New Yorkers are also among the nicest and most helpful people in America, quite unlike Chicago, where there is a certain Midwestern reserve and distance. The "arrogance and snobbery" comes with the unspoken (or sometimetimes spoken) assumption that everything in NYC is better than anything anywhere else, and that there is no place else even worth considering as a place to live. See e.g., Cole Porter's I Happen To Like New York ("I gave Hackensack the once over/And took the next train back.") This is actually an attitude I share, btw, and it is one of the heartbreaks of my life thahn even at my inflated salary I cannot afford to live in NYC. Specifically in Manhattan. It's kids that are the killer.
The insurality and provinciality are something else -- for all NYC's internal cosmospolitanism, NYers are remarkably oblivious to anything outside the city. When J and I were getting a marriage license in Queens, we had to give our residence, then Ann Arbor. "Where's that?" the clerk asked. "Michigan." Puzzled look. "West of the Hudson." "Oh, Jersey?" "Well, close enough."
I have a million stories like this. A lot of them involving my late MiL. Her response to Ann Arbor was to sniff, "I suppose it's all right if you can't live in New York." I have told her her reaction to Chicago. ("Not like New York. Boring.")
Or running into some NYers on the corner just chatting, we confessed we were from Ohio (which we were at the time.) "Oh, you have a farm? With cows and everything?" (Sort the obverse of the Minnesota farmers we met while camping who asked what kind of farm we had in Chicago . . . .)
Or Tom Wolfe's crack in Bonfire that one of the characters "went to a law school in Ohio with three names." Like my alma, Ohio State University College of Law. Technically more thamn threee, and now it is OSU MORITZ C of L, but his point is that's not Harvard, Yale, or Columbia, the schools that Count.
. . . .
jks
--- ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org> wrote:
> John Thornton wrote:
> >>>No, snobbish and arrogant. I won't deny that.
> >>
> >>Thinking there's nowhere worth being outside of
> one's city strikes me as an
> >>insular arrogance.
> >
> > I think insular is a pretty good description of
> many NYer's. Obviously not
> > all or even most but more than anywhere else I've
> spent time. NYer's tend
> > to think that no place on earth is a good as NY
> which is just an annoying
> > opinion. When they think they there is no need to
> find out much about the
> > rest of the world...
> >
>
> my own anecdotal experiences are quite the opposite.
> new yorkers are
> more open, tolerant and curious (w.r.t my being from
> a significantly
> different culture) than people i have met in the
> midwest, northeast
> (where i lived for three years) or the south. people
> in the midwest or
> south (and even new england) have been more polite
> (when they are not
> racist ;-)) but i often got the feeling that the
> politeness did not
> extend to the natural sense of being treated an
> equal (which i get in NYC).
>
> perhaps it helps that i agree that no place on earth
> is better than NYC
> ;-) (though there are places as good: london,
> various parts of utah...)
>
> --ravi
>
>
> p.s: i am mostly talking about manhattan when i say
> NYC (only because
> that's where i have spent the most time).
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com