-By Warner Todd Huston
Speaking as a Chicagoan, I get my “second city” dander up every time I hear people who live in New York City patting themselves on the back and blathering aloud about how much better they are than the rest of us peons in flyover country. Usually this sort of arrogant bravado is reserved for New Yorkers talking to other New Yorkers, at least, usually seen as the sort of talk one would hear at the corner bistro or what one might encounter listening to what passes for conversation at highbrow dinner parties. So we don’t often see such self-congratulatory nonsense outside local New York media. While it isn’t seen so often in publications that serve the nation, Smithsonian Magazine has decided to give New York dance critic Joan Acocella the platform of their publication to tell us all how cool she thinks New York is and how people there are just naturally smarter and better than everyone else everywhere in the country… if she, a resident of New York City, does say so herself.
I suppose we need to give Acocella a bit of a pass, seeing as how she probably doesn’t know too many people from outside of New York City and, therefore, has a dearth of information by which to measure the rest of us. We should also probably realize that someone at the Smithsonian Magazine had space to fill and since Acocella is considered something of an “essayist,” it might be assumed that she could fill that space as well as any other. And, heck, she HAS to be ultra cool. She’s from New York City, after all. The blind spots all across the board here add up to Acocella and the good folks at the Smithsonian being perfect nominees for the 2008 Helen Keller award for cultural observance.
To start her little space filler, Acocella assures us that in her “experience” many people “believe that New Yorkers are smarter than other Americans.” She then casually assures us that “this may actually be true.” I’m feeling better informed already. What “experience” she bases all this assuredness on certainly is a question that immediately comes to the mind of any reader outside the Big Apple, naturally. One immediately wonders if it is the “experience” that she has talking to other New Yorkers who are as self-congratulatory as she? Most likely. Granted, it’s a bit silly to expect the denizens of any particular city to traipse about their own streets telling each other how stupid they all are, but there we have it; New Yorkers are “smarter that other Americans” in Acocella’s “experience.” It’s as anecdotalish as anecdotal evidence gets, don’t you think?
Acocella does base this arrogance on one idea that almost appears as sensibly grounded, however. She has a theory that New Yorkers are smarter because they are the sort of people who “left another place and came here, looking for something, which suggests,” she posits, “that the population is preselected for higher energy and ambition.” Actually, that isn’t such an implausible thing to believe. It may not necessarily mean they are “smarter,” just that they are more energetic, but at least this is a stab at a logical premise. If Acocella had mined this proposition further, she might have had something. Unfortunately, she went off on another theory that she spent far more time on. This other theory rests on far less superficially sensible grounds.
But I think it’s also possible that New Yorkers just appear smarter, because they make less separation between private and public life. That is, they act on the street as they do in private. In the United States today, public behavior is ruled by a kind of compulsory cheer that people probably picked up from television and advertising and that coats their transactions in a smooth, shiny glaze, making them seem empty-headed. New Yorkers have not yet gotten the knack of this. That may be because so many of them grew up outside the United States, and also because they live so much of their lives in public, eating their lunches in parks, riding to work in subways. It’s hard to keep up the smiley face for that many hours a day.
So, for Acocella, rudeness is to be excused as some wonderful antidote to, what, politeness? She thinks that smiling and having good cheer is only picked up by TV and advertising? This theory, however, doesn’t explain why New York has had the reputation of being boisterous, loud, obnoxious and rude for many decades before TV was ever invented.
In his short story collection “The Voice of the City,” in the story titled “The Defeat of the City,” O. Henry described a character from Manhattan this way:
“In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness. ”
Not the nicest of descriptions and one meant to typify a New Yorker of the time, not specify just this one character. I should remind the reader that O. Henry died in 1910. That was a few years before TV came around if I am not mistaken.
But, the thing that really shows that Acocella doesn’t know much about those other, more stupid Americans she is so sure aren’t as cool as New Yorkers is where she imagined that New Yorkers are just more helpful than other Americans. She says that, “while New Yorkers don’t mind correcting you, they also want to help you,” and she tells us a little tale about her recent visit to the post office.
This injects a certain drama into our public life. The other day I was in the post office when a man in line in front of me bought one of those U.S. Postal Service boxes. Then he moved down the counter a few inches to assemble his package while the clerk waited on the next person. But the man soon discovered that the books he wanted to mail were going to rattle around in the box, so he interrupted the clerk to tell her his problem. She offered to sell him a roll of bubble wrap, but he told her that he had already paid $2.79 for the box, and that was a lot for a box—he could have gotten a box for free at the liquor store—and what was he going to do with a whole roll of bubble wrap? Carry it around all day? The clerk shrugged. Then the man spotted a copy of the Village Voice on the counter and laid hold of it to use it for stuffing. “No!” said the clerk. “That’s my Voice.” Annoyed, the man put it back and looked around helplessly. Now a woman in line behind me said she’d give him the sections of her New York Times that she didn’t want, and she began going through the paper. “Real estate? You can have real estate. Sports? Here, take sports.” But the real estate section was all the man needed. He separated the pages, stuffed them in the box and proceeded to the taping process (interrupting the clerk once again). Another man in line asked the woman if he could have the sports section, since she didn’t want it. She gave it to him, and so finally everything was settled.
This little moment of human interaction, while interesting, even a tad heartwarming, is not something that one would never see in any big city — or any small one for that matter — anywhere in the U.S. I have certainly witnessed such displays of helpfulness repeatedly in the Windy City. I have also seen it in Cincinnati, Ohio (where I was born as it happens) and other large cities I’ve visited. I’ve seen it in the middle of nowhere America, too.
But, to Acocella, because some citizen went out of his way to be helpful to another citizen in the Big Apple, why that must say something special about New Yorkers. Absurdly, she seems utterly unaware that such a display might say something about America, or even just people in general. Instead Acocella uses her anecdotal evidence to suggest that such a thing could only happen in New York. Well, I can agree to a certain degree that what we have here in Acocella’s piece is something that can only happen in New York. The arrogance to imagine that such a scene can ONLY happen in New York and nowhere else is pretty peculiar to New York, it seems. At the very least it seems peculiar to Joan Acocella.
This whole episode reminds me of the story of another New Yorker that was so caught up in her New York “experience” that she couldn’t see outside that bubble. In 1972, New York Times critic, Pauline Kael, is quoted as having been utterly amazed that Richard Nixon won election to the White House. How he got all those votes flummoxed her because, as she is supposed to have said, she didn’t know anyone who voted for the man. It may be apocryphal but it is indicative of the enclosed little world in which some New York illiterati live, a world that it might seem our Miss Acocella inhabits.
So, to Acocella, New Yorkers may seem “smarter,” more “helpful,” more “energetic,” she may think they “know better” then the rest of us and she just might think New Yorkers are all around better than the rest of us poor shlubs out here in the great cultural desert we call the United States, but its a bit hard to take her opinion seriously because one gets the feeling that, like the erstwhile Pauline Kael, she never met any of the rest of us to be so sure of her neighbor’s superiority. But on one thing she is wholly correct. The rest of us in the US do think New Yorkers “seem rude.” Unfortunately for her fellow New Yawkers, Acocella doesn’t give us any compelling reason to revist that assumption.
(Photo credit: www.charlierose.com)
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