Not New Jersey. AOL hilites an alarmist bunch of bull today about natural disasters with the heading "No State Is Risk-Free: Disasters Strike Everywhere". No, not really. The best they could do in the way of natural 'disasters' that my state, New Jersey, is "At Particular Risk for" is "Heat waves, hurricanes, ice storms, nor'easters". What a load of crap.
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Let's list some of the things New Jersey is not at risk for: earthquakes, tornados, mudslides, forest fires or brush fires of consequence, tsunamis, golfball-size (or larger) hail, dust storms, or much of any other extreme of nature. We get a glancing blow from a hurricane every 20 years or so, but while the rest of the country rumbles and burns, roofs and entire trailer parks being swirled into the clouds, New Jersey watches the havoc on television secure in the knowledge that none of that will ever happen to us.
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Heat waves? We have air conditioning.
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Ice storms? Big friggin' deal. They last one day and cause a few broken hips and occasional multiple deaths from pileups, but 5 or 12 deaths, not 3,000 as in Hurricane Katrina.
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Nor'easters? Rain. Big deal.
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The late, great Johnny Carson used to joke that people who move to L.A. from other parts of the country miss the change of seasons, and countered that 'We have our seasons: fire season, earthquake season, mudslide season...'. We in NJ ('enjay', as in "enjoy") have just the plain-old four seasons: a bracing but usually not bitter winter, glorious spring, beautiful summer with easy access to the Jersey Shore or the many lakes of our northwestern mountains, and resplendent autumn, when leaves of gold and red climb the hillsides. 'Small' wonder that more people per square mile want to live in New Jersey than in any other state of the Union.
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I left NJ for New York City in my youth, but returned in my (impending) old age. Manhattan is for the young, who can stand the crowds and noise, and who have some chance of successfully outrunning the dangers. New Jersey is a step away from the madness, still close to the action but apart from the unpleasantness of too many people jammed together in too small a space. NJ is a place for unpretentious people who don't have to prove anything to anyone. We are 'comfortable in our skins', and don't need to reside in some ritzy exurb to feel good about ourselves. That is not to say there aren't very wealthy areas of New Jersey (Rumson, Short Hills, etc.), just that we don't have the enclave mentality. Rich New Jerseyans can leave their home and venture into ordinary towns nearby without feeling demeaned or endangered.
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Even those of us (we won't mention anybody by name) who are in Who's Who in America can relax and be ourselves, just ordinary Americans in the Urban Heartland, that state midway in the huge Boston-to-Washington megalopolis in which the bulk of the political and media power of the Nation, and, by extension, much of such power in the entire Western world, reside.
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New Jersey was central to the Revolutionary War too, and earned the name "Cockpit of the Revolution" for its crucial battles of Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth, and Washington's winter campground at Morristown.
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North Jersey comprises over a fourth of the Nation's largest metropolis, the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area (which is in truth basically a bistate area, Connecticut contributing little to the region's population), and South Jersey contributes mightily to the majesty of the City of Brotherly Love.
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The Midwest is proud of its nickname "The Heartland", but it's not really the Heartland of this country anymore, if ever it was, in anything but myth. The culture of the United States today is "bicoastal", dominated by the great concentrations of mobile Americans who have concentrated themselves, thru migration, in the great urban centers of the East and West Coasts. New York is the actual, emotional capital of the Nation; Washington, only the administrative center of the Federal Government, a much less consequential thing. The New Year begins in Times Square, not on the Mall, and when a national hero captures the Nation's heart, s/he gets a ticker-tape parade on Broadway, not Pennsylvania Avenue. Dow Jones tallies the Nation's economic stats more tellingly and impellingly than the Commerce Department. It is in fact no contest as to which city on the East Coast is most important to the Nation. New York wins hands down.
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On the West Coast, L.A. has replaced the former metropolis of the West, San Francisco, thanks to the entertainment industry's impact on public consciousness, and L.A. has become the Nation's "Second City", eclipsing the former holder of that title, fabulous, muscular Chicago, for the slender reason that L.A. is warm much of the year but Chicago's temperatures plunge to 10 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit mid-winter. Americans are weather sissies. We don't like severe cold. So Chicago, a great city by anyone's estimation, has been left in the dust by that hussy in the sun, "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora[,] la Reina de los Ángeles[,] sobre El Río Porciuncula ("The Town of Our Lady[,] Queen of the Angels[,] on the River Porciuncula"). Today we call it simply "Los Angeles", tho we might even more simply have called it "Mary" (you know: "Holy Mary, Mother of God" — the lady whom Spaniards regarded as "Queen of the Angels"). Fitting is it then, perhaps, that the old British ocean liner Queen Mary is docked at Long Beach, the second city of the Second City's metropolitan area (as my noble city, Newark, is the second city of the First City's metropolitan area).
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The United States today is far more urban than rural. (For this purpose, suburbs are non-rural, thus "urban".) In the olden days of early urban sprawl, suburbs were "the country" — what later came to be called "exurbs". But that long ago changed, and we now have not only continuous suburban development outward in all directions for tens of miles from the major cities of the Nation, but even the "sluburb", suburbs that have gone so bad that they have become slums with lawns. We pay too much homage to the Jeffersonian, anti-city ideal, in which the pastoral virtues of a bygone era define what is good, whose preservation is regarded as the essence of conservatism.
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The present-day United States is much more like New Jersey than North Dakota or Iowa, but the myth of a rural America is crystallized in Grant Wood's famous painting "American Gothic". There is no modern, urban replacement.
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When Kansas endorses creationism, that is not proof that the Heartland is conservative, because Kansas is not the Heartland. New Jersey is. And New Jersey is about as blue as Blue States come. We're like a sane Massachusetts.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,378.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:26 AM