Rural Michigan is More American

What wonders a month in the country can do for a body! Well, maybe not a month, but towards the end of a two week sojourn in rural northern Michigan, one cannot help but notice certain differences between rural and urban areas.

Even though celebrations of our nation's birth are larger and noisier here in Detroit than in small town America and small town Michigan, there is something quaint about Fourth of July parades and such in outstate areas. We mean quaint in a very good way: with the local veterans marching during the Cedarville, Michigan Fourth of July parade, well, you could hear the cheers for them well before you actually saw the veterans themselves, young and old, come into view. Without much doubt, the main reason for that is that everyone knows everyone, at least by sight if not in person, in small towns. That kind of empathy simply isn't available in places like Detroit. That's no fault of Detroit's, of course. It's too big to offer that sort of familiarity. There is an understandable yet regrettable insulation between local (to Detroit) armed services members and the rest of the city. We simply cannot know everyone here as is it possible to in rural Michigan.

The local news reporting seems more homespun as well. When reporting on recent activities in Afghanistan, a local news anchor (on a TV station out of Traverse City) remarked about 'engaging the enemy'. It is a phrase which we don't think we've ever heard from such cosmopolitan areas as Detroit, and definitely not from the national news. Yet the Afghan insurgents are our enemy. Why can't we find it in ourselves to pass such remarks in Detroit or nationwide?

Presumably, it is to maintain a certain objectivity, and we understand that. But what is objectivity if not to state the plain truth? The insurgents are our enemy. May as well say so. Surely it doesn't hurt any decent sense of being objective to pass such an obviously true remark.

Again, it would seem that we are dealing with another rural/urban issue. But we cannot help but wonder if perhaps something sort of vaguely sinister is going on. National news reporters, and even more local yet big city newscasters such as we still have in Detroit, cannot find it in themselves to make such admittedly judgmental statements which by their nature must, however slightly, favor the actions of the United States. Maybe they excuse it on the grounds of not wishing to incite the enemy; yet the enemy certainly does not appear to need greater incitement.

Maybe it's all PC. Or maybe they simply cannot bring themselves to be more open and honest about what they actually think about the United States and her role in the world. To call Taliban insurgents or Iraqi terrorist enemies sounds too much like putting halos around the US troops and enshrining US policy. Perhaps, deep in their hearts, they really do not want to appear too close to Washington on military issues. They love their mental vision of America, just not the United States itself in what she is actually doing in the world.

That is where we are left to believe that rural America knows and understands her nation better than big city or national types do. Hessel and Cedarville Michigan know themselves better than, know America better than, Carmen Harlan or the NBC Nightly News does. They are, the rural and outstate residents of ours and other states, more aware, more immediately conscious, of the struggles of the United States than big important news reporters think they are. Their own vaunted objectivity gets in the way of their self assured objective reporting.

That is the American media in a nutshell. It is one tough nut to crack.