“You can learn a lot about a town by listening to what it doesn’t show.”
Greil Marcus
They were right. I hereby admit that all those republicans and conservatives were right. I can see that now. They said that Small Town U.S.A. is the “Real America”…and they are right. How could we have all been so blind? Don’t think me crazy…I’m not joining up and Sarah Palin has not promised to make me cloak of Wolf fur. The thing is kiddies, Small Towns being the real America is actually a bad thing. People always paint small towns as peaceful and friendly places to live. Which is true, however, they neglect to mention the other side of small towns. Before I get too far into this I’d ask you all to think about anytime you’ve spent in a relatively small group of people who were together alot. Maybe if you lived on campus at college or if you grew up in a close neighborhood and went to school with your neighbors. Was every thing really good about that time? Really? See there are certain things about small towns that I think we have all neglected to think of. Statistics say in a small town a resident is less likely to be locked up…because the cop knows you. The local constable knows who’s going to get drunk on friday night and shouldn’t be driving. He knows if someone has something stolen who’s likely to have taken it. Knowledge is the big thing about small towns. You might not know that the guy in cubicle next to you beats his wife or the secretary is a dominatrix in her spare time. In a small town however, there are no real secrets…only people pretending to have them and people pretending not to know them. When I think of small towns I always think of Stephen King stories. See a big city has to experience a large event to effect everyone. A small town is so interconnected that the ripples move a lot faster. Take the novel Needful Things:
“The devil in disguise comes to a quiet, peaceful town and opens a store called Needful Things. The store has an item for everyone in town. All the devil asks for in return is a few dirty pranks. Little do they know, that they’ve sold their souls, and the pranks escalate to murder…”
Sound far fetched? Not if you read the book. It didn’t require magic or intense trickery. The antagonist simply played on existing fueds, dislikes and buried frustrations to make an entire town explode. Things that are always there, but in most cases can be ignored because of distance. Distance doesn’t exist in small towns. In small towns everyone knows your name and history. They know your family. They know that your crazy uncle used to molest chickens. The big thing is if they chose to talk about it and to whom. I know things about co-workers, family members, close friends and so forth. In each case however I get to have distance. Imagine working a block from the person who lives next door to you. Living across the street from the cop that locked you up once. There could never be any real secrets…just things that you don’t speak of. Imagine the kind of drama that could come forth in a small town if everyone started exposing secrets or talking outloud about what everyone already knows? How much hostility could be brought to the surface with little effort? It’s easy to see why Stephen King sets most of his stories in a small town. There’s so much potential for drama. Playing up the good qualities of people in a small town is fine…my issue is with ignoring the other things that exist there. People in a big city aren’t bad. They have as much potential for goodness as anyone. The real issue is more people are strangers and therefore don’t know each others secrets. When you don’t know someone’s secrets it’s harder to place them in the scheme of things. Secrets are as powerful as they can be destructive. That’s what small towns are and that’s the real America.
