I know, very few people would ever do that. But today’s column cries out for a reminder:
If Balzac were alive today, he would plant himself in that region of America that starts in central New York and Pennsylvania and then stretches out through Ohio and Indiana before spreading out to include Wisconsin and Arkansas. He’d plant himself in the working-class families in this area.
William Easterly actually is a Midwesterner (not that you have to be for the above quote to send you into gales of laughter — I was born, raised, and have lived all my life in and around New York City,and I’m just picking myself off the floor):
Mr. Brooks is apparently unaware from his vantage point on the Far Eastern Coastal Rim that central New York is still in the East, not the Midwest. And there has never been a single Midwesterner in two centuries who ever thought they were in the same region as Arkansas.
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