david cross, the us, and tulsa

“you can go look at my rout­ing sched­ule and I was in Lin­coln, Ne­bras­ka, and Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, and Chan­dler, Ari­zona. I was in Far­go, North Dako­ta, Sioux Falls – much small­er, con­ser­v­a­tive ar­eas, lots of them. And those peo­ple were, I think, elat­ed, so thank­ful that a guy did come to their town and say those things, be­cause they’re in the mi­nor­i­ty. And I grew up in that mi­nor­i­ty. I grew up in the South, in Roswell, Geor­gia, and it was heav­i­ly white, Bap­tist, con­ser­v­a­tive. And the idea that some­body would come there and say those things that I said cre­at­ed an at­mos­phere where some peo­ple would walk out, and sud­den­ly they weren’t in the mi­nor­i­ty. For an hour and a half, they were the majority”
—David Cross on why his com­e­dy tour – Mak­ing Amer­i­ca Great Again! – pissed off peo­ple right and left
 

David Cross makes the same kind of point that I keep say­ing al­beit to a dif­fer­ent end: if you’ve lived your whole life in San Fran­cis­co or LA or NYC I’d wa­ger you have zero idea what most of the Unit­ed States is ac­tu­al­ly like. 

And short vis­its to the in­te­ri­or don’t count. There is noth­ing wrong with that on its face. We all have the lim­i­ta­tions of our own points of view. The prob­lem is when you start ex­pect­ing to ex­trap­o­late your world out to map onto the rest of America. 

As if Tul­sa is just SF with small­er build­ings. And the rea­son that is a prob­lem is that it ig­nores that a lot of those places have a ton of catch­ing up to do to break free of even mid­dle-late 20th cen­tu­ry attitudes. 

Not that there aren’t pro­gres­sive pock­ets through­out, but the vast ma­jor­i­ty out there aren’t just go­ing to ac­cept 4th wave fem­i­nism (or what have you) just be­cause we yell at them about it. And yes I am guilty of it too. This is­n’t to say we stop lob­by­ing for what we be­lieve in, but we do need to rec­og­nize that those things are by no means a giv­en every­where else.
 
 

—ja­son malmberg

Flom­mist Ja­son Malm­berg is a sim­ple man who be­lieves in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art some­times. Copy­right © 2016 Ja­son Malmberg.

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