Response to Fish’s The Andes Chronicles

In his latest blog post, Stanley Fish celebrates a idyllic little town in upstate New York for its lack of “crime” and its discussion groups. But it’s clear that the town is another Celebration, this time for liberals, where Celebration down in Florida is an “ideal” American town.

Here’s my response.

“Threatens to become a Mexican restaurant?”

Mr. Fish, this is a massive aporia, for it cracks open this pastoral…wide open, in my view.

What people seem to want from Andes are not discussion groups (which in my experience tend to end discussion once discussion gets interesting) or flower beds: I grew up on a pastoral idyll, in which the neighborhood bully, now a Chicago millionaire, destroyed the flower bed built by a neighbor’s child because, he said, boys aren’t supposed to plant flowers.

No, what they want is “no crime”, which is white American code for “no obstreperous minorities”.

They wish in fact to recreate a bourgeois pastoral which in fact never existed. It did not exist for my late mother, growing up poor on the lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s. It did not exist in Italy for my uncle, sent against the German lines in the last months of the war.

Even in the 1930s and the 1940s, the bourgeois pastoral was a cinematic fantasy, toward which people aspired because Hollywood ruthlessly destroyed the makers of alternative visions, or those who, like Orson Welles, showed the downside of the American dream.

Stanley, I’m almost as old as you, but I vastly prefer neighborhoods where there is life in all its diversity. My favorite neighborhoods where I live now in Hong Kong are Causeway Bay, one of the most densely populated places on earth, and Tsim Sha Shue, a diverse neighborhood of Chinese, Westerners, Arabs and Africans. My favorite neighborhood in Paris is the mixed Senegalese/French arondissement around the Gare du Nord.

I do not seek a white fantasy land as false in its liberal, progressive way as is “Celebration”, a Florida town constructed to be a redneck fantasy.

Sociologists have discovered that most people as they age prefer to live in vital cities because they cannot drive and can healthily walk to all needed services. While Andes appears to support walkers (except, perhaps, for American citizens guilty of Walking While Black, who may attract attention), life in Andes could easily become a nightmare for you once you are no longer able to drive.

If I were you, and I am not, I’d buy a flat on 72nd street opposite Central Park.