Posted on 11/04/2004 5:37:57 AM PST by publius1
A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: November 4, 2004
Striking a characteristic New York pose near Lincoln Center yesterday, Beverly Camhe clutched three morning newspapers to her chest while balancing a large latte and talked about how disconsolate she was to realize that not only had her candidate, John Kerry, lost but that she and her city were so out of step with the rest of the country.
"Do you know how I described New York to my European friends?" she said. "New York is an island off the coast of Europe."
Like Ms. Camhe, a film producer, three of every four voters in New York City gave Mr. Kerry their vote, a starkly different choice from the rest of the nation. So they awoke yesterday with something of a woozy existential hangover and had to confront once again how much of a 51st State they are, different in their sensibilities, lifestyles and polyglot texture from most of America. The election seemed to reverse the perspective of the famous Saul Steinberg cartoon, with much of the land mass of America now in the foreground and New York a tiny, distant and irrelevant dot.
Some New Yorkers, like Meredith Hackett, a 25-year-old barmaid in Brooklyn, said they didn't even know any people who had voted for President Bush. (In both Manhattan and the Bronx, Mr. Bush received 16.7 percent of the vote.) Others spoke of a feeling of isolation from their fellow Americans, a sense that perhaps Middle America doesn't care as much about New York and its animating concerns as it seemed to in the weeks immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center.
"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' "
City residents talked about this chasm between outlooks with characteristic New York bluntness.
Dr. Joseph, a bearded, broad-shouldered man with silken gray hair, was sharing coffee and cigarettes with his fellow dog walker, Roberta Kimmel Cohn, at an outdoor table outside the hole-in-the-wall Breadsoul Cafe near Lincoln Center. The site was almost a cliché corner of cosmopolitan Manhattan, with a newsstand next door selling French and Italian newspapers and, a bit farther down, the Lincoln Plaza theater showing foreign movies.
"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."
"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.
His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."
"They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."
Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.
"People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities," he said.
Like those in the rest of the country, New Yorkers stayed up late watching the results, and some went to bed with a glimmer of hope that Mr. Kerry might yet find victory in some fortuitous combination of battleground states. But they awoke to reality. Some politically conscious children were disheartened - or sleepy - enough to ask parents if they could stay home. But even grownups were unnerved.
"To paraphrase our current president, I'm in shock and awe," said Keithe Sales, a 58-year-old former publishing administrator walking a dog near Central Park. He said he and friends shared a feeling of "disempowerment" as a result of the country's choice of President Bush. "There is a feeling of 'What do I have to do to get this man out of office?'''
In downtown Brooklyn, J. J. Murphy, 34, a teacher, said that Mr. Kerry's loss underscored the geographic divide between the Northeast and the rest of the country. He harked back to Reconstruction to help explain his point.
"One thing Clinton and Gore had going for them was they were from the South," he said. "There's a lot of resentment toward the Northeast carpetbagger stereotype, and Kerry fit right in to that."
Mr. Murphy said he understood why Mr. Bush appealed to Southerners in a way that he did not appeal to New Yorkers.
"Even though Bush isn't one of them - he's a son of privilege - he comes off as just a good old boy," Mr. Murphy said.
Pondering the disparity, Bret Adams, a 33-year-old computer network administrator in Rego Park, Queens, said, "I think a lot of the country sees New York as a wild and crazy place, where these things like the war protests happen."
Ms. Camhe, the film producer, frequents Elaine's restaurant with friends and spends many mornings on a bench in Central Park talking politics with homeless people with whom she's become acquainted. She spent part of Tuesday knocking on doors in Pennsylvania to rustle up Kerry votes then returned to Manhattan to attend an election-night party thrown by Miramax's chairman, Harvey Weinstein, at The Palm. Ms. Camhe was also up much of the night talking to a son in California who was depressed at the election results.
When it became clear yesterday morning that the outlook for a Kerry squeaker was a mirage, she was unable to eat breakfast. Her doorman on Central Park West gave her a consoling hug. Then a friend buying coffee along with her said she had just heard a report on television that Mr. Kerry had conceded and tears welled in Ms. Camhe's eyes.
Ms. Camhe explained the habits and beliefs of those dwelling in the heartland like an anthropologist.
"What's different about New York City is it tends to bring people together and so we can't ignore each others' dreams and values and it creates a much more inclusive consciousness," she said. "When you're in a more isolated environment, you're more susceptible to some ideology that's imposed on you."
As an example, Ms. Camhe offered the different attitudes New Yorkers may have about social issues like gay marriage.
"We live in this marvelous diversity where we actually have gay neighbors," she said. "They're not some vilified unknown. They're our neighbors."
But she said that a dichotomy of outlooks was bad for the country.
"If the heartland feels so alienated from us, then it behooves us to wrap our arms around the heartland," she said. "We need to bring our way of life, which is honoring diversity and having compassion for people with different lifestyles, on a trip around the country."
Michael Brick and Brian McDonald contributed reporting for this article.
"We live in this marvelous diversity where we actually have gay neighbors," she said. "They're not some vilified unknown. They're our neighbors."
I wonder if she actually KNOWS any evangelical Christians (no - which I assume makes it easier for her to villify them).
BTW, from personal experience, the New York zeitgeist is grumpy rudeness (in which they take great pride) mixed with bewildering ineptitude.
No, you putz--you have it complete backwards. What the homeland people are saying is: "You New Yorkers are too self-absorbed to realize it, but the best chance you have for avoiding another terrorist attack is to re-elect George W. Bush."
Well done, you should be proud. Be sure to tell this to all your liberal friends. They'll think you went to Mars or something.
Open letter to New Yorkers:
Don't come here to the Heartland and try to impose your way of life on us. We don't want your condescending know it all attitude. If we want your way of life, we will come to you, otherwise, leave us alone. Call us rednecks if you like but I am proud to be one versus being an elitist stuck up snob. There is something that a few of us enjoy in this country and is being forgotten in this day and age of P.C., the right to be left alone. It is a value we cherish.
If you decide to come to the Heartland, behave yourself, you are a guest. If you cannot behave, take your @$$ back to the city. When we visit the city, we know better to behave ourselves. We expect the same from y'all.
"I don't know ANY Republicans who dishonor diversity "
With all due respect, DIVERSITY is what is destroying this country!
It says E PLURIBUS [b]UNUM[/b], not E PLURIBUS PLURIBUS
It's supposed to be a melting pot, not a kitchen of a thousand different pots!
"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush..."
EXCEPT FOR VIRTUALLY ALL OF THE TROOPS FIGHTING NOW IN IRAQ!
Zito=Maron.
I grew up in NYC, moved away, and then returned to live there for about fifteen years - and reading this article makes me recall why I finally moved away again, permanently.
Not all New Yorkers are like the idiots in this article, but most of those who consider themselves "intellectuals" and "real New Yorkers" are like this. And of course the ones the NY Times considers "real New Yorkers." What a pack of conceited, self-satisfied idiots.
Or maybe they're so clueless because they all spend their "mornings on a bench in Central Park talking politics with homeless people ..."
You know, these sophisticates think they know so much, but they would be shocked at how comparatively uninformed they are compared to the most redneck FReeper. Who didn't laugh out loud at this one?
Yes, clearly the 59 MILLION of us who voted for GWB are too dumb to think for ourselves. Thank goodness we have these brilliant elites who know they are better than we are! LOL.
"They're very 1950's,"
Well, I don't totally agree, but what was wrong with the 1950s? Libs will ALWAYS answer "it was the era of Jim Crow." True. Any other answers? Not really. The 50s were an era of strong families (where Moms could properly raised kids to be good people and good citizens); of pinkos in hiding (yaay for Senator McCarthy and the blacklists); of a strong U.S. economy (where only one bread-winner was required), of self-sufficiency in almost all resources, including oil; of no abortion. I am proud to say that Leave it to Beaver, Donna Reed, and Father Knows Best ideals that should be emulated and not scorned.
I was at the Towers on 9/11. I looked up and I squinted real hard but I didn't see any existential globalists contemplating up there. I saw a bunch of Americans burned alive and jumping.
This is why I am so glad to be off that island. There is no greater concentration of self-impressed, self-involved and undisciplined people on the planet. They aren't smarter. They aren't more sophisticated. They only want to be seen as smarter and more sophisticated. What a bunch of self-involved jerks.
I'm glad I left. Its great to be back in America. The US Government should start taking steps to decentralize whatever economic exposure the nation has to Manhattan through tax incentives to relocate and let that damned island become the leper colony it deserves to be.
They are indeed our neighbors. And fellow sinners. Which I grant is not language she might use.
But her own peculiar isolation makes it difficult for her to wrap her mind around the notion that a vote against marriage is not a vote to tie gays up to fenceposts. Respect and tolerance are not incompatible with the notion that social cohesion and family stability may outweigh an unlimited rights entitlement. Putting children first requires recognition that the ideal environment for them is one with a responsible mother and father at home.
The fact that millions of Americans are chary of the idea of chucking overboard the common understanding of an institution as old as civilization itself - and, likewise, other traditional mores and values - so quickly deserves a little more than dismissals of bigotry.
We care about America. That is why we voted to protect the people of New York (Americans) from future terrorists attacks. Period.
And THAT, gentle FReepers, is the entire CRUX of the problem!
These effite, erudite, "enlightened" LIEberals only associate with their own ilk, have ABSOLUTELY no idea what the REST of the country is like, admire and emulate the Euro-Crapweasels...and look down their snobbish, prudish noses at ANYONE who does not buy their FILTH!
It's like the famous quote from the Nixon election, when some elitist NY pundit a$$clown said "I don't understand how Nixon was elected...no one I know voted for him?!"
And WE are "out of step", and must be "nurtured and educated" to THINK like they do????
No F'n THANKS! Try to find something to eat when the heartland (read BREADBASKET, you LIEberal morons) decide NOT to feed your sorry a$$ess and subsidize your way of life anymore!
See how well you defend yourselves the next time some "non-existent" boogeyman like Bin Laden decides to kick your a$$es...this time I say we LET them sink on their own! Give Michael Moore and George Soros a call! Seems like we are "All Americans" ONLY when it suit the LIEberals, andthey NEED the rest of US to bail them out!
Maybe It's harsh, but they are CHILDREN that need discipline, and we have to be the adults that say "No" and MEAN it!
This is fine, but why does your compassion mean taking our income in the form of taxes and lawsuit transfer payments?
My God, we risked life limp and treasure for these people, and they still don't get it!
I suspect that none of the blue states get it. I am confident that almost no Democrats get anywhere close to getting it.
Good grief, these people are such SNOBS!!
Good point.
I doubt it.
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