Small-Town USA

the New England village, in literary depictions, can have some of the wildness, the unpredictability, of country life. It can be strange, not simply flat.

Not because of the role it plays in some national mythology, not because of the values it embodies (it probably doesn’t embody them any better than lots of other places), and not because it makes the ethical life somehow realer. It is worth saving because people live there.

This may be the primary mythic role that small towns play in our politics: the stage that is just the right size.

When we treat it as axiomatic that small towns have no use or place for such people, that if you have ever liked a French movie you had better just hurry to the nearest city, we forget that part of being a community is leaving room for the diversity of human nature.

Perhaps the smallness is the point: as if only at a particular scale can we see human relations in their fullness.

You can catch a person at a bad time. The same is surely true of places. 

But these tasks of meaning making require the small town, precisely, not to change too fast. Meanwhile, we demand that such places upend their entire local economy as soon as their fragile node in the regional economy is disrupted, often by some far-off decision over which the town had no control. It’s impossible. A place will certainly be grumpy i... See more

It suggests something about the hollowing out of the American economy that, by the 1990s, even those living in actual cities had begun to make the story of the town we must leave behind their own. If you feel stifled by Chicago, that’s your fault.

A small town might well be angry; it is asked to do everything. Along with everything else we ask them to make, we ask small towns to make meaning.