-By Warner Todd Huston
Speaking as a Chicagoan, I get my “second city” dander up every time I hear people who live in New York City patting themselves on the back and blathering aloud about how much better they are than the rest of us peons in flyover country. Usually this sort of arrogant bravado is reserved for New Yorkers talking to other New Yorkers, at least, usually seen as the sort of talk one would hear at the corner bistro or what one might encounter listening to what passes for conversation at highbrow dinner parties. So we don’t often see such self-congratulatory nonsense outside local New York media. While it isn’t seen so often in publications that serve the nation, Smithsonian Magazine has decided to give New York dance critic Joan Acocella the platform of their publication to tell us all how cool she thinks New York is and how people there are just naturally smarter and better than everyone else everywhere in the country… if she, a resident of New York City, does say so herself.
I suppose we need to give Acocella a bit of a pass, seeing as how she probably doesn’t know too many people from outside of New York City and, therefore, has a dearth of information by which to measure the rest of us. We should also probably realize that someone at the Smithsonian Magazine had space to fill and since Acocella is considered something of an “essayist,” it might be assumed that she could fill that space as well as any other. And, heck, she HAS to be ultra cool. She’s from New York City, after all. The blind spots all across the board here add up to Acocella and the good folks at the Smithsonian being perfect nominees for the 2008 Helen Keller award for cultural observance.
To start her little space filler, Acocella assures us that in her “experience” many people “believe that New Yorkers are smarter than other Americans.” She then casually assures us that “this may actually be true.” I’m feeling better informed already. What “experience” she bases all this assuredness on certainly is a question that immediately comes to the mind of any reader outside the Big Apple, naturally. One immediately wonders if it is the “experience” that she has talking to other New Yorkers who are as self-congratulatory as she? Most likely. Granted, it’s a bit silly to expect the denizens of any particular city to traipse about their own streets telling each other how stupid they all are, but there we have it; New Yorkers are “smarter that other Americans” in Acocella’s “experience.” It’s as anecdotalish as anecdotal evidence gets, don’t you think?
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