But, oh, this word "elitist" --- Who's being elitist? Schwartz and Holtzman for not including a synopsis? For opening their show in San Francisco and then New York and not Pittsburgh?
The "elitistism" that both DR TD and I have referred to is an attitude that many of us find coming from some citizens of NYC, namely that what happens in that city is automatically important to everyone, and what happens elsewhere is of lesser importance. New York has the "best" theater, the "best" restaurants, the "best" of everything...
But does it really?
This placing of NYC on the pedistal is demeaning to those of us who do not live there, because it implys that the rest of us are not as worthy. Even the name, "New York," is taken to mean the city, not the state, the residents of Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo et al being also-rans.
This can stretch even to how news stories are reported. Take, for instance, the blackout earlier this year. Much of the Eastern seaboard was affected, and into the nation's heartland. Power outages ran for weeks in some areas. But the only reporting that took place reflected what was happening in NYC. Once that single city got it's power back, the rest of the nation was left dangling, fending for itself the best it could. The crisis that "mattered" was over, on to the next story. And the people that weren't in NYC were implicitly told that they didn't matter as much.
But let's examine this a little more closely. The power shortage didn't start in NYC; NYC was really just one player in the entire scheme of things. So the story that really mattered, the one that got ignored, was the one about how the entire power grid fell down in the first place, and how the people
who were not in NYC went about repairing the problem.
This is what those of us outside that single city face constantly.
Further aggravating this is what so many of the rest of us know but New Yorkers seem to ignore: almost everything in New York City is imported, and little is created within the city itself. Food, for instance. If NYC were, for some reason, cut off from the rest of the world, people would be starving to death within a week or two. The city does not create it's own food, it has to be brought in.
Cutting this back to something less drastic, let's consider cuisine. Go to any restaurant guide for NYC, and you'll find French restaurants, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, almost any nation in the world restaurants, even American restaurants with all of it's permutations like Southern and Tex-Mex. There are no listings for "New York" food. Delis, you suggest? Still no dice. I've been to Zabars, and the roots of that food are found in Eastern Europe. It's an import.
So, if everything in New York City is imported, why should the rest of us wait until we get to NYC to sample these things? Why not, instead, go directly to the source, and sample them in their pure form? The reason is because NYC, for a very long time, insisted that IT was the source and not just a clearing-house.
THAT was (and is) the elitist attitude, and for a very long time everyone fell for that story.
But that's not selling the way it used to. We've become aware of the "man behind the curtain," and his humbuggery is fooling us less and less.
So, why should we go to New York City?