From the MSNBC website today:
Headline:
These cities are poised to recover the fastest
Omaha boring? Maybe, but it leads list of places where things will pick up
First sentence:
“Though Omaha, Neb., seems second-rate to some, Warren Buffett may have been on to something when he chose it for the headquarters of his massive holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.”
I have for several years now been writing about the Big City bias of the mass media, and been regularly pooh-poohed. Omaha has a metropolitan area of slightly under a million people, so this attitude is ridiculous. By what possible measure is Omaha “boring” and “second-rate” except by some arrogant New Yorker, which is what the author Francesca Levy is.
“Francesca Levy is a BusinessWeek reporting intern. She has written online and print articles for outlets including the New York Press, The Villager, and Chelsea Now, and Web sites such as Women’s eNews and the New York City News Service….She will receive a master’s degree in journalism from the City University of New York in December.”
BusinessWeek needs to pay closer attention to what it’s interns are writing on-line, and be reminded that New York City is an anomaly, a place that much of the US would be loathe to imitate.
I hear you: the same happens in the UK, where is it’s not London it’s ‘Provincial’ and considered to be backward and boring, despite the fact thast many inventions London now uses came from elsewhere.
Germany is somewhat better, being small and federal, so the arts are more evenly spread and lively in smaller places.
Exactly. It is part of the Myth of Large Places, a myth which is draining our arts (and our lives) of diversity.
I confess that sometimes I read this stuff and am secretly grateful that the New Yorkers don’t know what they’re missing out here. This doesn’t improve anything, but it does allow me to feel smug for a while.
We have way too many New Yorkers moving to Asheville, too, and they come with the attitude that they’ll tell all the backward yokels down here how it is done in the Big City. The level of arrogance is astonishing.
Hmmm. We don’t really get that in Kentucky — perhaps only because we get so few big-city “transplants” in the first place.
I’m not surprised that the New Yorkers are uncomfortable in the country (or even in Asheville!) — I’m miserable after 3 days in the city, so it makes sense that a lifelong city-dweller would have a hard time adjusting to the rhythms and flow of rural life.
That’s no excuse, though, for moving to a new place and then spending all your time informing the folks there how inferior they are by comparison to your old place.