When I read Lisa Jones’ essay, I wasn’t
sure whether I was more offended by what she wrote about the West,
where I now live, or Vermont, where I used to live. The West she
ridicules as callow, uncultured, easily excited to a frenzy by
images of its violent past; Vermont she insults with false praise
as a bucolic paradise of pastoral civility.
I wonder if
Ms. Jones knows how many Vermont state legislators were voted out
of office because of their support of Howard Dean’s gay union
bill; or how many towns in Vermont have tried to increase the size
of residential building lots to three acres in order to keep
lower-income people out. The maple syrup, leaf-peeping,
green-mountain image of Vermont is a postcard ideology obscuring
the fracture line between wealth and poverty that runs throughout
the state and much of New England.
It is surprising that
HCN, “The paper for people who care about the West,” would publish
an article so disrespectful of the people of the West. Jones’
description of her and her sweetie slumming with “other folks,
old-timers and their spouses,” snickering and giggling at the
shameless schlock of a Western epic, isn’t High Country News,
it’s the high country of elitism; the world as seen, not
closely and compassionately, but through a peephole of privilege
from Paonia to Burlington.
James Kelly
Sante
Fe, New Mexico
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Essay insults easterns and westerners.
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