January 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
The Supportive Community is one of America’s most cherished myths. By “myth,” I don’t mean that Community is some Gorgon or unicorn, a beast with no existence in reality. Observers of the US going back to de Tocqueville have been impressed by our community spirit.
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations . . . . The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. (DIA, II, 5)
The supportive community is a myth in the sense that it represents an ideal – it is a story that we love to tell ourselves about ourselves. When the story is true, so much the better.
Last week, David Brooks devoted his
column to such a story. A woman from a small town in Louisiana was diagnosed with cancer, and “the entire town rallied around her,” with fund-raising cookouts and concerts to pay for her medical care. It’s all very touching and genuine, and Brooks uses it as an appeal to “communitarian conservatism.”
A much better known version of the myth is the television show “Extreme Makeover Home Edition.” Each week brings us a needy but deserving family, usually in a suburb or small town, almost never a city. Often, the family has been stricken by death, disease, or disability, but not despair. Always their house, despite their best efforts, is a shambles. The TV team comes in, sends the family on vacation (usually to Disney World – it’s an ABC show), and begins work on the centerpiece of its largesse, a new home.
It’s the modern counterpart of the 1950s “Queen For a Day,” but with two important differences. First, the sad story is always a family, not an individual. And second, the story always involves the community. Neighbors, co-workers, and others tell the camera what wonderful people the family are and how much they’ve given to the community. During the construction of the new house hundreds of people – a sort of town team wearing identical t-shirts and hard hats – turn up to help.
The show’s signature moment comes when the family is brought back from vacation. With the hundreds of neighbors (we assume that they are neighbors and not ringers brought in by ABC) in their matching t-shirts and hard hats, the family stands opposite the new house, but their view is blocked by a large bus. “Move that bus! Move that bus!” everyone chants.
The bus moves, the family runs to the house and goes through it room by room gasping “Oh my God.”
The stories David Brooks and ABC tell are heart-warming indeed. They show us at our best. They are our myth. But there are other stories.
On Sunday, “This American Life” reran a story about a woman who believed the myth. She has lived in the same town, on the same block, for forty years, but she is approaching seventy, and she turned to the community seeking people who would help in caring for her autistic son, now 39, after she has died or become unable to look out for him. The short answer is that nobody volunteered. But take two minutes and listen to the entire excerpt, especially if you’re not familiar with “Extreme Makeover Home Edition.”
The point is that myth is not a substitute for policy. Not everybody who gets cancer is beloved by others in their town.* Not every needy family, not even every virtuous and deserving needy family, is beloved by ABC – and besides, the show has been cancelled. These stories are one-offs, and we do ourselves a disservice to think that the myth represents workable solutions to our large-scale problems – problems like the millions of people without health care or affordable housing or jobs.**
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* To quote my own tweet, only in America do we need fund-raisers for people who become ill. I recall one “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” family which had been impoverished by medical costs and needed treatment they could no longer afford. Both parents were employed as public school teachers. In no other wealthy country would these people not be able to afford health care.
** Wrong thinking is a frequent theme on “This American Life.” (See this earlier
SocioBlog post for another example.) A few years ago, NPR began a
series called “This I Believe,” short essays by hundreds of different people stating their “core values.” (The archive now has over 100,000 such essays.) That prompted “This American Life” to run an episode called “This I Used to Believe.”
But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong. In fact, we've talked as a staff about how the crypto-theme of every one of our shows is: “I thought it would work out this way, but then it worked out that way.”
