Category: Hardscrabble Mon Valley Watch || By

One of the disappointments so far of the Tube City Almanac Hardscrabble Mon Valley Watch has been a relative lack of reporters actually visiting the Mon Valley.

Twenty years ago, this place would have been crawling with TV crews, looking for closed steel mills to report from. Chiodo's Tavern in Homestead would have been lousy with correspondents from the Chicago Tribune.

Now, Chiodo's is a Walgreen's, and the reporters all go to Johnstown and Altoona.

On the other hand, I'm delighted to see The New York Times is living down to its reputation as a bastion of East Coast elitism. I can always count on the Times to look down its snoot at the peasants.

. . .

"Gritty" is surpassing "hardscrabble" as the word of choice when describing Pennsylvania cities, as Michael Powell of the Times illustrates:

So in Johnstown, a small, economically depressed city tucked in a valley hard by the Little Conemaugh River, Mr. Obama on Saturday spoke to the gritty reality of a city that ranks dead last on the Census Bureau's list of places likely to attract American workers. His traveling companion, Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, introduced the candidate as an "underdog fighter for an underdog state."

Note the word choices: "Tucked hard," "dead last," "small," "gritty reality."

I've finally figured out why these stories grate on me. The hidden message is, "why are you people so stupid as to live in Johnstown?" (Or McKeesport, or Braddock, or Altoona, or Ambridge.)

Maybe we're not stupid. Maybe we can't afford to move. Maybe we have to take care of our families.

Or maybe we like it here. Maybe we feel a sense of loyalty to our hometowns. Maybe we feel like we can make it better.

You know what, New York Times? I've been to New York, and I've been to Altoona. And while you may take Manhattan, I'll take Monaca, the 'Port and Neville Island, too.

. . .

Close behind the New York Times in elitism is Time magazine. Now, maybe I'm engaging in some stereotypes of my own, but in my mind, the typical Time reporter remains Roland Burton Hedley III of "Doonesbury."

Hedley was memorably introduced in a series of mid-1970s "Doonesbury" strips in which Zonker and other students at Walden College convinced him the hippie movement was making a comeback. (Hedley thought that a lilac bush was actually a marijuana plant.)

In "Doonesbury," Hedley represents every elitist, superficial reporter, and his fingerprints are on this story:

"If there aren't major policy differences, it's about perceptions, it's about who is feels your pain," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Stanford Washington Research Group, which tracks economic policy issues. "Hillary is slightly better; she appeals to beer drinkers, Obama appeals to chardonnay drinkers."

You know, we do drink wine in Pennsylvania. Hell, my grandfather used to make it in the basement. But I guess "Hunky red" isn't what the connoisseurs at Stanford Washington Research Group consider a fine vintage.

. . .

While "gritty" has taken a clear lead in political dispatches from Pennsylvania, "hardscrabble" continues to pop up. Mike Dorning of the Chicago Tribune worked it into this report:

Barack Obama hit the bowling lanes and walked the factory floor, hoisted the local brew and even nursed a calf as he introduced himself over the weekend to the working-class residents of hardscrabble towns in the valleys and mountains of southern Pennsylvania ... (at) Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona ... Obama exchanged his polished black oxfords for a pair of size 13-and-a-half blue-and-white Velcro bowling shoes.

Thirteen-and-a-half? Damn, my man's got some big feet. I wear a 12-and-a-half, and I thought those were barges.

You know what they say about guys with big feet.

Right. We have to pay more for shoes.

(Tip o'the Tube City hard-hat: Dave M. and Brian O.)

. . .

I don't want to be too hard on the Times, whose Paul Vitello turned in a very thoughtful story last week on a subject most of us choose to ignore, although he did make sure to work "abandoned steel mills" and "blue collar" into his report:

(In) the first presidential campaign with an African-American as a serious contender, there may be a new gyration in the way voters think, the need to explain the vote against the candidate who is black ...

In a place like Latrobe, which the census says is 99 percent white, the race issue is almost an unexplored country that people visit like tourists with a phrase book. Driving past abandoned steel mills and a brewery and through a neatly swept downtown where tulips have sprouted along the 19th-century railroad line that spawned the city, diversity is mainly in the exterior paint of the residential bungalows.

Vitello quotes many Latrobe residents saying that although they couldn't vote for Obama, they're "not racist" and "it's not about race." One of them even uses a variation of the famous "some of my best friends were black."

I'm not going to jump to conclusions. But I've noticed that often when someone says, "it's not about race," it's about race. And if they start a comment with the words, "Now, I'm no racist," whatever they're about to say is usually incredibly racist.

(Hard-hat tip: Alert Reader Jeff.)

. . .

Apparently they don't listen to Billy Joel songs at The Wall Street Journal, because they don't know that in Allentown, they're closing all the factories down. A Journal writer found a garment factory there amidst the "depressed manufacturing and coal-mining towns" in "the nation's Rust Belt."

After "gritty," the words "Rust Belt" seem to be the most popular description of Pennsylvania.

I suppose the "Rust Belt" is between the Red Belt and the Orange Belt, but what roads does it connect?

. . .

Finally, Dale McFeatters, whose father (I think) was a cartoonist and business writer for the Pittsburgh Press, shares our pain in a column for Scripps-Howard News Service:

There's something about Pennsylvania, and especially Pittsburgh, that makes the cable-TV talking heads adopt this faux blue-collar persona. They try to project a sense of "I may be a multimillionaire celebrity with a designer haircut, professional makeup and famous friends, but at heart I'm just a rugged workingman -- maybe a steelworker doing something that involves lots of sparks -- who likes to belly up to the bar of the Legion Hall for a shot and a beer."

(O)utsiders seem to find the place irresistibly exotic. Wrote a New York Times reporter, "Question to our Keystone State readers: What is it with this Pennsylvania fetish for bizarre world food combinations? In Johnstown, this New Yorker encountered the artery-clogging prospect of cheese fries."

Cheese fries? I'm thinking he was either overcome by the sheer foreignness of Johnstown, a city that puts the grit in gritty, or else he was the victim of an overly sheltered childhood. Cheese fries are readily available all over Manhattan, although perhaps not at the kinds of places where he dines.

Maybe Pennsylvania is as strange as the national press thinks and growing up there you just don't notice it. I was back in Pittsburgh for a convention of mainly out-of-staters and the hotel served what it called a Pittsburgh buffet -- city chicken (breaded veal on a stick), kielbasa, stuffed cabbage, pierogi. The guests seemed to find this novel and unusual fare. I thought, "I'm back in my high-school cafeteria."

Ask permission before photographing the natives.

A-freaking-men, Dale.