This past Sunday, Frank Rich wrote a typically snooty,
self-absorbed, preeningly obnoxious essay
in the New York Times, claiming that New York City is the
“real” capital of the United States, and a far superior capital
city to Washington, D.C. Almost instantly, a number of writers whom
I really do like (like Rod Dreher and Jonah Goldberg) started
responding on National Review Online’s blog, “The
Corner.”
To the lot of them, I say, get real. And I point out the
obvious.
New York City is the place where a whole lot of people with
adolescent delusions of grandeur go to work out those delusions
with others of their kind, and persist in those delusions well into
purported adulthood, well beyond the point when any truly mature
person would have abandoned them. Yes, all sophisticated societies
have a place for this kind of thing — it happens in Paris and
London and Rome, too. And somebody has to make movies and
television shows and run advertising agencies and book publishers.
And if you are drawn addictively to the business of looking down
your nose at people, then such a business must undoubtedly have a
capital, and New York is that capital in the United States.
Washington, D.C. attracts those for whom federal government is
an addiction and the juice of life, when in fact the glory of the
United States, even in these over-governmented times, is that the
great majority of us mostly never think of our government at all,
and don’t have to. Try that in Iraq, or in Taliban Afghanistan, for
example, or Zimbabwe, or even Singapore. For most of us, the idea
of living in a government city carries about the same attraction as
spending our lives flying on commercial airlines — hermetically
sealed, indoor liberal hell, and you can have it.
The partisans of New York and D.C. living tout cultural
attractions, 24-hour everything, multi-cultural attractions like
food and entertainment, excitement, intellectual stimulation, the
world of ideas — we all know the constellation. I have had better
talk in Massachusetts suburbs than in either of those urban
colossi. You can eat well anywhere. (The best restaurant of any
kind I’ve ever seen is in Springfield, New Jersey.) Medium-sized
cities are easier to get in and out of, no small consideration with
children in tow, and therefore offer up more frequent visits to
shows and museums, plus more wonderful easy treats (Boston’s water
shuttles, for example) for the visitor from the immediate
neighborhood. And major cities like New York, D.C., Paris, Rome,
and the rest are inevitably surrounded by a blasted 50-mile moraine
of ex-urban ruin. Jersey Meadowlands, anyone?
Let’s look instead at what you can’t do — or can’t do with any
ease — if you live in New York or D.C.
You can’t play golf.
You can’t play softball without a wearisome process of signing
up for leagues and teams and fields.
If you’re a middling musician, like me, you can’t find anybody
to play with on a casual basis, because all the good guys are
gaunt-eyed with constant work, and generally have a bad attitude.
In the Boston area, I can play with anybody. The same thing is
generally true around Austin or Nashville or Richmond or
Savannah.
You can’t send your kids unsupervised outside to play. There’s
nowhere to ride a bike for a kid without worrying about getting
beat up and having your wheels stolen.
You can’t send your kids to the public schools.
There’s nowhere to park. Yes, yes, I know all about mass
transportation; I lived in Manhattan for six years and let my
driver’s license lapse. But the free market spoke on the
transportation question 50 years ago. The car won. Out of nearly
300 million people in the country, what percentage ride trains and
busses anywhere? And no, I’m not begging the question because of
the lack of mass transportation elsewhere. We like it that way.
You can’t see the stars. If you’re a photographer, you know
that, at high noon on a clear day, there are two whole stops less
light in Manhattan than in, say, Minneapolis.
Time and life itself mitigate against the great cities. Yes,
they offer a great adventure for the young, the childless, the
ambitious, the starry-eyed with show biz dreams. But most of us
grow out of that, and cities too are growing out of it. Frank Rich
cites the 9/11 glories of New York’s response to terrorism, very
real. But very real too is the ever-more rapid exodus of the great
corporations from Manhattan.
D.C. will continue to be D.C., half-monument, half-city, all
embalmed. One thing alone might save it: trading popular
sovereignty for tax-exempt status could create a new Hong Kong on
the Potomac. That’s not likely. For New York, that city is poised
forever on the knife edge of bankruptcy. How long can it live in
the Weimar excesses of last days? Not long.
