DADWAGON

The American public, and especially its elected representatives, continue to have a bias against city life. Our politicians consistently talk about Middle American values, privileging Main Street over any other street, and (in the case of certain vice-presidential candidates) the way in which our small towns grow good people. (Never mind who she was quoting, and what other ideas he liked.)

And then one of these stories comes along, in the same vein as the one Theodore flagged yesterday. Apparently it is not uncommon, in small-town Ohio, for parents to call the cops when their kids won’t do household chores. Some sort of scared-straight thinking comes into play. And the police are willing to play along! The police chief says he’ll send a cop out to the house in question, and give the kid a talking-to.

First of all, I cannot believe that residents of these small, conservative-leaning towns (“keep the government out of our lives”; “parents, not the nanny state, should raise children”) are, as soon as the kids act up, willing to lean on those institutions that they ostensibly hate. But also? A lot of those same people consider New York City, and city life in general, a swamp of dysfunction, where well-off parents produce entitled monsters and poor parents produce welfare queens. Back atcha, folks. I see your small-town values, and admit that big-city ways have their downside–but at least I am not calling the NYPD when my kid won’t sit still, and do not plan to, no matter how squirmy he gets.

I also fixated on one detail in this story: that the family is named Homer. Which, in my head, made every subsequent quote come out in Dan Castelleneta‘s voice.