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This is a cautionary tale. I love to read the cultural criticism of earlier eras -- notice the examples I've cited here in the past couple of weeks -- but it's far too easy, in some cases, to assume that the authors' observations are sound. (George Orwell, I'm looking at your boys' weeklies and you!)
Wanting real-life people to behave like your favorite stereotype of their socio-economic class (cf. D.H. Lawrence's fruitless international search for a peasantry sufficiently in possession of the "vital life-throb") is hardly a defunct pastime: see this wonderful critique of the "facts" reported in David Brooks' infuriating article "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in December of 2001.
This is the piece where he purports to compare the prevailing culture of the "Red" Franklin County in Pennsylvania and the "Blue" Montgomery County, where I happen to live. I knew it was rife with overgeneralizations, glib telling details that don't tell the whole story, and mistaking the part for the whole in ways that seem uniformly motivated by the assumptions of the author's worldview, but I didn't realize just how thoroughly false it was until I read this Philadelphia Magazine article. It's a corker! (via Crooked Timber)
PS. The comments of that Crooked Timber article also have some interesting stuff to say about sprawl in my hometown of Pittsburgh.
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