NPR just had a piece on the Brooklyn Nets and the building of the Barclay Center. New Yorkers can have whatever opinion they want about Jay-Z's involvement or Barbra Streisand's or any Russians or other rich people. To me, it's just one more example of considering what happens in New York much more important than what happens anywhere else (except maybe DC).
It's our biggest city. It's been our biggest city for a long time. Well, fine. It's not 50% of the country. It's revealing that NPR, even though its announcers, writers, and employees come from all over the country, buy into the mystique. The other big cities develop similar attitudes: LA, certainly - not to mention Second City and The Hub of the Universe. But nothing like New York. Did you know that New York sports teams and neighborhoods are more interesting and important than all other teams and neighborhoods combined? It's true! New York writers have proven this.
If literature and folktales are any evidence, this has been true in other times and places as well - Country Mouse and City Mouse. "Provincial" meaning originally not Paris. Reading Mesoamerican history, it seems that Wari and Norte Chico and everyone else had the same attitudes, thousands of years ago. The Celestial City.
Let's give Silicon Valley some credit for helping to break the urban urbanity stereotype.
2 comments:
Ain't no provincialism like NYC provincialism. Highly refined to an art form, now heavily degraded.
And they have almost no idea they suffer from it. It's not normally something they can even allow into their consciousness.
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