A friend emailed with a gripe the other day and it’s one
that I’ve often had myself. Having spent much of my life in medium-sized college
towns throughout the Midwest, an inferiority complex can build after a fashion
when it comes to dealing with the way the “important areas” of the country view
us.
He’s working in Arizona. It’s not the Midwest, but it’s
definitely not close enough to the Sunset Strip to make anyone important out West
give a shit.The state is at the point where it is broke.
We’re not
talking “Oh, gee, we’ve got a cash flow problem.” We’re talking rolling pennies
for a gallon of gas broke. We’re talking Ramen noodle broke.The state is
thinking about shutting down two-thirds of its parks.
The state is also considering paying employees with ‘Zona
Bucks or whatever you want to call bullshit IOUs that don’t cover the mortgage.
Real estate is failing at massive rates and isn’t that far behind California in
terms the “you’re really paying through the nose for a crappy home” factor. The
current level of screwed-ness indicates that the state’s shortfall will be
approximately 16 percent of its budget, compared to California’s 15 percent (at
worst; yes, I know budget sizes differ, but hang with me on this.)
His point is that there has been almost no coverage of this
outside of the Arizona Republic, a couple brief TV stories that centered on the
announcement of being broke and some blogging about who’s to blame.(Freepers are on it. Who do you think
is to blame? Probably Socialists or sodomites…)
When Schwartzenegger was taking
California and flushing it down the crapper, we practically had journalists
from Mars showing up to rail about this. A bit of hot Google action reveals
more than 1.7 million hits on this.The 2008-2010 California Budget Crisis has
it’s own detailed Wikipedia page dedicated to it. I’m surprised that ESPN didn’t dispatch their Draft Day Crew
to the California state house so Jay Bilas could talk about how while the
governor had demonstrated length and upside, Leeland Yee really was the sleeper
pick in sorting out the crisis. (Oh, crap, I hope I didn’t give someone in
Bristol an idea…)
Arizona? Hell, that’s like another planet or something
because it sits on a desert. It’s got old people and bad football (bitter
Packer fan coming out of me). Their basketball team is called The Suns because
they couldn’t call it “The Big Ass Patch of Sand that Nothing Will Grow In” and
Sun is the only other thing they see all the time. (They also overpaid Steve
Nash and then surrounded him with the worst possible team, but that’s a
discussion for another day…) The place is overrun by rattlesnakes and Native
Americans hawking Turquoise jewelry, right?
When my friend brought this all up on a journalism listserv
we subscribe to and queried why the journalists we all know from large national
metros (L.A., WaPo, NYT, WSJ etc.) haven’t gone and looked at Arizona’s issues
in depth, the response was pretty typical. California is more important, NYC
and Cali are media capitals etc. The most insulting response in my mind was
this one:
“I’m sure the national press MIGHT(emphasis in the original)pick up on it if it were
previously reported in local press. That seems to be the way things happen
quite frequently. (i.e. I used to write stories for the Cape Cod Times about
insurance issues, and details would often end up being reported in broader
pieces in the Wall Street Journal later on.) It’s all part of how the system
works.”
Yeah, because that’s how it should work: Local journalists
and bloggers and other people who give a crap pour their hard work into
something in hopes that Hairdo X from the Big City will show up and shine a
light on something someone else has already covered. Nothing motivated me more
as a reporter than thinking, “Hey, I bet if I do a really good job of this,
maybe some asshole from the big state paper will steal my idea, fuck it all up
and get credit for it!” Sure.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Palin Perv who believes that
living where I live makes me a “real American.” I don’t dislike people who
choose to live in large cities or to gravitate toward our nation’s most massive
population centers. However, when a crisis hits, people who aren’t in these Meccas
of self-importance are often ignored.
Pols call anything that’s not Cali or the Eastern Seaboard
“flyover states.” The City Folk often refer to our areas as “quiet hamlets” or
“the Heartland.” If they think about us at all, they probably figure we have
nice people, big farms and beautiful sunsets. We’re hardworking rubes who
probable WISH we could find our way to the Big City where we could share a
windowless closet with 12 people for 10 times the mortgage we’re paying for our
six acres. (Or, as one of my former journalism teachers once did, share a
single room in Manhattan with a drug-addicted gay hooker who didn’t believe in Jesus, but rather thought
he was Jesus. That didn’t work out well…) Usually, we are ignored, unless we
live in a swing state during a particularly important November or manage to
have a resident who can kill 17 people and consume parts of them as part of his
diet regimen. For the most part, we are viewed on the national scene the way
Matt Dillon’s character viewed Cameron Diaz’s little brother in “There’s
Something About Mary:”Retards! I love those goofy little bastards.
You can point to all sorts of crises from Katrina on back in
which the Important Media tend to either a) come around really late, show
distain and bug out or b) break out the “this is just terrible… Terrible…” act
for a while until suddenly some jagoff in New York tries banning artificial
sweetener or Angelina Jolie adopts another kid from some country she never
heard of before. Seriously, how long until the national media stops giving a
shit about Haiti because no matter how many times we text in to donate 10
bucks, the place will still be fucked up beyond all recognition? I’m putting
the plus/minus at 12 days, presuming there are no horrific aftershocks or Conan
O’Brien isn’t sent there by NBC to do his newly scheduled 3 a.m. show from a Quonset hut in
Port-au-Prince.
People who have larger platforms have larger
responsibilities and they aren’t just to the people around them. If you’re
going to shine a light, do so on things that matter beyond your crowded little
nook of the world. Don’t wait for a natural disaster or a serial killer to jolt
you into taking a look at life beyond Fifth Avenue.
Of course, what the hell do I know? My town only has one
stop light…