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Quote of the Day: Provincialism
“I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
— Pauline Kael misquote
You have probably heard this quote, or a variation. It points to a particular form of provincialism, a view from within a bubble that blocks out all the disagreeable peoples’ opinions. The real quote seems to reflect some self-awareness, perhaps with self-satisfaction, about the speaker’s separation from those with whom she disagrees. It significantly predates things like the internet and social media, much blamed for echo chambers and halls of mirrors around our minds. Consider the quote, the context, and a few implications.
The quote: Pauline Kael was a film critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. So, she started the year Nixon first won a presidential election. That should, perhaps, have cued her to the larger society beyond Manhattan. Kael’s infamous comment came after the 1972 election, when Nixon obliterated McGovern in 1972.
Pauline Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
The context: Pauline Kael made this remark during a panel discussion at the Modern Language Association, as reported in the New York Times.
Shunning the single‐track mindedness of prepared text, the stars of the first day were two engaging critics who invited audience participation and spoke thoughts directly from their minds— Pauline Kael, film critic of The New Yorker, and Leslie Fiedler, valedictorian of the arts, whose next book is to be entitled “What Was Literature?”
Kael was professionally aware of popular culture and the increasing depiction of violence on screen. She took this to be popular affirmation of a belief, formed in coverage of the Vietnam War, that America is “brutal.” Kael’s comment about Nixon voters was in this context. She knew one Nixon voter, she made a point of distancing herself “where they are I don’t know,” and she “feels them” when she is sitting in movie theaters, likely watching “trash” movies dominated by on-screen violence. She, and the people with whom she chooses to associate, her circle, are different, have more refined views and tastes.
Some implications: Ross Douthat wrote in 2016 that people like Pauline Kael were displaying a “faux cosmopolitanism.”
Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.
The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”
I illustrate this viewpoint with a famous New Yorker cover from 1976, the American bicentennial year. My mother had long subscribed to The New Yorker for the ballet reviews and other critical content, and we had always enjoyed the pen-and-ink cartoons. These were of such quality that they merited a 656-page coffee table book of their own: The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker. The covers led the way, making all manner of statements, large and small. The first 64 years were captured in Complete Book Of Covers From The New Yorker: 1925-1989.
The view from 9th Avenue cover was published well before the interwebs became a popular thing. It was before even BBS, a year before the basic protocols (TCP/IP) that enabled what became the internet, and almost two decades before HTML. so, this was nothing to do with the ability to jet or Zoom from bubble to bubble around the world. Saul Steinberg, in the spring of our bicentennial, during the post-Vietnam electoral campaign that would end in a Baptist Sunday school teacher, peanut farmer, Georgia governor, and nuclear submarine veteran being elected president of these United States. In this context, Washington DC is merely noted near a border of the map. Los Angeles, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Kansas City get the same treatment. Canada, Mexico, Japan, Russia, and China make the grade as places the smart set are aware of.
Douthat observes where such self-isolation has gone in the decades since that cartoon. His words are even more pointed after 2020.
They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.
They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world.
We tell ourselves that we have a far better understanding of the elite, precisely because we cannot avoid their megaphone, from high to low culture, from Capital Hill to city hall, from Harvard to Head Start. The left’s pervasiveness is undeniable, and yet, how detailed would your map be of the faux cosmopolitan landscape, starting with your life, your family, your community in the foreground? We all have limited time, attention, and processing capability.
The thumbnail sketch may be enough to “satisfice,” a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice coined by Herbert L. Simon in a 1956 article. Yet, with political power projected into every space, supposedly public or private, not even stopping at your property line or front door, do our maps suffice for effective iterative observation, orientation, decision, and action? Or are we satisfied with the pleasure hits off our favorite politician, talking head, or columnist doing the usual star turn and ringing the familiar changes on “the left,” “the Dems,” “the libs?”
Published in Group Writing
The most provincial people I have met from America have been from NYC.
Perhaps our “localness” is the context in which we view and hear the current hullaballoo. That is our experience, it is an indelible part of our viewpoint.
I understand that and understand to a fairly good degree the prejudices and pretexts of a Pauline Kael, largely because it is a voice heard often, as every time a Young Turk says something along the lines of “Europe is laughing at us.” What desperation there is in that plea for faux cosmopolitanism to rule the land and run over the rubes.
And yet, we save them every time. We rescue them from the naivete that permeates the way of thinking that it is better to say things rather than believe them. Their sophistry allows others to pat them on the back while removing their wallets. Dignity exists only as an inward illusion because no respect is earned when one follows the crowd and says only the things they think others want to hear.
So, grand magicians, please continue to entertain. Every trick reveals your methods and lays bare your mind and soul. You cannot accept that what we see there is ugliness, a shallow disposition, and desires that end only in the destruction of things larger than self.
We know you. You haven’t a clue about us.
This is a great post that unfortunately brings back memories of The New Yorker before David Remnick knifed it, beheaded it, and ate its heart out.
With some fava beans and a nice chianti?
I suspect Dr. Lecter would’ve had enough class to leave an icon alone. He loved Florence.
Steinberg was lampooning New Yorkers’ provincial attitudes with that cover. As provincial as many New Yorkers are, the same can be said of most Americans. A similar cartoon could be drawn for Chicagoans, St. Louisans, or Atlantans. For better or worse, lots of folks don’t get out much.
I do not find people in Atlanta as provenvial as NYC citizens
I’m working on it. I’m working on it. (The not getting out much, that is.) If I keep up the good work, I soon won’t know anything at all about what’s going on.
YMMV, as they say. As a riposte, I’ve never seen a magazine cover lampooning the provincial qualities of Atlantans. At least Steinberg had self-awareness.
I get what you’re saying, but I do not think it’s just about the limits of daily life. Many NYers I have known (I lived in Manhattan for a while) are quite open about their inability to comprehend why anyone would live elsewhere.* It’s not that they don’t know; it’s that they don’t even want to know. Also, lots of people visit NYC, but New Yorkers are less likely to visit some random suburb or small town, or let’s say, Arkansas.
* Post-Covid, I’m not sure how much this remains true. I’ll be seeing a friend tomorrow who still lives in NYC and will find out whether it still seems like a better option than the suburbs.
It occurs to me that that is how I like to consider myself. I wonder what percentage of the population is wandering around puffed up by imaginary elitism.
Maybe I don’t want to know.
Yes, I thought both those things, too.
Another frisson, blast from the past, or ghost walking over my grave: Any academics worth their salt that I’ve known in my life (and I’ve known plenty) would find it entirely fitting that the MLA served as the background and context for Kael’s snooty remarks. The MLA has been known for decades among actual, serious, scholars as the home of hacks and poseurs. I have no idea what it looks like today, but would be unsurprised to find out that it’s gone fully woke.
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I had the very good fortune to be an Air Force spouse. I lived in three foreign countries; Japan, Germany, and a small town in Oklahoma. I learned that these people were not the same as me. Their values and aspirations were shaped and constrained by belief systems that weren’t the same as mine.
But you have to actually live in places to realize that you can call yourself a citizen of the world, but most of the world considers you a barbarian in one way or another.
My daughter has been living in Manhattan where she has been completing a residency at the Animal Medical Center. She is getting ready to leave in mid-July. She has loved living in New York despite the pandemic, and she and her husband love New Yorkers. It will be hard for her to say good-bye. :-)
I asked her if she thought the city would come back, and she believes it will. There’s so much to do in the city, and there’s a wonderful assortment of people from everywhere imaginable. It’s as if the whole world comes to you. :-) She is confident that it will return to its former prepandemic self. :-)
Oft times with cause.
DC and LA also suffer from this
DC and LA might be related to being a “company town”
my town, Pittsburgh suffers from this only in the area of Football
“Or are we satisfied with the pleasure hits off our favorite politician, talking head, or columnist doing the usual star turn and ringing the familiar changes on “the left,” “the Dems,” “the libs?””
A great deal of political communication is such that it may be effective at stirring up ‘the base’, but is of absolutely no use…may be actually harmful…in persuading those who are of the opposite view or tending that way.
Doesn’t Tina deserve some of the credit?
Thank you, Bryan, we are.
Reminds me of this exchange from the “Love Stinks” episode of Frasier:
I lived in New York for 31 years, the last six with that 1976 poster on my wall. Even now, closing in on 40 years in Los Angeles, I’m proud of growing up and coming of age with what New York had to offer.
This year neither of my home states seems particularly appealing, thank you very much Democrats. It’s a damned shame. If anyone knows of a low tax, un-woke state with the worldliness of Manhattan and the weather of Manhattan Beach, please inform.
Excellent comment to an excellent post. Here in Appalachia we’ve become accustomed to the provincialism of the Left; “A strange land inhabited by a peculiar people”, as the description went in the early 1900s. The Great Society programs sent scores of government workers here; many of which acted as if they were missionaries going into the Congo.
Accompanying this were the intellectual exercises such as The Kentucky Cycle which perpetuated every negative stereotype that existed concerning the region (naturally, the author of the drama won a Pulitzer Prize for his work).
Now, with the faux intellectualism of the Rabid Left, every Conservative can enjoy the disparagement that comes from our highbrow “betters”.
I used to subscribe, wouldn’t waste the money now. Same for The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Sports Illustrated, which I subscribed to for 40 years before stopping last year.
Daughter worked in finance and lived in NYC for 20 years. Got a new job opportunity and moved to Nashville just before the COVID hit early last year. Loves it and bought her first house.
My wife lived in the city for seven years, including during 9/11, and still misses it. Other cities test you, but New York forces you to be yourself…sort of you, with emphasis. That’s the true spirit of the city, according to her.
You have Tom Wolfe for that.
She likely started the ball rolling but was only editor for about six years before going to work for the fabulous Harvey Weinstein. Remnick has been there since ’98 and has to be the main issue. Still, I haven’t been able to stomach it for long enough–basically since Obama– that it’s possible I’m out of touch.
Is everyone talking about Manhattan? The regular people in the four other boroughs consider that to be a separate planet, unfortunately Manhattan-light has eaten up sections of Brooklyn. The working class Park Slope where I grew up seems to be inhabited by skinny men with no forearms wearing tee shirts and those little round glasses, I’m pretty sure they’d look at a screwdriver the same way they’d look at an octopus. The house my father bought for $4000 in 1951 now has a Zillow estimate of $2.2 million.
@jimkearney, I don’t remember this episode. But I loved Frasier, mostly because it gave me and the wife the “Bad boy/Dirty girl” script to riff off of. How much fun is that?
Brother, give the 305 a shot. Miami is…sublime, once you’ve been here awhile.
I don’t think the problem is that they are provincial.
The problem is that the pretend at cosmopolitan while monopolizing the media that claims to be the voice of America – and it is not.
Absolutely. It’s cosmopolitan provincialism.
I wrote this at City Journal in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election and I still think it holds true: