It’s really not you, it’s me

I’m not going to make fun of the ad the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce bought in the Washington Post last week, the one that pretended to break up with Amazon. com, which wasn’t going to locate its second headquarters here anyway.

Because whether you thought the dad joke was funny or pathetic, at least it was pro-active. I don’t know whether it was cost-efficient, but advertising is a foreign land to me. Maybe it was worth it, and even if it wasn’t, at least it gave people something to talk about. People ought to consider Little Rock when they’re looking for a place to do business even if the Amazon.com deal was a non-starter. (We couldn’t give them an international airport, which shouldn’t bother us. We couldn’t give them the sort of educated, trained workforce they needed, which should.)

But other businesses should give Little Rock a chance. Because I really love it here.

(And not just because I read on Nextdoor Hillcrest that there’s a teenage boy skateboarding naked down Midland Street with his friend filming him.)

And I’ve got a basis for comparison. I counted it up once and then forgot the precise number. But I’ve had a lot of addresses in my life.

We moved a lot when I was a kid— we lived in south Georgia, upstate

New York, North Carolina, southern California and Louisiana. I spent summers with my uncle in San Francisco. I lived in Brazil for nearly a year.

I’ve lived in Texas. I had an apartment in Chicago I visited on the weekends. I think the best and worst places I ever rented were in Phoenix— when I first got in town I lived in a pay-by-theweek hotel that had evaporation coolers rather than air conditioners; I later moved into a swank high-rise on the 14th floor of a downtown building. (I didn’t have a TV but I had a great view.)

I lived in dorms and cheap apartments. Twice when I was a young man I rented a place from a friend of mine only to have that friend become my roommate after his wife kicked him out of the house.

We’ve lived in our house in Hillcrest for 18 years. But we still get around. We get to New York a couple of times a year, to Europe every other year or so. Los Angeles when we have to. I could be happy living in any number of places. But I’m very comfortable here.

We like it a lot. And Arkansas, too, though sometimes when I’m trying to describe the state to someone who isn’t familiar with it I’ll tell them that Little Rock is this small, remarkably cosmopolitan town surrounded by Arkansas. And they’ll laugh at that, and I’ll explain that Arkansas is pretty much what they think it is, absent the meanest stereotypes. It’s beautiful and poor. It’s surprising. And there’s nothing inherently shameful about being from a place so green and wild.

I’ll admit that my ideal of Little Rock—and Arkansas—is pretty circumscribed. My dogtrots run from the parking lot of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park and the Arkansas Arts Center through downtown and out along Markham Street and Kavanaugh. I buy liquor and tennis shoes in west Little Rock. I’m always surprised by the growth in Conway; we thread our way to Bentonville every so often.

I’m not Rex Nelson; I don’t know every diner and holler.

But I do know there’s something special about our state as well as an abundance of talent. But there’s also the sort of inferiority complex that afflicts most American places that aren’t New York City, Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. Our economic and cultural infrastructure isn’t as strong as it might be, we ought to be offering our kids better educational opportunities, and we’ve got the sort of social and medical problems that typically attend deprivation. There are sad places in Arkansas.

Let’s leave politics out of it for the moment, for politics doesn’t really matter so much as the people who think about politics all the time think it does; we’re a purple state in a purple country, and you can find all brands of moderation and extremism represented in even the smallest towns. I live in a fairly well-off progressive bubble that’s next door to a more well-off conservative bubble, and there’s not much tension as we move from zone to zone. I know there are good folks outside my bubble and a few nasty pieces of work who keep their lawns mowed.

The main thing about Arkansas is it is not so different than anywhere else in America; we work about as hard and struggle just as much to do right as other Americans. And like other Americans we could probably do a lot better if we didn’t find it easy to listen to folks telling us how we’re victims who are looked down on by “elites” or whatever.

Sure, there are people who will make fun of your accent and assume you’re second-rate because you’re from Arkansas, but that’s a demonstrably stupid thing to do that says more about their insecurities and inadequacies than anything about you. (None of my smart friends who went to Harvard will have any problem with me pointing out that some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met graduated from Harvard. Because they’re smart, they realize that schools confer credentials, not intelligence.)

And yes, you could see Little Rock and Arkansas as places that are at certain disadvantages. We don’t have an ocean; we have historically been an agricultural state with rocky soil. We have a particularly virulent strain of American anti-intellectualism and populations who have survived for generations on scant hope of ever bettering their situations. We have all the problems most places in America have, and we have fewer resources with which to combat them.

Idon’t know about you and your situation, but I know there’s no reason I can’t do my job here as well as I could do it anywhere else in the world. I’m not limited by Little Rock or by Arkansas, just by the limits of my own talent, aspiration and work ethic.

Lots of people think we’re podunk and there’s not much we can do about that. You don’t win anyone’s respect by demanding it. You have to demonstrate your competence, prove your worth.

Enough of us do that; we’ll be all right. Whether we attract any new industry or not.