Source:The Fiscal Times– I guess this is supposed to be Middle America.
“The United States is at war. No, I don’t mean in Afghanistan or Syria; I mean right here in River City. Right here where our opinion-makers and political leaders are doing their level best to demean and discredit historical American values. A new film, Nebraska, that parodies our heartland, provides exhibit A.
Nebraska played at the Lincoln Center Film Festival in New York recently to an enthusiastic audience. Directed by Alexander Payne, whose body of work includes The Descendants, Nebraska speaks volumes about the country we live in. While one reviewer lauded the picture as a “nuanced portrait of small-town life” that “contemplates the loss of the stout Midwest that once formed America’s backbone,” I found it mean-spirited and insulting.
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Only people who actually believe that Midwesterners are mute and moronic could think this movie portrays accurately or with sympathy the folks who live in between our coasts. Rather, the film paints small-town America as culturally deprived, small-minded and venal – inhabited by folks “clinging to guns or religion,” as Barack Obama so famously put it. It’s hard to picture Johnny Carson or Warren Buffet emerging from such a bleak landscape.
This is the great divide in the U.S. today. It is not between blacks and whites – or rich and poor; it is between the elites in California or New York and ordinary people who wouldn’t know a Wagyu beefburger from an heirloom tomato. The pundits who cannot imagine how anyone can live in Nebraska’s farm country also can’t imagine why anyone ever voted for George W. Bush; they do not and cannot understand the Tea Party. And, they are scornful of what they do not understand.
The elites do not celebrate the rich history of our plains states, the struggle to tame the frontier and to create the world’s most productive agricultural society. In their hearts, they also deride the assembly line workers who built our industrial base, the hard hats who kick back with Bud at the end of their shift, instead of cozying up to the New Yorker.”
From The Fiscal Times