Small-Town USA

But places aren’t tests. Indeed, one of the signs of a healthy community is that it’s robust enough to tolerate a little difference.

The picture of a successful town presented here is of a place that has given up any hope of surviving without the patronage of people who live elsewhere, that is, in cities—where, presumably, actual things are still being made.

it’s easier to list small towns in American art that serve as sites for the examination of pathology, hypocrisy, or the ways a soul is stifled, than towns that serve simply as neutral settings.

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.

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

In the city, meanings and connections are multiplied until we can’t see them at all. In the country or the wilderness, we may feel that our actions take place outside the grid of human meaning entirely.

This is the very possibility that small towns are supposed to offer: a theater in which to contemplate more fully the impact of your single life, your choices.

When a place rejects you, you never stop wondering whether it’s your fault; the whole memory becomes like a test you wish you could take again, now that you’ve finally studied for it.

Exemplarity can be a curse.  Deep frustrations and hypocrisies wriggle under the wholesome surface of small-town life.

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.