NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 21, 2004
Urbanities
The tale of the city mouse and the country mouse is (in all its variants) as old as history since history begins with the invention of cities. And the stereotypes of city slicker and country bumpkin are likewise written too deep to weed out. When I moved my family out of a big city ("Tranna") many years ago a dear old lady friend was appalled. She as much a city girl as I am at heart a city boy asked a question for which I was unprepared since the whole point of moving was to provide my children with a better environment in which to grow up. She said How can you do that to your children? "Huh?" I seem to remember replying. "They will grow up to be morons. Everyone in the country grows up to be morons. Don't you want your kids to be smart?" Well it's too late now. My kids are mostly "growed" already. Through the catastrophe of modern life I am a city mouse again could only ever be a city mouse and it's true my children now strike me as remarkably laid back and strangely lacking most of my neuroses. Not stupid however; merely calm. My eldest is the computer wizard who handles my website. Let me give you an example of his state of mind. He was assembling a computer for his grandfather and found that one of those little prongs that stick out of one of those weird little panels had been somehow bent. This would prevent the whole computer from working. Now I as a city boy know exactly what to do in such a situation. You get up from your chair. You pick up the offending unit and bang it down. You kick the wall. You open and then slam a door. And all the while you are doing this you utter obscenities. It's a no-brainer really. Instead the kid asked his grandpa for his very smallest pair of needle-nose pliers. And after about ten minutes of zen-like concentration he got the thing unbent. I asked him afterwards to explain his eccentric behaviour. Why hadn't he done what I would have done? "Dad he replied patiently. Doesn't it make more sense to think about your problem than to think about how you feel about your problem?" Case closed. There was an election in the United States recently. For the last several weeks the innumerable experts most of them city and university-based have been analyzing the result. They've been looking at maps showing the distribution of votes and one fact about them is so obvious that not even the experts have missed it. There was a shockingly precise correlation between population density and people voting for Senator Kerry: the denser the bigger the margin. And thus an inverse relation between population density and people voting for President Bush. A few explicable exceptions of course. Example people who live on Indian reservations which tend not to be very densely populated also voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. An important qualification. The margins by which the right-of-centre party wins what the city folk call "flyover country" tend to be much closer than the margins by which the left-of-centre party takes inner-city polls. In other words what you get in the most rural areas tends more often to resemble a two-horse race there being room for only one horse downtown. We get the same results on the Canadian electoral map. The Grits own the big cities the Tories own when they own anything much of the rest. (Quebec is unusual in having two left-wing parties: Grits in the wen and the Bloc in the boonies.) But since the proportion of the Canadian population that is densely urbanized is considerably higher than for the United States (much of our outback being Canadian Shield) the Tories here never seem to come to power. You will imagine how the experts read the results being overwhelmingly city folk themselves. In the case of the U.S. their verdict was Kerry voters smart; Bush voters stupid. And none of their much-vaunted nuance. I am writing in a metropolitan daily in what Conrad Black liked to call the "capital of a G-7 country". I had better be careful how far I disagree with the expert analysis. And given the space still available I will be content to put just one thought in the minds of my city-slick readers: Are we really that much better educated or is our alma mater a school of fish? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top