This morning I offered a blind quotation describing a social group. I asked if you might recognize in the description some people you know.
Here’s the quotation, once more –
[L]ocals were overwhelmed. Modern…ways and the waves of foreigners had created among them a sense of panic, he said, “the erosion of everything traditional and a real sense of insecurity.” In the minds of the locals, the world they knew was disappearing…. “It’s a very pervasive feeling for a large portion of the population.”
Unless (and improbably) you have read about Saipan, and how the indigenous population has reacted to immigrants from Asia with a mixture of envy and hostility, then you would – quite reasonably – not have guessed the subject of the quotation.
It’s an observation from Samuel McPhetres, as John Bowe quotes him in Bowe’s recent book, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. The quotation is a description of Saipan’s first residents.
You might, instead, have supposed that the quote was a reference to Whitewater’s stodgy, stagnant town faction.
It would have been a fair guess. One could not fault you for looking for a group close at hand, and so fitting for the quotation.
Saipan, though, is far away. It’s part of a failed, multi-island commonwealth, suffering from an ailing economy, ineffective government, and social hostility from longstanding residents against newcomers.
Some people here — those who think that this town belongs principally to them — would be insulted at any comparison with Saipan. Each and every one of them must think that he or she is more important, cultured, and fair-minded than the inhabitants of Saipan, a tropical island turned rat hole.
Our self-designated town squires and their narrow coterie may rest assured — the author of the quotation did not you have you in mind.
Then again, I don’t think that he’s yet visited Whitewater.