Ponderosa: That's us at The Ponderosa -- obtuse and shortsighted. Wotta dick!] of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland." [The Ponderosa: This man is a walking, talking caricature!]
"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.
His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say." [The Ponderosa: Dunno about that -- you'd be hard pressed to find a good sized Red County where Mr. Kerry only got 17% of the vote. Seems diversity of opinion is more respected amongst us rednecks -- who are not fooled by what Dan, Peter and the NY Times have to say!]"They're very 1950's[The Ponderosa: That horrific era where men married women and only THEN had children.]," she said of Midwesterners.[The Ponderosa: We gots news for ya, lady -- no need to bash the Midwest -- travel a mere 5 hours west on the Thruway and you'll get a good sense of how out of the mainstream you are. ]. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."[The Ponderosa: OK, a little farther west than Utica.]
Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.
"People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities," he said.[The Ponderosa: In entertainment and finance perhaps.]
Like those in the rest of the country, New Yorkers stayed up late watching the results, and some went to bed with a glimmer of hope that Mr. Kerry might yet find victory in some fortuitous combination of battleground states. But they awoke to reality. Some politically conscious children were disheartened - or sleepy - enough to ask parents if they could stay home.
But even grownups were unnerved.
"To paraphrase our current president, I'm in shock and awe," said Keithe Sales, a 58-year-old former publishing administrator walking a dog near Central Park. He said he and friends shared a feeling of "disempowerment" as a result of the country's choice of President Bush. "There is a feeling of 'What do I have to do to get this man out of office?''' [The Ponderosa: Wait for his term to end then nominate another supercillious panjandrum.]
In downtown Brooklyn, J. J. Murphy, 34, a teacher, said that Mr. Kerry's loss underscored the geographic divide between the Northeast and the rest of the country. He harked back to Reconstruction to help explain his point. "One thing Clinton and Gore had going for them was they were from the South," he said. "There's a lot of resentment toward the Northeast carpetbagger stereotype, and Kerry fit right in to that."[The Ponderosa: No, he fit into the pompous, Frenchman stereotype.]
Mr. Murphy said he understood why Mr. Bush appealed to Southerners in a way that he did not appeal to New Yorkers. "Even though Bush isn't one of them - he's a son of privilege - he comes off as just a good old boy," Mr. Murphy said. [The Ponderosa: Trust us, he's one of us -- clears brush on his ranch, mangles the occasional sentence and can actually name players on his favorite baseball team.]
...
-more-
My, aren't some people full of themselves. As you can see by the county-by-county map, it is the folks in the Blue Counties that are truly out of touch. Oh, we know, they dominate the Mainstream Media, Hollywood and Academia, and deftly use these monopolies to drum into your head how "stupid" you are to love God, Country and NASCAR. This is all supposed to cow you into silence. Yet, somehow, when surveyed, twice as many people describe themselves as "conservative" as opposed to "liberal". Surprising? Not after looking at the map.
posted by Mr. Buzzcut at 2:58 PM
<< Home