I was sitting in a Jewish deli called Noshville, in Nashville, some weeks ago. Sitting there, drinking coffee, looking around, watching people, several thoughts occurred to me.
When you are in a big city, you are monad-itized. You are a singular unit. You are isolated. You have people you can connect with, but the enmeshment is disrupted just by the scale of movement, and the cultural diversity. In that sort of cultural context you hvae to be able to make some assumptions about people. This is the value of uniform political beliefs. No matter what else he may believe, you can say “Well, at least this guy understand how the world works, and why we need strong unions.” This is an outcome of the anxiety that attends never knowing what to expect from others. You see thousands of people very day, so you need to be able to make some assumptions.
I read once of a woman in New York claiming she did not know one person who voted for Nixon. Of course she didn’t. In the face of all the diversity, at least some things remained stable for her.
Second thought: This restaurant was filled with pictures of people I didn’t recognize, but who were presumably local heroes, or at least Jewish heroes. This place has kind of a Swing-era theme, so they were old. Some pictures were almost reminiscent of shrines to me, to someone was important to someone.
This led me to the conclusion that local heroes are very important. George Washington: great man, but he lived somewhere else. The people that really make you feel good are local kids who made good. Maybe not President, but they played pro ball somewhere, or started some company everyone knows. That sort of thing is useful because you can RELATE to it.
The homogenization of our culture that mass media has enabled has impoverished us in many ways.