Commentary - Usha Nellore : Small-town folks: Do they have small minds?

Like most politicians, Obama plays to his audience. He divines what it wants to hear, and he shrewdly dishes it bromides to soothe anxieties and the generalizations with which it is most likely to agree. He figured rich donors in San Francisco probably look down their noses on small-town America. And so with clever deliberation, he massaged their egos by deploring the small-minded ethos of small-town folks — in his parlance, gun-toting, insular xenophobes.  

Here’s where Obama made his mistake: He assumed every San Franciscan in that closed room must scorn small-town mentality. Unfortunately for him, among those donors there must have been at least a handful of small-town transplants. After all, most cities are a conglomerate of native urbanites and small-town escapees. And small-town escapees don’t want native New Yorkers or Chicagoans criticizing their mothers, fathers and grandparents living in the dim lights back home.   

Besides, small towns are changing across America. I live in one, and I have seen it urbanize rapidly over the past 20 years. Immigrants of every stripe exist in small-town America. Numerous languages are spoken in small-town homes. Farms are being obliterated, and in what was once rural America we now face intense development, untrammeled crime, gangs, and police and fire forces depleted by the magnitude of problems they confront. As small towns expand and explode with a variety of voices, entrenched small-town people, too, are swept away by this tide, their attitudes tested and challenged daily; their international consciousness raised; their tolerance heightened and their experiences widened by goods and products not previously available.

Small-town supermarkets carry raspberries from Mexico and blueberries from Chile, and many among the bitter blue-collar workers Obama speaks of, the once “meat and potato, food pyramid be damned and yogurt is sissy food folks,” shop for curry powder because they read it prevents Alzheimer’s disease, for soy milk to take the edge off their hot flashes and for yogurt to bolster their osteoporotic bones. They may be angry about illegal immigrants, but they love tacos, tamales and Mexican restaurants. Increasingly, they are learning to live with the choices they have, agonizing less about their doctors from India or China, their children’s teachers from the Philippines or their roofers from Guatemala, jobs well done being their bigger focus than prejudices long held.       

For writers and artists, small towns are wonderful places to roost and to soak up the comings and the goings. Look where William Faulkner came from, or Mark Twain or many of our presidents and senators, or our dashing celebrities. Open their closets, and you will see small towns sitting there smug in the satisfaction that without the small towns to supply the brains and the talent, big cities would wilt and die under the glare of their own neon lights. True, there are hunters, Bible thumpers and dogmatic clingers to old traditions in small towns, but no more than the number of the same types of people in the cities. If small towns are so terrible the city millionaires will not tote their bags to their village villa hideouts.             

In case Obama thinks that small towns are bereft of the intellectual heft of large cities he needs to look no further than Princeton University, an intellectual powerhouse in what do you know — a small town!  With that said, I will leave Obama alone to devise in the “small town” of his mind a way out of the big mess in which he has landed himself. It is such fun to watch the machinations that keep this presidential race lurching from one melodrama to another.

Usha Nellore is a writer living in Bel Air. She can be reached at unellu@gmail.com.