What am I, chopped liver?

[pecunium]

I keep hearing the McCain campaign, in the voice of Sarah Palin, and her sympathisers and supporters, saying that she has some secret insight to, "real America" by virtue of being from someplace not contaminated by urbanity.

I, it seems (and those like me), somehow don't count as a real american. Never mind the summer I spent digging ditches, and stripping paint and shingling roofs. Nope, manual labor doesn't cut it.

Ignore sixteen years in the National Guard (and a tour in Iraq, and duty overseas in Germany, Korea and Ukraine). Ignore my father the Marine (1964-68 active, and another eight years in the reserves). Forget my grandfather who was in WW1.

Nope, not good enough.

Helping my folks start a small business (still going strong 24 years later). Nope, not good enough.

I, you see, like most americans, live in a city. I, therefore, am somehow not quite the real thing when it comes to being an American.

About a year ago someone at Obidian Wings saw the same thing, and wondered the same sort of thing I'm asking about now,
"When do I get to be one of the "American people?"

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Apparently, albeit indirectly.

I'll skip the Literal game & cut to the chase by answering your real question.

The Era of the Intrepid Pioneer Farmers.

I was born during the '20s (only by about 14 months, but...), and lived for ten years in villages/small towns on the outskirts of what was a "Big City" (Toledo, Ohio) by virtue/measurement of having _two_ Chinese restaurants and three major factories (Willis-Overland, Libby Owens Ford glass, and Electric Autolight). [Okay, there might've been more of both, but that's what I knew about.]

Probably I had or have some (pleasant) illusions about that environment & era, but nothing approaching serious Nostalgia.

That was reserved for the era of (mostly) my paternal-line great-great grandparents (all safely dead by then), who had come from Vermont & Upper New York State and claimed Land Grants in The Northwest Territory (a year or so before that part of it became Michigan, and the inhabitants could share in the annual distribution of the surplus in the Federal Treasury (*sigh*)). Sure, cutting down the forests & creating productive farmland was hard work, but Time has a way of glossing-over that, and the Vision/Illusion I got -- probably from my elders -- was of hard-working, independent, cantankerous, mostly-honest, thoroughly-pragmatic people who owned their land and could manage to eat reasonably well (even if they got damned tired of chicken [which cousin Alma still detests], and of canning food) and pay their taxes even through times of serious economic Depression.

The keyword here, I think, is "pragmatism". Farmers and factory-workers have (or used to have) a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't work, and -- even if not highly-educated -- are generally smart enough to think things through if the facts are presented to them. Not necessarily rapidly, unfortunately -- it took my father something like 20 years to conclude or admit that FDR's policies were a reasonably good solution to the mess the country was in c. 1930. They expect a certain amount of lying from Politicians, but balk at egregious attempts to pull the wool over their eyes. If that still applies, I have some hope for the results of the upcoming election.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Having been, in my time, an intrepid pioneer farm boy I have no illusions about that life or that era. There's a reason why George M. Cohan asked 'How can you keep them down on the farm now that they've seen Paree?'