By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review
June 23, 2020
In Aesop’s Fables and Horace’s Satires a common classical allegory is variously retold about the country mouse and his sophisticated urban cousin.
The
city-slicker mouse first visits his rustic cousin’s simple rural hole
and is quickly bored and unimpressed by both the calm and the simple
fare.
When
the roles are soon reversed, the country cousin at first is delighted
by big-city mouse’s sumptuous urban food scraps and the majestic halls
where they may scuttle about. But as the crafty clawed house cat and
sharp-toothed guard dogs threaten both, and the noise and bustle mount,
the stressed-out country mouse scampers home — at last realizing that
his unappreciated quiet and safe abode trump action and sophistication
every time.
These
Greek and Roman fables reflect the classical world’s paradox of not
particularly enjoying life in the fetid, plague-ridden, and dangerous
big cities of Athens, Rome, and Alexandria that nevertheless gave the
world Socrates, Virgil, and magnificent libraries.
As
towns grew into metropolises, their sheen as heady places for art,
literature, and cultural change began to fade. In response, the once
commonplace farm and distant town were increasingly romanticized,
especially in such genres as pastoralism and bucolic poetry. The escape
to the country estate was the ideal of the Roman senator, the same way
that the “ranch” sometimes becomes the getaway from the Washington swamp
for American presidents.
Originally,
city man was “astute” (asteios/astu: town) and country man a
rustic agroikos or bumpkin (argoikos/agros: farm). But it was not such a
simple dichotomy, as even today “urbane” is not always an unqualified
compliment, and “rustic” is sometimes a grudging commendation of
authenticity.
The
urbane city dweller (urbanus/urbs) was also often portrayed in Roman
comedy and satire as a naïve and full-of-himself fop. In contrast, the
rustic bumpkin (rusticus/rus: countryside) might have been grubby and
smelly. But he is also usually commonsensical, grounded, and skeptical.
Globalization,
we thought, confirmed the superiority and desirability of the urban
coastal mice. From Miami to Boston, they looked across the sea to the EU
for guidance, not to Appalachia. Likewise, the strip from San Diego to
Seattle was a rich window further westward to Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo,
Seoul, and Taipei, not looking backward upon stagnant Bakersfield,
Provo, or Missoula. Winners lived as urban gentry; losers were the
clingers and deplorables of the interior.
Yale,
Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Hollywood, Facebook, Google, Amazon, CBS,
NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Wall Street are
certainly not to be found in Kansas, South Dakota, or Arizona.
Things
began to change a bit with the election of Donald Trump and his attack
on Chinese mercantilism, the inequalities of globalization, open
borders, and the deindustrialization of the American interior.
Election-night
Electoral College maps revealed high-density, blue corridors as
bookends on a less settled but undeniably geographically vaster red
interior. The interior, not the coasts, determined the Electoral College
vote. Peter Strzok’s smelly Walmart deplorables and Barack Obama’s
clingers for once seemed to have had the upper hand.
Then
came the COVID-19 epidemic. Suddenly, green mass-transit rail,
high-density, elevator-reliant town houses, and subways were petri
dishes, in a way Wyoming, upstate New York, and the Sierra Nevada
foothills were not. Translated, what was the upside of going to
Greenwich, Conn., poetry readings of the latest hipster poet or buying
the prints of the future Andy Warhol on Manhattan’s Upper West Side if
you were either infected or locked in your cramped apartment dependent
entirely on a host of previously taken-for-granted Others who brought
you water, food, and power, and took out your garbage and sewage — or
sometimes didn’t?
Michael
Bloomberg’s slur of dumb farmers dropping seeds by rote into the ground
to produce corn on autopilot suddenly seemed even dumber when boutique
bread was not to be so easily had at the corner La Boulangerie.
The
contagion and the lockdown led to economic catastrophe. If the cities
might have fared better than the countryside in the abstract calculus of
finance and stocks, the recession also gave us another, rawer glimpse
of Armageddon to come. Urban services and necessities may break down,
but at least in the countryside, the proverbial basics of existential
survival — food, water, power, guns, and fuel — are not so tenuous.
In
small towns, outlying suburbs, and farmhouses, you can grow food, have a
well, pump out your own septic tank, take target practice at home, and
have a gasoline tank or a generator in reserve. You can be worth $2
billion on the Magnificent Mile, but if your Gulfstream is locked down
at the airport, your driver socially distanced at home, your elevator on
the blink, and your food courier a day late, then you are poorer than a
peasant in Nowhere, Okla. The poor in high-rises in Queens are far more
vulnerable than those in rickety farmhouses in rural Ohio.
After
the Trump election, the virus, the lockdown, and the recession, then
came the looting, street violence, and arson of the protests that
spiraled out of control after the initial demonstrations over the
horrific death of George Floyd while in police custody. America saw that
in
extremis blue-city mayors and police chiefs would virtue-signal away
the public’s own safety, to veneer either their own bias, fright, or
impotence.
The country’s major cities — New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington, Philadelphia, and others — experienced not just mass fire and theft but state-sanctioned or de facto allowances of both. Police
departments either could not — or would not — stop the stealing and
burning. And officers on the beat often blamed their mayors and
governors, who characteristically contextualized the violence, either
because they felt they could do nothing about it or they wanted to do
nothing about it, or they saw that excusing it was the more persuasive
political narrative, at least in the short term. A family in the country
may be two hours away from the rural constable, but when armed, it has
some recourse against the nocturnal intruder, in a way that someone
locked down in an apartment in gun- and ammunition-controlled Queens,
with a politically beleaguered police force, does not.
On
the national level, blue-state congressional representatives and
senators treated chaos in city streets in the same way they had earlier
packaged the epidemic, lockdown, and recession: more mayhem that could
be blamed on Donald Trump and that would thus accomplish in November
2020 what Robert Mueller, Ukraine, and impeachment did not. Suddenly
millions without masks reminded us that shouting about endemic and
systematic racism exempted one from the quarantine — though Donald
Trump’s flag-waving crowds did not enjoy the same privilege. The urbane
who quoted “science” chapter and verse manufactured all sorts of
pseudoscientific exegeses about how storming into restaurants to shout
down patrons and strolling through burning and smoke-filled Walmarts to
loot for hours were permissible indoor social congregations, while going
to a peaceful indoor Trump rally was Typhoid Mary recklessness.
For
many liberal urban dwellers, all the violence, filth, dependency,
plague, incompetence, and sermonizing were no longer worth the salaries
earned from globalized high-tech and finances. Even the city’s retro,
gentrified neighborhoods, its internationalism and sophistication in
food, drink, and entertainment, its cultural diversity, and its easy
accessibility to millions of similarly enlightened liberals with
superior tastes and tolerance began to wear. When stores go up in
flames, or the 58th floor comes down with the coronavirus, or Mayor de
Blasio plays “Imagine” to illustrate why there are no police on the
streets, then who cares about the intellectual stimulation that
supposedly comes by osmosis from the nation’s tony universities anchored
in cities or their nearby suburbs?
Increasingly
over the past four months, millions of city folk have discovered that
the police are as essential as water, food, sewage, and gasoline.
Without them, life reverts not to a summer of love but more often to the
Lord of the Flies and Deadwood. The urban hipster and marketing
executive discovered that a spark somewhere 2,000 miles away can ignite
their own neighborhood, and all the kneeling, foot-washing, and
social-media virtue-signaling won’t bring safety or food.
For
the boutique owner, whose store was looted, defaced, and burned, the
existential crisis was not just that capital and income were lost, and a
lifetime investment wiped out, after the earlier one-two-three punch of
plague/quarantine/depression.
Instead,
the rub was that the urban store owner and his customer grasped that
all that mayhem could easily happen again and on a moment’s notice — and
the ensuing
losses would once again be written off as the regrettable collateral
damage that is sometimes necessary to “effect social change.”
When the mayor and police look the other way as the mob carries off
Louis Vuitton bags, and CNN reporters assure us of peaceful protests
while flames engulf our television screens, why rebuild or restore what
the authorities and the influential deem expendable? Why live in Detroit
in 1970 when a constant 1967 repeat was supposed to be a tolerable cost
of doing business there?
A
Mayor de Blasio or Durkan and a Governor Inslee or Newsom were more or
less indifferent when “brick-and-mortar” livelihoods were wiped out.
Observably, they expressed very little outrage. Preventing the recurrence of anarchy might alienate the looters and burners, and especially their appeasers and contextualizers.
Add
it all up, and as the country mouse of old learned, the giddiness and
opulence of the city are increasingly not worth the danger, noise, and
mess of the city, at least after February 2020. There are simply too
many claws and too many sharp teeth to justify the rich crumbs from the
opulent table.
There is another force-multiplier of urban disenchantment: In
the age of Zoom and Skype, the bustle of the city may not be able to be
fully replicated, and the drama of the live classroom relived, but
tele-business still can be conducted well enough without having to
navigate around the feces of Market Street, or the looting, shouting,
and burning of Seattle.
If one wishes to endure watching the torching of the Oakland
Mercedes-Benz dealership, one can do it on YouTube in Red Bluff without
smelling the burning plastic four blocks away. And when the NFL coaches
take the knee this fall during the National Anthem, it will be far more
out of sight and out of mind in Hawthorne, Calif., than when living in
Silicon Valley.
With
downloads, social media, and instant visual communications, the
sanitized version of the city can be used well enough by the county
dweller. It is of course not the city, but a workable facsimile that
means not flying into JFK, or navigating West Hollywood, or staying in a
hotel in Chicago.
The cities are broke —
a fact that will be more widely appreciated when they return to
“normal.” They are no longer even marginally clean and safe, and their police
nationwide will calculate that it is not worth getting killed, being
fired, spat upon, or put in prison to answer a 911 call.
Our
big cities are governed by a blue paradigm that fairly or not will now
be increasingly synonymous with crime, debt, and high taxes that ensure
bad services. Most city dwellers by needs and habit will still stay there.
But
millions will increasingly seek to avoid cities and will appreciate
their virtual upsides from a distance without having to endure their
real downsides.
Wherever we live, in our dreams at least, we are all country mice now.
No comments:
Post a Comment