Ah, NYC. The Vampire City. That wart, that chancre, that evil carcinoma befouling the face of the earth, as Edward Abbey once rhapsodized. The domination — or should I say perversion, or poisoning — of American culture by the Manhattan-based corporate media has been an absolute catastrophe. God I hate that place. I travel thereto only under duress, and escape with a breathless celerity.

I mean, look: my America is Johnny Appleseed and Sinclair Lewis and Bob Dylan and Mother Jones and H.L. Mencken. NYC is network TV and Rosie O’Donnell and knocking down and paving over anything — even graves — just to make a buck. It’s Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire, which propagandized for war — any war, every war — and did its damnedest to substitute its upper-case Life for our lower-case lives. NYC contains people who think Philip Roth is a good novelist. Inexplicable. But you know what: I’m willing to leave NYC alone if it will leave us alone. Alas, it won’t.

That girl you spoke to was a fool. Hating one’s hometown is a sickness. One need not idealize it: God knows I don’t, certainly not in “Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette.” Batavia is scarred, even mutilated. Often unlovely. But why are we here if not to love the unlovable? ~Bill Kauffman

Via Clark Stooksbury and Dan McCarthy

Or, as Chesterton said, love means to love the unlovable or it is not love at all.  We make things lovely by loving them.  Those who have ever mistaken idealising a woman for loving her understanding the vast difference between idealism and love.  It is no so different with a place.  Chesterton again (roughly): “The true patriot never boasts of the largeness of his country, but of its smallness.”  That might be put another way: “The patriot never boasts of the beauty of his country, but even of its ugliness, or more precisely, of the beauty he finds in even the flaws of his country that the foreigner cannot see and will never appreciate because it is not his country.” New Yorkers will find things to love about their city that I will never understand, being entirely alien to it (indeed, I take it as a small point of flyover country pride that I have never been to NYC once), which would be fine if so many of them didn’t think that their city was the beating heart of the nation.

As for my view of New York City, well, I inherited some mixed attitudes from my father, who grew up in central New Jersey, so close and yet in so many ways so far from the Metropolis.  One of NYC’s pseudonyms, Metropolis is actually a misnomer, since New York City does not give birth to new cities as a mother does, but swallows old cities like Chronos devouring his children.

Even to this day, though my father has not lived there in forty years, he will speak with some passion about the awful New Yorkers who “stole” Staten Island from the people of New Jersey, even though everyone can see that it ought to belong to New Jersey. I learned to hate the Yankees–who doesn’t?–at my father’s knee, and at a young age took a disliking to the Mets when they drove my team out of contention for the World Series in 1986.  What sort of a name, I might have asked sneeringly back then, was Metropolitans anyway?  The Astros have since made it to the Series (and lost), so the old injury is now mostly forgotten, but who still alive can forget that heartbreaking Game 7?  The Mets now have their shot to get back to the Series for the first time since those glory days, and I wish them well, though I do not envy them the mauling they will receive at the hands of the Tigers.

With apologies to my New York-centric friends, who are not NYC imperialists and are probably embarrassed by the whole “Empire State” business, I grew up in the firm belief that New Yorkers–who claimed the mantle of ueber-cosmopolitans–were the most provincial, parochial people, who imagined the end of the world to begin somewhere just on their side of Philadelphia. The New Yorker could mock this, but only because it was The New Yorker.

There is, of course, nothing wrong and quite a lot right with parochial people and probably something very wrong with cosmopolitan people (many people attend a parish, but how many are able to attend to the entire cosmos?), but the supreme importance they have attached to their own New Yorkishness was never permitted by them to others to bask in the mild, simple satisfaction of DeKalb-ian-ness or Boiseanness or, in my case, Albuquerqueanness.  Albuquerque, after all, was the butt of a stock joke in a cartoon; New York was capital of the world.  Yet I have never wanted to go there, and I have often wanted to return home.  I do not begrudge the New Yorkers their place, but I do not want to visit it.

Going to school in Chicago has not done much to alleviate my resistance to the Big Apple.  After all, it was through an apple that man fell of old, and the bigger the Apple, the harder the Fall, right?