NP: Bears vs. Lions

In light of the Olympics decision and conservatives' malevolent glee over Chicago's loss, I've been thinking more about this notion of the GOP essentially waging war on America's cities as their overall strategy. Clearly, the right feels they are inoculated against the claim that they are being unpatriotic because, at some fundamental level, they don't actually believe that Chicago is even part of America.

Cities have a very peculiar identity in this country, I think, and there was some electoral data even ahead of the 2008 election that had proximity to a major city as a key determining factor in voting trends. Cities are were the melting pot of American is most-fully realized, which means that it's where the heterogeneity of the population is the greatest. Which means, in turn, that cities are starkly in contrast to those more homogeneous parts of the country where Fox News and Glenn Beck seem to find their most rabid supporters.

This is why I find it odd that someone I know from New York brought up the recent school violence here and how it's making us look so terrible, because that brush isn't just painting us. It's painting Manhattan, too. Cities are seen by outsiders as where crime and violence are much worse than the rest of America, as places where it's inherently dangerous to live. All while they ignore things like meth labs in their own backyards, of course.

For a chunk of these people, though, there's an unspoken clause in this formulation, which is that "cities are dangerous, because that's where black people live." This is the where I think that the likes of David Brooks and Joe Klein have glossed over how the racial component manifests itself. You could maybe expand it to "where people who are not like me live" and call it more xenophobia than racism, but it's still an ugly sentiment.

Back on the subject of the Olympics, none other than heck-of-a-job-Brownie makes the more policy-based dogmatic critique of Obama, in that Brazil won the games because they cut taxes more than anybody else. I'm not sure that holds up, either, but it seems much more serious by comparison.

And if you're looking for a good, substantive take on why I won't be able to sublet wherever I'm living for a ton of money in seven years, check out USA Today.