The idea of a great city never has occupied a comfortable place in the American imagination. Much of the country's political and literary history suggests that the city stands as a metaphor for depravity — the port of entry for things foreign and obnoxious, likely to pollute the pure streams of American innocence. Virtue proverbially resides in villages and small towns, and for at least two hundred years the rhetoric of urban reform has borrowed its images from the Bible and the visionary poets. Under the open sky (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) the faithful gather by the firelight to denounce the metropolitan sewers of crime and vice, and every now and then a knight errant — Jimmy Carter, Ralph Nader, Gary Hart, Ross Perot, et al. — rides off toward the dark horizon under the banners of redemption....

The movies and television series delight in showing the city as a killing ground. Predators of every known species (pimps, real estate speculators, drug addicts, prostitutes, dissolute prosecuting attorneys, and venal police captains) roam the streets as if they were beasts drifting across the Serengeti plain. The successful protagonists learn to rely on their animal instincts. If they make the mistake of remaining human (trusting to the civilized virtues of tolerance and compassion), they die a fool's death in the first reel.

Given the preferred image of the city as godforsaken heath, it's not surprising that so many American cities come to look the way the audience wants and expects them to look. The proofs of worldly ruin give credence to the theorems of transcendental grace. If American cities have the feeling of makeshift camps, littered with debris and inhabited, temporarily, by people on the way to someplace else, it is because we conceive of them as sulfurous pits in which to earn the fortune to pay for the country rose garden and the house with the view of the sea. The pilgrims come to perform heroic feats of acquisition and then to depart with the spoils to the comforts of Florida or the safety of Simi Valley.

Lewis H. Lapham, City Lights
Published in Harper's Magazine, July 1992
Copyright © 1992 by the Harper's Magazine Foundation. All rights reserved.

Posted 20 October 1996

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