Steve Chapman
Chicago Tribune
“Americans disdain snobbery in all its forms except the most popular one: reverse snobbery,” said Steve Chapman. That’s why Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin repeatedly gets away with implying that small-town and rural Americans are more honest, more hard-working, and generally better than those lazy, lying scoundrels who live in big, bad cities. “The myth of rural virtue and urban vice is an old one in this country,” but the facts show that it is just that—a myth. Studies have found, for example, that eighth-graders who live in rural areas were 26 percent more likely to experiment with drugs than those in middle schools elsewhere, and that there’s far more alcohol use among teens in “the country,” too. Methamphetamine use among both adults and teens is 50 percent higher in small-town America. Many rural states have higher rates of out-of-wedlock births than such urbanized states as New Jersey and California. Four out of five Americans choose to live in cities and their suburbs, and there has to be some reason for that. Americans will tolerate and even applaud lectures about the moral superiority of small towns—“as long as they don’t have to live in one.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
August 23 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include deficit dimness, steamroller-in-chief, and more
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
Viewpoint: Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winterfeature From The New York Times: “Nearly half of all people now live in countries where women, on average, give birth to fewer than 2.1 babies...
-
Snowden’s silence on Putin
feature If Edward Snowden truly is a moral paragon, then he should announce that he can no longer stomach Vladimir Putin’s oppressive behavior.
-
The irrelevance of the United Nations
feature Once again, the United Nations has been “rendered impotent by a small group of thugs.”
-
Millions of closeted gay men
feature “What percent of American men are gay?”
-
The smug confidence of libertarians
feature Why are most libertarians white dudes?
-
Seeing racism for what it is
feature Riley Cooper’s case shows just how poorly he and most other Americans understand “what a racist is.”
-
Searching for a libertarian paradise
feature Not one of the world’s 193 sovereign states—not even a tiny one—has adopted a full-on libertarian system.
-
Viewpoint: Juliette Kayyem
feature From The Boston Globe: “It is now clear that the Tsarnaev brothers had no strategic plan but to kill in a very public fashion....