Imagine No Big Cities
By: Dennis Prager
The seed author has a great point. Cities are the source of all that is wrong and immoral in history and in America too. Bad and dangerous ideas originate in them. They are where most bad ideas come from, the source of violent crimes, riots, looting, incivility, and repression of dissent.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Source: AP Photo/Paul Sancya
Remember John Lennon's silly song, "Imagine"?
Well, here's my (much shorter) version.
Imagine if some of the biggest cities in America seceded from their states. Imagine Illinois without Chicago, Pennsylvania without Philadelphia, California without Los Angeles or San Francisco, New York state without New York City, or Texas without Houston, Dallas or San Antonio.
Those states would lose a major tax base and some of their best orchestras and other artistic institutions. But the gains in quality of life would completely offset any financial or artistic losses.
Big cities have been and continue to be centers of destructive ideas, and the people living in them are generally coarser and often just plain meaner. Of course, there are decent individuals in big cities and obnoxious people outside of big cities. But having a greater proportion of nice to obnoxious is more likely in smaller cities and other non-urban areas. Everyone reading this knows that one is more likely to be treated warmly when entering a store or dining in a restaurant in Cooperstown, New York, than in Brooklyn, New York; in Laramie, Wyoming, than in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
As regards bad and destructive ideas, big cities almost hold a monopoly.
What bad modern idea did not originate in a big city? And what bad idea is more likely to be believed in Laramie than in Philadelphia? Between city-dwellers and residents of small towns and rural communities, which group is more likely to embrace the belief that men give birth? Which group is more likely to believe the lie that America was "founded" in 1619 in order to perpetuate slavery? Which population is more likely to strongly advocate that people marry before having children? Which group is more likely to produce pampered, spoiled children? Which group is more likely to cherish liberty?
The list of differences between the Laramies of America and the big cities of America is long indeed. A study by the University of Indiana Center on Philanthropy concluded, "Rural donors donated a statistically significant higher percentage of their income to charity than urban donors did."
It is not surprising that so many of Israel's great prophets were shepherds, the most rural of folk. Moses, the man who brought the world the Ten Commandments, the most influential moral code in history, was a shepherd. Rutgers University professor Leonardo Vazquez wrote that the American founder, Thomas Jefferson, "was of one mind about cities: he hated them ... "Though Jefferson partied in Paris and had a hand in shaping Washington, D.C., he thought cities were dens of corruption and iniquity that would spoil the young American republic."
Hitler learned his antisemitism in Vienna; Marx spent his adult life in London, writing his totalitarian tomes at the London Library; Pol Pot, the genocidal butcher of Cambodia, became a committed communist in Paris; Lenin engaged in his Marxist activities in St. Petersburg, Munich, London and Geneva; Stalin, born in Georgia, rose to prominence in Georgia's largest city, its capital, Tbilisi, and spent the rest of his life in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
The idea that the city is a source of evil is ancient. The first city ever built is attributed to Cain, the first murderer in the Bible (Genesis 4:17). The Book of Genesis contains the famous story of the Tower of Babel, a tower built to reach as high as the heavens in order, Genesis tells us, "to make the builders famous." What is less well known is that every time the Bible mentions the Tower, it mentions "the city" built alongside it: "And they said, 'Come let us build a city and a tower with its top in the sky.'" (Genesis 11:4).
The biblical scholar Patrick D. Miller, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote that the story should more properly be captioned "The City of Babel," not "The Tower of Babel." Another scholar, professor Robert Alter of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote: "The polemic thrust of the story is against urbanism ... "
And the paradigmatic biblical places of evil are cities: Sodom and Gomorrah.
Why are cities dens of iniquity and incubators of destructive ideas?
One answer to the first question is anonymity: the bigger the city, the more anonymous the individual. People behave much better when they are known to their neighbors. Just think how much better people act when they wear an ID, as they do, for example, when attending a convention.
And just as we are more anonymous in a city, so is everyone else. People feel responsible to treat those they know better than they do anonymous strangers.
As for moronic ideas, rural people get meaning out of working with their hands and interacting with nature, which grounds them in reality and imposes pragmatism, while urban people are far more likely to get meaning, along with no consequences, from working with abstract ideas. Hence, the urban intellectual is so often a fool. Had Karl Marx been a farmer, the world might have been spared the unprecedented mass persecution and murder brought about by Marxist ideas. But Marx was the classic urban intellectual, never doing a day's worth of labor while writing about the proletariat.
It makes perfect sense, then, that our states would be far better without their biggest cities. I didn't say it was practical. But it's worth imagining. The states separating from its biggest cities 1 million plus statistical metro areas would all become better off. Big cities in each state that has them should be separate entities of their own unable to rule over or control any surrounding rural areas.
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Never let it be said that Dennis Prager is not a useless piece of crap.
Dennis Prager is one of the biggest hypocrites out there. He was born in Brooklyn and now lives in LA. So this op-ed is nothing more than another attempt by him to make himself into a fake country boy, which is who listens to him.
Imagine? Yeah, imagine no MAGAs.
I’m a little beside myself with amazement. Dennis Prager wrote this? I mean whether you tend to agree with Dennis or not on most issues, he does at least usually present an intelligent, thoughtful thesis. He is capable of speaking as an intelligent person, even if he’s dead wrong.
But this? This is some kind of unhinged fever dream of bigotry. City people bad; country people good. What the actual fuck? Is that supposed to be intelligent? Thoughtful? How much did he have to drink, I wonder, before he sat down to write this? Has he finally gone senile?
I don’t know. Is this a serious inquiry? Is there actual data for this?
OK, the following aren’t modern ideas, I grant you, but they’re pretty big ideas, all the same:
How about Lynching? Named for Charles Lynch, a Virginia plantation and slave owner. There’s a pretty shitty idea that came from the country.
How about sex with livestock? That doesn’t sound like a big city idea, either.
Does anybody think this is a useful discussion?
Oh for Pete’s sake. The human race was like 99% rural in those days. Anyway, even given that fact, it’s still only “many” of the prophets? So not “all.” Does this even support his thesis?
Is that a real argument? (Sorry I ask so many questions. I am just flabbergasted by this article!) First of all, Cain didn’t murder his brother in the city. No city was the source of his sin. This murder was conceived and carried out in the country. So according to Genesis, murder was invented in the country. Fucking murder. And then he lied about it. So lying was also invented in the country. And that wasn’t even the first sin. Adam and Eve betrayed God in the Garden - also not in a city.
It seems like maybe all our really deep, nasty sins were actually invented outside of cities.
What a dumb article by a man who should know better.
I do believe there are more meth labs in the country than the city. Easier to escape detection
Tacos! you continue to amaze me, I'm finding I agree with you more these days.
(Give me more Piggies)
This country dweller finds this article to be a crock of unsupported shit.
Huh, another load of horse manure dumped onto NT.
91,580 (2019) - Population of Redding, California
That's about 3 times the size of the town I live in. Me - the Lefty Liberal lives in the woods and a not so large town. Never did live in any town larger than 50,000
Come to think of it, I don't think I ever have either.
The biggest town I ever lived in was Indiana, PA where I went to college. I lived about 10 miles from Lubbock, TX when I was stationed there. We weren't really in the city, but our address was Lubbock (base housing).
I think even now we are at something like 45k.
A lot of that is also the Air Force.
Yeah...Keesler is a main training base. Mr Giggles went there for tech school
It's over twice the size of my entire county.
It is understood that Dennis Prager has moved to Mayberry and is now living with his mother, Thelma Lou. It is currently unknown if Barney Fife is his father. Opie confirmed this report with a well muted snicker.
I grew up in the country. Many of my neighbors weren't such good people. A lot of them were government free loaders who kept coming up with excuses of why they couldn't work. The neighbors across the road lived in a dilapidated house owned by another neighbor. They would party all week and then run a whore house during the weekend.
Then there was the trailer park up the road. Some nice...others not. So this whole seed is a bunch of bs horseshit written by a man who has never stepped foot in the forest (I would bet a dollar on that).
Dennis...go piss up a rope. And take your sycophants with you
Woof!Woof!Woof!Woof!Woof!Woof!Woof!Woof!Woof!Woof!
I finally got your comment. As I told Ender earlier, I'm not running on a full tank today
Anyone else notice that he used Laramie as an example then goes on to talk about shepherds...
I didn't make the connection, but thank you pointing that out.
YUGE dog whistle
Now that is amusing since many of the people living in the cities are professionals that are opting not to marry & not to have children.
Oh...my. So many unwed mothers in the rural areas.
Well, as long as Paw had to pawn his shotgun...
I don’t live on a farm and I don’t live in a big city. I live in the suburbs. So are me and mine just sort of fair-to-middlin people?
LMAO!!!
Imagine no hate-filled, low IQ demagogues like Dennis Prager intentionally stoking division on a daily basis.
Better yet, imagine no hate-filled, low IQ audience eagerly consuming garbage like this and providing a lucrative market for it.
Translation: Imagine if there were no heavily populated blue spots on election maps voting for the other party and possibly outweighing the lower populated red areas.
Living in a rural area, It's a refrain I've heard my entire life... "The fu**ing cities, where all the fu**ing ni**ers live."
Prager is just another sick, twisted piece of shit making a living spreading misinformation and lies about everything from covid to climate change to evolution.