Small-Town USA

But these tasks of meaning making require the small town, precisely, not to change too fast. Meanwhile, we demand that such places upend their entire local economy as soon as their fragile node in the regional economy is disrupted, often by some far-off decision over which the town had no control. It’s impossible. A place will certainly be grumpy i... See more

Perhaps the smallness is the point: as if only at a particular scale can we see human relations in their fullness.

The town is the place where you learn the value of a dollar, the meaning of a hard day’s work, before you find your true life in the city. Its continuance after you leave, in turn, symbolizes the unchanging reality of these moral verities: Superman never goes mad with power because Smallville is still there, steadying him at a distance. This mythic... See more

Exemplarity can be a curse.  Deep frustrations and hypocrisies wriggle under the wholesome surface of small-town life.

it’s easier to list small towns in American art that serve as sites for the examination of pathology, hypocrisy, or the ways a soul is stifled, than towns that serve simply as neutral settings.

This may be the primary mythic role that small towns play in our politics: the stage that is just the right size.

It suggests something about the hollowing out of the American economy that, by the 1990s, even those living in actual cities had begun to make the story of the town we must leave behind their own. If you feel stifled by Chicago, that’s your fault.

But places aren’t tests. Indeed, one of the signs of a healthy community is that it’s robust enough to tolerate a little difference.

This is the very possibility that small towns are supposed to offer: a theater in which to contemplate more fully the impact of your single life, your choices.