Recently I was watching a let’s play video for a historical simulation game and an advertisement for Masterclass came on.  Although I have never taken any of these I find the advertisements interesting enough to watch, and this particular one was for a class by Samuel L. Jackson for a course on acting.  One of the things he said particularly struck me, and it was not any of his comments about acting or the need to win jobs before one can interpret a character as one wishes, and that was his statement that his ambition as an actor was fired by a desire not to live and die in Chattanooga.  Now, it must be admitted that this is by no means a sentiment that is limited to Samuel L. Jackson.  A great many famous artists appear to have been fired by a desire to be living in a big ol’ city and to leave their rural and small town and small city backgrounds behind, and certainly to leave the sort of traditionalist approach of those areas behind.  Even those of us who have a fondness for some aspects of rural life often have intellectual and social ambitions that have led us to leave our own hometowns far behind.

I wonder if Samuel L. Jackson and others like him realize, though, that there are far worse things than to live and die in Chattanooga.  To be sure, one is likely not going to set cultural trends through one’s life or be rich and famous and a celebrity in such a place, but one is likely to live a decent and honorable life and make a difference in the lives of one’s friends and neighbors, and that is nothing to look contemptuously toward.  In my estimation it would be better to live a solid life in a city or town like Chattanooga than to die in a rent-controlled Nolita apartment in New York City or some other city like that of AIDS after a failed attempt to be an actor and maybe a role as an understudy or member of a chorus line in some Broadway adaptation.  Others may disagree, but an ordinary and decent life lived far from the bright lights and demented celebrity culture of our world is the sort of life that people should aspire to and not run away from.  It is by no means a surprise that our popular culture should be created by and large by people who hate small-town and perhaps somewhat old-fashioned American places, but that is something to be decried and lamented and mourned and not to be celebrated.

There are plenty of reasons why someone might not want to go back to one’s hometown without hating everything it stands for and actively seeking to ridicule it and to view it with hatred and contempt.  In many ways, the world of elites in institutions and of celebrities with regards to the press is a lot like a small town.  Everyone knows everyone’s business, and there is a great deal of posturing for position and competition for relative superiority among a great many people who view themselves as peers in an egalitarian sense.  The main difference, of course, is that small towns and their politics are viewed with contempt and seen as being of little influence in the world at large and the competition between cultural and political and economic elites has massive effects on national and world politics and the drama is the sort that is written about in breathless reportage and covered in the press and even frequently part of the historical record.  Perhaps people are unaware of the fact that their professed hatred of small-minded and narrowly focused small town gossip applies just as well, if not more, to the same sort of small world that they seek to inhabit by becoming celebrities or elites than it does to small towns where there can be a great deal of goodwill and kindness shown by neighbors to each other in the face of the common struggles of one’s existence.

Perhaps we might look at ourselves and wonder if the problem is not with our surroundings but with ourselves.  If we are eaten up with pride so that we are too good for our neighbors because we cannot relate to them, it is not as if we have ceased to be provincial, but rather our provincialism is based on people of particular interests or a particular educational or class background.   Given that we can only form deep ties with so many people over the course of our lives because we will lack the time to acquire close knowledge of more than that, it stands to reason that human beings have no choice but to be dwellers of small towns.  Whether we live in small towns where we know and are known by few, or whether we live with a high enough profile that many people know about us because of our fame and notoriety but where we know few people intimately and are known by equally few, we will be small town dwellers the same.  Our ability to create intimate and deep links is limited by the equal amount of time and varying amounts of attention and interest that we have, and so we are no better off with a famous name than we are worse off if we are known only to isolated and unfashionable populations.  We only think that we have moved on from small town life when we seek to make it big in Hollywood or any other place like it, and we deceive ourselves into thinking that we have transcended the smallness of mind that we may decry from past hometowns, only to realize that the smallest mind that constrains our view of the world is the mind that we cannot help but bring with us wherever we go.