>> 'slightly more than one-half of the nation's population lived in jurisdictions --- cities,
>> towns, boroughs, villages and townships --- with fewer than 25,000 people or
>> in rural areas.'
> Half the U.S. population lives in suburbs, and another quarter in cities.
> Only a quarter lives in rural areas. A quarter of the U.S. population lives
> in the ten largest metro areas, and over 40% in the top 25. The <25,000
> jurisdictions your source speaks of are more often than not part of larger
> metropolitan agglomerations. The notion that small town America is somehow
> real and the rest of us are fake is purely phantasmic.
I think Doug is right on this--and am sure he's exhausted by endlessly needing to point this out--but I also see something in James' comment--even though he reifies what is basically a false dichotomy.
I'm reminded, for instance, of Mike Davis' discussion of "Edge Cities" in /Ecology of Fear/ especially the section of chapter 7 titled "Ozzie and Harriet in Hell" where he talks about inter-suburban competition for tax revenues and the general decline of suburbs around the country (i.e. some of those <25K communities James assumes he can paint with a single brush) and their replacement with what Davis calls "Edge Cities." Here's some key quotes, which can be found in an adapted version of the chapter, here, http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/affiliated_publications/hdm/back_issues/1davis.html
<OPEN QUOTES> "older suburbs' losses are usually someone else's gain. Just as the inner-ring suburbs once stole jobs and tax revenues from central cities, so now their pockets are being picked by the new urban centers –– further out on the spiral arms of the metropolitan galaxy –– that Joel Garreau named "edge cities." It has been estimated, for example, that the inner-ring suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul lost 40% of their jobs during the 1980s to the so-called Fertile Crescent of edge cities on the metro-region's southwest flank." [....] "The edge cities, moreover, have rapidly translated their rising economic power into decisive electoral clout. Consider the astonishingly homogeneous composition of the current Republican leadership in the House [c. 1996-8]. Speaker Gingrich and his top dozen lieutenants (Archer, Armey, Crane, Hyde, Kasich, etc.) represent, without a single exception, the affluent, self-contained outer suburbs –– Route 290 (Houston), Las Colinas (Dallas), Schaumburg (Chicago), DuPage (Chicago), suburban Columbus, etc.–– that have been the big winners in the intrametropolitan distributional struggles of the last generation. Gingrich's Revolution, in a profound sense, has been the Edge City Revolution. This one-sided competition between old and new suburbs has exploded latent class divisions in the historic commuter belts." [. . . .] descent in Ozzie-and-Harriet Land than in East L.A.
But their experiences too often repeat the heartbreak and disillusionment of the original migrations to the central cities. What seemed from afar a promised land is, at closer sight, a low-rise version of the old ghetto or barrio. Like a maddening mirage, jobs and good schools are still a horizon away, in the new edge cities. The "good ole boy" regimes that hold power in the interregnum between white flight and the slow accession of new Black or Latino electoral majorities usually loot every last cent in the town treasury before making their ungraceful exits. As a result, minorities typically inherit municipal scorched earth — crushing redevelopment debts, demoralized workforces, neglected schools, ghostlike business districts, etc. — as their principal legacy from the ancient regime.
In the meantime, the stranded and forgotten white populations of these transitional communities are too easily tempted to confuse structural decay with the sudden presence of neighbors of color. The vampirish role of the edge cities in sucking resources from older, more central regions of the metropolis is less immediately visible than the desperate needs of growing populations dependent upon the dole. Political discourse, moreover, constantly valorizes resentment against the poor and people of color, while remaining discreetly silent about the real structure of urban inequality. In the absence of any serious vision of reform, one of the most worrisome prospects is that new-wave racism — even some viral mutation of fascism — may yet grow legs of steel in the ruins of the suburban dream. <END QUOTES>
In other words, even if those suburbs are near cities, the cultural outlook could be surprisingly reactionary--whether because it is informed by the predatory framework of a New Right version of family values in Edge Cities sucking the tax base from smaller more established suburbs or because it is informed by a reactionary flailing to recover the elysian fields of the Ozzie and Harriet hyperreal of the 1950s. In other words, making it just about an urban-rural split is to totally misconstrue the economic and political geography of the USA--and making it about some "Liberal urban elitists" not getting the attraction of "small town values" a la
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjSha0CqPfc <<<clip from daily show last week satirizing the notion)
is pretty far off the mark, especially if it hopes to have some empirical grounding for its replication of Republican talking points. The suburbs and exurbs in question can only be considered the equivalent of the rural "small town" America in the sense of a shared illusion. In other words, the phantasm is that "small town america." Doug's invocation of the term, reminded me, on a final note, of this explication of that notion by Baudrillard some time ago, mostly in reference to the same suburban mythology born in Los Angeles that Davis discusses. It's still baudrillard, so it reveals all his frailties, but the notion of the phantasmic notion of a "real" America, seems topical. I'll leave off with that:
<OPEN QUOTE> Hyperreal and imaginary
Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, **the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America**, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.
Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system. ....http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html