Let Me Tell You About Small Town Values

[Prophet 451]

I grew up in a small fishing town on the south-west coast of Britain. Yeah, it's England but the small town mentality is universal. The Republicans (and more Democrats than I'd like) lately have spent a lot of time talking about small town values so let me tell you about those small town values.

There's nothing especially admirable about small town people. Politicians like to talk like small towners are the salt-of-the-earth, backbone-of-the-country, the much glorified small town volk. You scratch those small towners and you'll find that those values aren't exactly admirable. Values like racism. Small towns tend not to be ethnically diverse, you tend not to come across many black or Asian or Hispanic people in small towns. There's always exceptions of course but by and large, the only minority those small towners ever talk to is the guy who runs the local newstand or takeout. There's a natural human tendancy to feel comfortable around people who look like ourselves but small towns tend to be so white that racism runs rampant. Where I grew up, telling someone quibbling about money to "stop being such a Jew" was still a common phrase.

Know what else you can find in small towns? Homophobia and lots of it. The town Sarah Palin ran into the ground had a population of around nine thousand people. That's about half the size of my hometown (Brixham in Devon, it's on Wiki). No-one comes out of the closet in towns that small. Oh, there's probably a few gay people quietly living their lives. In fact, I'd be surprised if there weren't but people aren't openly gay in small towns. They don't talk about their partners because in any street, any bar, you'll find a few dozen guys who think homosexuality is a better reason than most to start a fight. Where I grew up, the standard response to suspecting someone was gay was "kick 'is 'ead in!". Violent homophobia is almost a universal trait in small towns.

Want some more small town values? Ignorance is probably a good place to start. Here, schooling is compulsary until you turn sixteen and home schooling is almost unheard of. What you get is classes of around thirty bored kids who don't want to be there, taught by underpaid and overworked teachers who either get ground down or have just plain given up in the first place. Remember peer pressure from when you were a teenager? The pressure in small town schools is actively hostile to learning. Schools in small towns don't teach kids because the other kids won't let them. Ignorance is the rule, lauded and rigidly enforced by bullying. No, schools in small towns exist for sports and to give parents somewhere to shove teenagers for six or seven hours a day.

I wasn't surprised when Bristol Palin's pregnancy was announced. Growing up in a small town, the only things there are for a teenager to do are drink, drug and fuck. There were around twenty girls in my class when we left school at sixteen. Within a couple of years, almost all of them had kids of their own. We drank like fish, we snorted anything we could lay hands on and yeah, we screwed like rabbits. When the only nightlife is pubs you can't get into, what else is there to do? The official age of consent in Britain is sixteen but I don't think there was more than a couple of kids in my class who actually were virginal when we left school. Most had lost their virginity at fourteen or fifteen and more than a few were pregnant at that age as well. I guess you'd call us wild but we weren't, not by the standards of the small town we lived in. We were normal. I don't know how many laws we broke but it was probably a lot. We fucked and drank underage, took whatever we could get hold of, shoplifted, burgled. Are you surprised at that admission? You shouldn't be. Most small towns are poverty-stricken, especially if their whole income rests on one or two industries. The only times you see a copper in those towns, they're either moving you along or hassling you for, well, for being a teenager.

The people in those towns aren't bad, I should stress that but they tend to be ignorant, bored by high-minded policy discussions. They tend to fixate on details and be easily distracted. Trying to win their votes isn't about appealing to their better natures, it's about reflecting their prejudices and bribing them with promises of lower taxes or more funding for the town.

Religion didn't play much of a role in Brixham, it tends not to in England. We're a fairly secular country by-and-large but small towns tend to be conservative and we had a couple of churches. Two churches and nine pubs, what does that tell you about small town values? I know why both candidates are sucking up to small town voters, the arrangement of votes in both our countries give those voters a worrying amount of power but if you ever want to see the full milk of human bitterness, pettiness and prejudice, you can find it anywhere but you're most likely to find it just under the surface of small town values.