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Country Humor Like wisdom from the East
By Mitch Jayne
Who in the world came up with the concept that all good ideas come from the East? I haven’t trusted anything from the East since I heard somebody use the expression “a New York minute” and found out that it means “instantly.” Most of us like a more leisurely minute, like the one teenagers use to say they’ll be off the phone in one of. Native Americans never measured time in minutes at all, and they said “An east wind blows no one good” to make us suspicious of items (like Columbus) that arrive from that direction. That saying is mostly used nowadays by farmers, fishermen and folks who live a little west of a volcano.
Now eastern folks are probably all right, but it stands to reason that if you stay on some island like Manhattan where you can’t grow any way but up, you begin to live inside “silos.” Before long you don’t credit people outside your silos because all the people you know are right there, stacked up handy and their opinions are stacked like yours.
See, the East didn’t give us Henry Ford, Mark Twain, the Mayo brothers or George Washington Carver. We even hatch presidents out of the middle of the country now and then, from places like Abilene, Independence and Little Rock.
We joke about Washington, D.C., because it’s ours and we can. But lordy, if it was part of New York City, we’d all pitch a fit and fall back in it! We’d rather make do with a wagon wheel-shaped, mind boggling, cluttered up mismatch of a capitol down south, because it represents a land so big no one besides astronauts have seen all of it. We’re so diversified; we grow polar bears at one end of the country and alligators at the other—and get opinions from every corner of the place.
D.C. is OK for a capitol, but I can’t help but think that if they’d picked the Midwest for it, at least the lawmakers could look out any window and see what most of this country does for a living.
Now I figure it’s OK to look to New York City for Wall Street market reports, Broadway musicals and the Statue of Liberty, but if you want America, you have to go west a little. Like paint, we look our best spread out.
I guess that’s why, when I watch the views from New York City, I keep remembering what an old auctioneer said years ago about dealing with big numbers of people; “I can sell a sorry horse in a crowd of people that no one person in the bunch would buy. A crowd will addle their own judgment.”
Maybe that’s my problem with getting my news from the East. Mercy, folks, those people, crowded up as they are, still want to buy all our horses for us. It’s a crying shame, but most Missourians my age don’t even feel much need to buy a saddle!
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