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O.K. FOR MILK, BUT NOT US!
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America seems more
divided than blended
of TheColumnists.com
Many sociologists and Thinkers of Big Thoughts once believed that the United States was well on its way to becoming more homogenized. The mass circulation magazines such as Life and Look, they speculated, would eliminate regional differences by mixing things together. Add CBS, ABC, and NBC to the process, and we would indeed become a cultural melting pot. Everyone would receive the same information diet from the same nationally branded media, everyone would begin to speak in the accent-free manner of radio announcers, and wouldn’t it be lovely?
There would be exceptions. If a movie director needed to portray a character as dumb, the character would have a southern accent, naturally. And a Brooklyn accent telegraphed toughness. Fair? No. But we’re making movies here, not doing social work.
That was back in the 50’s. My, how times have changed. Today, we have blue states and red states and the suddenly pundit-popular purple states. We have the Bible Belt, and the liberal northeast and what some people call the Heartland and others call the Flyover States. We seem to be more divided than ever and at least one study has shown that regional dialects in the United States have become more, not less, pronounced.
Much of what divides us seems to be “values.” Candidates in the recent midterm elections, mostly Republican ones, talked about “Indiana values” and suchlike. No one is quite sure precisely what the candidates meant--what is an “Indiana value” as opposed to an “Ohio Value”? But most people at least vaguely understood that when a candidate was talking about “values,” he or she was sending a message against abortion rights, gay marriage and gun control. Liberals don’t talk all that much about “values.”
The overriding “value” theme in these few Midwestern and southern campaigns was that if the Democrats won control of Congress, it would mean the ascension of Nancy Pelosi and her “San Francisco Values.” To which most voters reacted with: “Who’s Nancy Pelosi?”
She is a congresswoman representing a large chunk of San Francisco, and has been the minority leader in the House for the past several years. Her bailiwick has long prided itself on its reputation as “America’s Favorite City.” It ranks at the top in many, many surveys as the city Americans and foreigners would most like to visit. It has lots of things going for it--sourdough bread, Chinatown, North Beach, a wonderful waterfront, terrific restaurants, cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and Tony Bennett.
But those are not what the candidates who talked about Pelosi and “San Francisco Values” were thinking about. They meant acceptance of gay marriage, homosexuals in public life, unions and embryonic stem cell research, all of which San Francisco embraces.
If Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America, the candidates thundered, we’ll have a National Transvestite Week celebration before you know it.
Which goes to show how much they knew. Nancy Pelosi is a consummate politician who grew up in politics. Her father was the mayor of Baltimore. She is the mother of five children and a grandmother to boot. She rose to the top in the particularly hard-knuckled world of San Francisco politics, which in the Cool Gray City of Love resembles nothing so much as mud wrestling accompanied by flamethrowers.
Scaring people about San Francisco was a loony idea from the start. The majority of voters simply shrugged and seemed content to let those wacky San Franciscans go about their perverted, un-American, subversive business of tending to the tourists, making dry martinis and worrying about too many skyscrapers downtown.
And now as a result of the midterm elections, Nancy Pelosi is poised to become the first woman speaker of the House of Representatives, third in line for the presidency.
No one talks much any more about how much alike the country is. Now it’s more fashionable to talk about the glories of diversity. We’re not a melting pot; we’re a tossed salad, a mosaic of different cultures and ethnicities.
We live in a country that may not have
become more homogenized, but this year it certainly became more
interesting.
©2006 by Charles
M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Nov. 20,
2006.
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