the minor landscape of glouster, oh

cartogram of county-by-county 2004 presidential election results, by Gastner, Shalizi, and Newman (U-Michigan)

BLDGBLOG posted yesterday on what he termed "the geography of american political campaigns" (see above for said geography), which turns out to be a fascinating topic:

I read that President Bush had stopped off this morning to speak about the credit crisis "with consumers and business people at Olmos Pharmacy, an old-fashioned soda shop and lunch counter" in San Antonio, Texas. The idea here - the spatial implication - is that Bush has somehow stopped off in a landscape of down-home American democracy. This is everyday life, we're meant to believe - a geographic stand-in for the true heart and center of the United States. But it increasingly feels to me that presidential politics now deliberately take place in a landscape that the modern world has left behind. It's a landscape of nostalgia, the golden age in landscape form: Joe Biden visits Pam's Pancakes outside Pittsburgh, Bush visits a soda shop, Sarah Palin watches ice hockey in a town that doesn't have cell phone coverage, Obama goes to a tractor pull. It's as if presidential campaigns and their pursuing tagcloud of media pundits are actually a kind of landscape detection society - a rival Center for Land Use Interpretation - seeking out obsolete spatial versions of the United States, outdated geographies most of us no longer live within or encounter. They find small towns that, by definition, are under-populated and thus unrepresentative of the United States as a whole; they find "old-fashioned" restaurants that seem on the verge of closing for lack of interested customers; they tour "Main Streets" that lost their inhabitants and their businesses long ago. All along they pretend that these landscapes are politically relevant.

What is fascinating here is the notion that political culture is responsible for or complicit in constructing an imaginary landscape -- "landscapes of nostalgia" -- which then become the terrain on which the political campaign is acted out. The question implied here though, by the two possiblities of responsiblity and complicity, is interesting. Surely this insight isn't one that has eluded the politicians -- surely they are aware that they are playing a game, campaigning in an imagined terrain. So there are two possibilites: either voters are being willfully deceived about the nature of modern america or they are willfully complicit in sustaining an illusion - because they WANT to participate in that illusion, or because something about that illusion is attractive to them. I think it's more of the latter than the former -- the comments on BLDGBLOG get a bit into why this might be so (references to the Jeffersonian ideal, etc.) and I might add that there could be very positive goods -- real goods -- contained within the construction, which people may rightly desire (a sense of community and place, an imagined social equilibrium, etc.).

BLDGBLOG finishes the post by arguing that, if the landscape history of a candidate is understood to be an essential part of a candidacy, but the nostalgic landscape is illusory, then perhaps what contemporary America needs are urban candidates (urban being understood not along the exurban-suburban-urban scale but in the juxtaposition between urban and rural, where exurban and suburban are part of urban because they are within the system of networks that compose urban areas).

I don't disagree with this conclusion (in fact, I think I endorse it), but I think that, without denying the fact that the urban, suburban, and exurban landscapes are all more 'representative' of demographic reality, we can also acknowledge that the people living in rural America (and the crumbling smaller cities embedded in rural America) have a real and valid complaint when they worry that they are being forgotten and left behind. (This can be acknowledged, I think, without making a judgment about whether that leaving behind can and should be fought, and, if so, how) I made a similar argument in my thesis project in explaining why I thought the study of small cities in Virginia -- Lynchburg, Staunton, Waynesboro, Winchester -- contributed to the understanding of a facet of urbanism that is rarely studied. Without getting into that argument (in part because I think it is self-evident), I will skip to my conclusion, which is that understanding these forgotten places is key to knowing what to do with, for, and about them.

Glouster, OH (Google Maps)

To that end (achieving understanding), I point out this superb piece of reporting by George Packer in the New Yorker, which focuses on southeastern Ohio. Excerpt:

"Glouster, a coal-mining town with a population of fewer than two thousand (and falling), lies hidden amid the gentle slopes and thick woods of southeastern Ohio's Appalachian hills. If the state is dying, Glouster was long ago left for dead. Over the past few decades, it has lost its Baptist church, grocery store, railroad depot, parking meters, four car dealerships, ten of its dozen bars, and--crucially--all but one of its deep mines. It's become the kind of town where several generations of white families live on welfare, and marijuana is the local cash crop. I was given a tour by Bob Cotter, who is seventy-four, and Pete Morris, seventy-one, both retired from the post office. We walked in a warm drizzle along Main Street, which was nearly deserted, with a few parked cars and no pedestrians. Half the storefronts were shuttered, although a local citizens' group had arranged hand-painted furniture and traditional quilts in the show windows of some of the vacant stores. It looked as if nothing had been built since the fifties. In the middle of town stood a prominent three-story brick building with the words "Sam & Ellen's Wonder Bar--Home of the 'Wonder Dog' " painted across an exposed side. Morris had once owned the bar before selling it to his cousin, in 1971; now it was boarded up. Farther down the street, a hotel, a restaurant, and a two-lane bowling alley had been demolished, leaving a weed-strewn lot.

...

Dave Herbert was a stocky, talkative building contractor in an Ohio State athletic jersey. At thirty-eight, he considerably lowered the average age in Bonnie's. "I'm self-employed," he said. "I can't afford to be a Democrat." Herbert was a devoted viewer of Fox News and talked in fluent sound bites about McCain's post-Convention "bounce" and Sarah Palin's "executive experience." At one point, he had doubted that Obama stood a chance in Glouster. "From Bob and Pete's generation there are a lot of racists--not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism here that Obama'd never win." Then he heard a man who freely used the " 'n' word" declare his support for Obama: "That blew my theory out of the water."

Extra credit here, as Ross Douthat talks about Packer's article and his/Reihan Salam's book Grand New Party, giving some suggestions about what to do with places like Glouster.

Posted by eatingbark at October 8, 2008 1:18 PM