Wall Street vs. Main Street

As you may know, America can’t afford to keep bailing out Wall St. without also helping Main St. Obama has said it, McCain has probably screamed it to himself, and Sarah Palin accidentally said the opposite without even noticing. Even Yglesias talked about this after I wrote this post but before I put it up. Does this lame-ass metaphor actually resonate with Americans?

According to the Census Bureau, maybe not. “Main” is only the seventh most popular street name. The most popular is “Second Street”. Even “Park” is a more popular name than “Main”, meaning that, technically, we should be bailing out Second St. first and Park Ave. before Main St.

That seems about right to me. As a kid the closest Main St. to me was in a crappy little antique-store district called Old Town Spring. It’s .3 miles long, no one lives near it and I thought it was called Spring Cypress Rd. until twenty minutes ago when I looked it up. The nearest real Main St. was in Houston, and I mainly associate it with sad people going clubbing and half-assed public transportation that kept plowing into cars after it was built.

The whole Main St. trope strikes me as another one of those fictional Americana things that Republicans invent to make people nostalgic for stuff that, in reality, sucks. Another good example is small towns. People like the guy who wrote Sarah Palin’s convention speech like to pretend that small towns exemplify American values. Take a drive down Second St. in a typical small town, and that thought will horrify you. Are American values really encapsulated by a Dairy Queen, a condemned bank, and a gas station? Small towns are small because no one wants to live in them. Over there is the first Google image result that comes up for a small town where my siblings recently bought gas. It’s called Monahans, TX, and humans do not want to be there. You’ve never heard of it because it’s not important. My sister, not exactly a big-city elitist, forgot the name as soon as they left. “That sad, sad little town,” she called it.

Anyway, the point is that instead of bailing out Main St., we should be bailing out 155th St.