The first thing I said when Sarah Palin got the nod was that this was a huge boon to middle America and a slap across the face to yuppie domination. As you know, I can't stand yuppies, having been one in the elan of my arrogant youth. But I understand.
What I have been saying to people since then, I realize I haven't written about extensively on the blog. So I'm going to take a moment here to fill out some parts of that stream of American thought and culture that I'm going to call Plaid Flannel America. Now that I think of it, I risk a bit by putting this out there before consulting David Brooks, because he so nailed it with Patio Man. But a few things have changed since then - especially around my way.
As I've been writing, starting about two years ago in the late winter, I spent a couple months living in Philadelphia. During that time, I fell in love with The History Channel, and specifically a show called Modern Marvels. I'm sure that by now I have seen every episode. Yet even prior to that I, like millions of other Americans have been addicted to the scientific reality shows of the Discovery Channel, including and especially Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs. By the time I was living in Philly, I basically restricted all of my television watching to that, completely weaned of shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rescue Me, The Shield, Six Feet Under and even finally Rome and 24.
My favorite TV show now is called America's Toughest Jobs. The premise is simple. Take a dozen office workers, white collar, urban middleclass folks and put them in a blue collar environment - see how their character stands up. Not surpisingly, the stockbroker was one of the first to hit the skids and get fired. In the end, she didn't have what it takes to drive an 18 wheeler. Back in 1977, I was a huge fan of CB radio and big rigs as a highschool junior. I remember when men with hairy chests were considered the role models. Now metrosexuals rule, like the kid who calls himself 'Mac' on the Apple commercials, not somebody you want around when a building is burning down. So like a lot of Americans, I found sweet identification when 'Mac' played his type in the big Bruce Willis film 'Live Free or Die Hard' which says a great deal about what kind of character is necessary if and when America moves from metaphoric Hell to the real thing. There's some part of me which is still a scrappy kid from the 'hood, who was four foot eight and 88 pounds as a high school freshman (not counting the 'fro). I look at America today and I see not quite enough respect for the scrappy people who don't look good when they are doing good because of the yuppie aesthetic we have inherited from two generations of cultural producers who seem to think that the perfect American life is somewhere between Seinfeld and Mad About You - and everything else is either Homicide: Life on the Streets or some retarded version of Lake Woebegone.
I stand in defense of flyover country, despite its lack of commuter airlines.
I have tried to be comprehensive in writing this up, but I'm losing the juice to do so. Not because my passion behind it is lagging, just because I have other things to do. Plaid Flannel America is the Second World, it is the aesthetic of getting dirty jobs done - the cultural ethic that enables and supports infrastructure and elbow grease of non-exportable, non-robot substitutable, skilled labor. It's about repairing telephone lines, driving skiploaders and dressing beef. Irreplaceable and unglamorous.
In that post I said the following:
The Internal Empire is how I often conceptualize the hundreds of millions of people living in the US who are not among its ruling class. Among them are First Worlders, Second Worlders and a small but real contingent of Third Worlders. The First World consists of that segment of the middle and upper classes who live up to all of the modern standards of the world. Think 'Friends' and 'The Practice'.Living in the Second World means that you live among faces that don't make the headlines or the soap operas. In Los Angeles, the Second World is where I'm making my money. It's a very different part of town than where I've lived. There are lots of trucks around here. It's Pico Rivera, Industry, La Mirada. It's industrial and warehousy over here in the Second World. But if there is any town in LA County that looks the most like the 2W to me, it must be Downey right in the neighborhood where the huge abandoned Boeing plant is. The Second World could go up or down.
When Brokaw when all gooey for the 'Greatest Generation', I think he found in that much of this ethos I'm talking about.
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