Dennis talks about 'the extraordinary dysfunction of small town America', which to me, sounds like a bit of a sweeping generalisation - fully backed up with impressionistic put-down of zombies in Wal-Mart (reminiscent, in fact of small town prejudices about the wickedness of the big city). Write off the concerns of a large swathe of the US population as nothing but prejudice, and you just hand them over to the Republicans, it seems to me. Divide and rule, as they say.
Quoth Doug: "it galls me no end that "small town America" is somehow seen as more real than big town America. Brooklyn, where I live now, is just one of five boroughs in NYC, but it's got more than three times the pop of Alaska. But Palin is "real" because she's from the sticks, and I'm not, because I'm a, as Rudy (of all people) put it with a sneer at the RNC, "cosmopolitan." My zip code alone, 11238, has five times the pop of whatever the fucking little burg is that Palin was mayor of. Which makes her real and me an astral projection, or French, or something."