The town is the place where you learn the value of a dollar, the meaning of a hard day’s work, before you find your true life in the city. Its continuance after you leave, in turn, symbolizes the unchanging reality of these moral verities: Superman never goes mad with power because Smallville is still there, steadying him at a distance. This mythic... See more

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.

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.

Why does it now seem natural to us that a small place should stifle? For the same reason, I suspect, that the small town offers the possibility of knowing everyone, of seeing each social interaction and political choice whole from one end to the other, of making meaning. It is so easy to make the wrong meanings. The small town is a terrible place... See more

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.

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... See more

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.

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