Daily Blague

You've cracked so many eggs here we could make an omelet.  Let me see if I can unscramble it a bit. 

That DB was inaccessible for awhile was a pain, glad it's back.

As a favor I wish you would link to the NYT articles, I've tried here, but as we've seen in the past my hypertext skills are sometimes lacking. [Editor's Note: We apologize for negligence. The link has been installed properly.]

Here is an explicit link to the printer friendly format. 

A quick Google search on "busts of Jacques Delors" reveals in the third item listed that the Jacques Delors issue is rather old news. And, the first first item on the list seems to be a foundation that Mr. Bowley has built upon.

What is the truth and what is a creation of the media, which now includes the INet and the Blogosphere,  as to what the American or British mind about some topic might be is largely a parlor game since the American mind or British mind simply does not exist other than as a creation of some polling data set about a particular issue or the opinion of some journalist.  Reading the covers of any of the tabloids or for that matter popular magazines in the checkout line at Wal-Mart would provide an impression of the American mind that hardly has any basis in reality, at least not the reality I live in. 

I may in fact have labeled myself now by even mentioning Wal-Mart since it is an experience that began in rural areas.  And, only in the last decade has Wal-Mart moved in a big way to urban areas, and finally only recently in the last few years into Southern California.  In fact I lived briefly in Rogers, Arkansas in 1972 when Sam Walton was still operating fire sale stores in Rogers and Bentonville. 

Say what you will about Wal-Mart shoppers and a good deal could be said about the store and its influence on America and American retailing, not to mention global retailing and wholesale production, we, the Wal-Mart shoppers, comprise a goodly portion of the American population, we are that slice from the twenty fifth to the seventy fifth percentile on personal and household income.  We are perhaps more likely to have less than a college education, more likely to own a gun, more likely to know how to use that gun, more likely to shoot something with that gun that we will later eat, more likely to fish regularly and eat what we catch, and unfortunately more likely to think that somehow larger urban areas like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles are hotbeds of crime and urban decay filled with wild eyed liberals and sexual perverts of all stripes. 

In short what you don't know, or perhaps don't have direct experience with, tends to cause a reaction that is akin to fear and that leads to a response that is akin to bigotry and fuzzy ideas about what some nebulous group know as urban, or for that matter rural,  thinks or does. 

It is just simply the result of poor reasoning and lack of experience either by direct contact or by serious reading.  Personally, I could live just as well in downtown Manhattan as I could in the woods of Tuckassee.  Although, perhaps it can fairly be said that the trades I have chosen in the last decades would not allow me to live in my accustomed style in Manhattan, I would feel, and have felt, quite comfortable in Manhattan and other urban settings, but on a continuum Manhattan is the best and Los Angeles is the worst in my experience. 

I don't know if you could move to somewhere in the Mid South or even southern Indiana or Illinois and feel as comfortable as you do in Manhattan, it is different granted that, but I do believe you will find after awhile that life is quite tolerable and enjoyable and so are us rural folk. 

I suspect that a goodly portion of America is in towns of two hundred thousand or less. And, even the most cursory observations in traveling in America will let you understand that the bulk of the landscape in America is rural and vacant or effectively vacant.  We have not even begun to approach the population density or land use factors of Europe and likely never will for a good long time to come.  To say we are provincial is to say nothing new, most of the world is provincial, in fact most of the world is beyond provincial, in most of the world characterizing the view of the masses as provincial would be putting a kind face on the characterization.

I've not read Jane Jacobs's Cities and the Wealth of Nations so I can't comment exactly on the idea presented, but what seems to be implied by the further discussion about the Electoral College and the undue influence of rural areas is that somehow the folks in large metropolitan areas are somehow better than those in rural areas or perhaps the urbanites are better equipped to determine the direction of society, the nation as a whole, and by inference my life in particular. This is a huge can of worms. 

Rural areas by the nature of the composition of the Senate do in fact exert some force much larger than their proportion of the population in comparison to the urban centers of America, but that was in fact the intention in forming the Senate, was it not?  And, in fact was not the intent of the Electoral College in many ways the same as that of the Senate to provide a balance against the pure force of the majority across the Union, to produce some manner of voting the individual states rather than the population as a whole? 

If we eliminate the Electoral College and go to pure popular vote for the presidency, then why should anyone east of Denver all the way over to I-95 with the possible exception of Texas bother to vote, won't the outcome will be determined by the right and left coast populations? 

Although in many ways I could give a hoot how we elect the president, the Senate is entirely a different matter, eliminating the bias given to some segments of the society provided by the Senate will change the character of the nation, but then perhaps that's what you intend.

I may be treading on very thin ice here since I am perhaps not in as much depth as you are on these issues, so I offer these comments if nothing else as a man in street view, or in my case the man in the woods view.  

We will wait quietly here in the woods and check back from time to time to see your informative response.

Thanks, George (aka Jordi Marcos) for a very thoughtful post, in which the possibility of many other omelettes cracks open.

...[w]hat seems to be implied by the further discussion about the Electoral College and the undue influence of rural areas is that somehow the folks in large metropolitan areas are somehow better than those in rural areas or perhaps the urbanites are better equipped to determine the direction of society

No, not better, just more numerous - as indeed you make clear in your next paragraph.

Well, now you force me into research mode. I suppose the census or some demography or geography data base will contain the answer. My supposition is that more of the population lives in small towns than large urban areas than we might suspect, that in fact the fiftieth percentile town size and the sixty fifth percentile toward size might be smaller than we would at first guess. We will see, the research committee meets on Saturdays.

And, the nonvoters, I think you should treat them like all sinners, you love them but you shun their sin not them, eh? Shunning people went out with witch hunts or do we still have those?