Does it say anything about a person’s character or beliefs if that person happens to hail from the same home state as the individual who ascends to the Oval Office? People love to generalize about regions and ethnicities, but if a President comes from the same neck of the woods as you do, does that somehow imply anything about you?
In 1977, the humorist Roy Blount Jr. wrote an amusing book whose premise, essentially, suggested that fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter’s Presidential victory could provide Blount a sense of vindication, an antidote to the cliché of Deep South racism and Confederacy.
“I come from people who have been blithely called rednecks, Crackers, white trash, Snopeses, and peckerwoods, people who have been put down from without and within,” Blount wrote in “Crackers.”
“You may not realize,” he wrote, “what a rousing moment it was for me, ethnically, when Daddy King stood up there in Madison Square Garden in 1976 at the behest of a by-God-country white Southerner and led all the states in singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ A Southern Baptist simple-talking peanut-warehousing grit-eating ‘Eyetalian’-saying Cracker had gotten the strongest and most nearly leftward party to nominate him for President. Of the United States…”
The book is typical Blount, occasionally absurd, with plenty of puns, silly country song lyrics and signature Blount wisecracks. There’s a whole chapter on Jimmy’s smile, another on “Being From Georgia” and “Trash No More,” with repeated, sly rejections of the rest of the nation’s perception of Blount’s people based on their accents and occupations. Comedic stuff that really is serious.
So now, applying this non-relationship in reverse, we have this fellow from New York assuming (and relishing) power over the less advantaged. A by-golly born-to-money, the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me, anti-intellectual, morally suspect nefarious prevaricator who wants everybody off his lawn. Is this (borderline) human being a New York prototype? Could his behavior, in any way, be considered standard in the nation’s largest and widest-known city?
I am, sort of, a New Yorker. Not a native, but a resident of The Big Town—and mostly its suburban environs—for more than a half century. And I will not countenance any hint that there is a Trump gene dominant in the local populace.
This hardly dismisses conventional depictions of New Yorkers. Pushy, blunt, impatient. New York has its imperfections—New Yorkers themselves are quick to confirm that—but, come on. New York is the very realization of diversity, equity and inclusion. You can’t walk a block without bumping into someone completely unlike yourself—and, more often than not, not the least bit contrary.
New Yorkers—surrounded by dozens of immigrant sub-communities, coming face-to-face with all kinds of people from all kinds of places on a daily basis—generally are open-minded, live-and-let-live citizens. Busy, yes; and quite demanding. You got a problem with that?
I’m in the camp of former New York Times superstar journalist George Vecsey, who grew up blocks from the family of one Donald J. Trump in the New York borough of Queens and, a couple of years ago, posted an essay on his website headlined “Please Don’t Blame Queens for Trump.”
Vecsey cited the vast ethnic and professional variety of his neighbors and friends while reminding that, “in the big picture, nobody is typical of Queens”—a truism, really, for any city or state. Or country. He marvelled that “somehow the lumpen masses of Queens County…are still being connected with the disturbed, amoral thug who has terrorized the U.S. and the world since 2016.”
That self-styled emperor doesn’t want to exist among the hoi polloi, wherever he finds himself. He wants to exist in an exclusive golf club, a gated community, a gilded mansion. And give orders.
Of the Presidents during my lifetime, who were closely identified with the home states of my youth—California and Texas—none especially embodied the presumed lifestyle of his state’s citizens—and certainly not mine. George W. Bush, born in Connecticut but raised in the Texas, did embrace the he-man cowboy thing, and I once bought one of those jokey Republic of Texas passports sold at the Dallas airport that reinforced such an archetype. Two bits of personal data on that (worthless) document already were filled in. Height: 6-foot-2. Sex: Yes.
Lyndon Johnson was in most ways very Texan but, like Carter, his stance on civil rights put him at odds with many white Southerners. The other Texas President, George H.W. Bush, always came across as a New England elite—hardly a Texas trait—and neither of California’s Presidents brought to mind a beach boy or hippie model (Nixon!?!?). Though Reagan was, well, an actor who demonstrated an ability to remember his lines.
What’s the validity, though, of painting folks with the same brush of as their home-grown President, or vice versa? “The thing is,” Blount wrote in “Crackers” of his fellow Georgians, “we’re very strong in the field of condescension-avoidance when we’ve got a Georgia President, because a Georgian hasn’t got any real business condescending to anybody.”