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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
To the degree that they’re under-representing segments of our country, they’re leaving money on the table. Lots of money.
I worked around these folks for years. Some had a keen sense of the audience, especially on the TV side, especially in the research and scheduling departments. “Nobody knows anything” is a screenwriter’s trope to sustain the myth that analytic thinking does not apply to the creative process. In TV, especially back in the days when overnight ratings came in from audiences divided into sizeable segments, you could easily tell what was going on. When a program or network broke through to a huge audience, it was like a dam bursting, a huge message being sent back to the programmers. But would they listen the the voice of the audience? Three different kinds of examples:
A phrase worth stealing.
This guy seems determined to prove your point.
https://nypost.com/2021/06/25/nyc-journalist-mocked-for-piece-about-trip-to-midwest/
“The Adventures of Bad Boy and Dirty Girl,” (written by the great Joe Keenan, who also wrote The Ski Lodge, Moondance, The Doctor is Out, Agents in America Pt. 3 etc.) is one of our favorite Frasiers, too. Still think Frasier should have ultimately gone back to Mercedes Ruehl’s Kate Costas instead of the Laura Linney character. I’ll assume by now he has.
Yes, I’d just checked Miami after real estate agent Liz Hogan found time to praise Gov. DeSantis in a segment on Varney. Ms. Hogan’s properties are absurdly out of our range, as are the blue areas on this map: https://bestneighborhood.org/best-neighborhoods-miami-fl/. Oddly, the map I find most useful in scouting areas for my personal New Age in Old Age comfort is this one: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores. We’ve got 3 WFMs within 3 miles of our present location in L.A. That will be a high standard for any neighborhood to match.
Thanks for pointing back to this important article: https://www.city-journal.org/html/trump-and-forgotten-man-14847.html
Salena Zito seems one of a handful of real reporters who gave honest voice to the rest of America, as Robert Duvall did in Tender Mercies and The Apostle. In Duvall’s case, he has made clear in interviews that he does not believe , but honestly tells stories.