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PARTISAN REVIEW
that lies in wait for those who fail to keep up with their various levels
of "stylized consumption."
Half of Springdale live from hand to mouth, the other half are
misers: the well-to-do farmer because he plows back every cent into
expanding his "plant," the storekeeper because he exists by the pennies
he shaves off his fixed costs, the traditional farmer because he learned
to be a skinflint in the cradle, the "old aristocrat" because he's hoarding
his inheritance. The only subjective unity Springdale achieves, apart
from the common lie about itself, is in its policy of "don't spend a cent
if
you can help it." Never paying for itself, the town sponges off the
state for its roads and its school system, its two largest expenses. We, of
the city, pay for Springdale-I'd rather give my dollar to the devil–
but this is no more than just, considering the gas-shells of delusion we
lob into the place daily in order to confuse its inhabitants and keep
them there.
"A central fact of rural life is its dependence on the institutions
and dynamics of urban and mass society." That in all important respects
Springdale is controlled from the outside and has no power to decide
its actions-this futility of disagreement conspires with the universal
niggardliness to perpetuate the fiction of unanimity that paralyzes the
brains of its citizens.
Small Town
examines in detail the limited con–
flicts that underlie this fiction and how the lid is kept on them by the
operations of a sham democracy. Three men constitute "the invisible
government" of Springdale and settle in advance what each meeting of
each town and village board shall resolve. The same hands have picked
the candidates and propelled the voters to the polls; placed some in
town jobs, fired others out of them; chosen the committees to run the
town's social events and collect its charities-all without controversy
and with a show of spontaneous public decision.
The single area where conflict might be worth while, and where
it constantly threatens to break out, is school politics, since the school's
quarter-of-a-million dollar budget makes it the major industry of Spring–
dale and pork barrel for feeding relatives who can sweep, teach, drive
buses or make the furnace, as well as a prime target for food suppliers,
contractors and sellers of acreage. "No year passes without the occur–
rence of a crisis . . . and this leads to further demands of unanimity
and concealment." Here The American Lie plays its part in holding
issues to the scale of triviality. Farmers who manage their lives by the
latest manual of the Department of Agriculture cite the need to "per–
petuate the rural tradition" in crushing resistance to useless courses in
farm training; and under the same obsession preference is given
to
