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As an American, I've actually already experienced this, sort of. I grew up in the Midwestern US, on a farm, miles from the closest town and miles more from the closest city, the name of which would probably only register with people in a 2-5 State radius. When I moved to New York City after college, I realized I could already name more streets and places in NYC than I could from my childhood. I knew the museums and the bridges, the boroughs, the landmarks; Battery Park and Castle Clinton were right out of Deus Ex. My "home town" didn't have a mayor; I couldn't name one of the nearby city, but I knew LaGuardia and Giuliani. I'm not actually sure if NYC and LA are overrepresented in American media -- the NYC metro area is something like 8% of the US population, after all -- but because a half dozen cities are the backdrop of so much of American culture even the people who live in one have all the rest, thousands of miles away, to develop that distant familiarity with. (On the topic of brands, the biggest question New Yorkers had for me, coming from the Midwest, was whether Long John Silver's really existed; the ads saturated New York advertising despite not having any locations within a state or three. Likewise, I'd never encountered a Dunkin Donuts prior to moving to the coast.) |
Marx and Lenin wrote about the "idiocy of rural life" but there is an urban idiocy to go with it. Frequently you meet urban people who have no idea where wealth comes from, any more than you'd get an understanding of ecology from looking at a fish tank.
In New York it is a running gag that downstate black politicians are opposed to marijuana legalization because they think some of the business has to be "cut out" for black people because otherwise white people are going to sell all the weed, or that a city councilmember wants to see off-track betting subsidized (not even the racetrack!) to "save jobs".