Main Street or Wall Street?

The ongoing presidential campaign has given me an identity crisis.

There's all this talk about Main Street and Wall Street. About Small Town America and Small Town Values. About Joe the Plumber, gosh, poor guy. So I can no longer avoid asking myself: am I Main Street or Wall Street?

I am most decidedly not from Wall Street. See, that's a street in New York, and I'm from Minnesota.

But, admittedly, I never lived on Main Street, either. I grew up on Gresham Avenue.

Those of us who come from the Twin Cities like to think of it as a booming metropolis. There are about 2 million people there, and I can promise it narrowly trumps Stockholm for crowdedness and corporations and sky-scrapers and whatnot. But then again, by American standards, the Twin Cities is not huge, and people there have a reputation for being nice and polite, don'tcha know. And since the whole state of Minnesota seems to be viewed as a rural farm-boy paradise by both natives and outsiders -- around 75% of the residents live in cities, which is pretty much the national average, but I suppose having any amount of farmland qualifies a state for Hicksville status -- I'm not sure if our buildings are tall enough and our jobs white-collar enough to show that our citizenry is adequately bereft of all moral fiber. Since I'm actually from the suburbs anyway, there's really no saying how the scales may tip for me.

I'm definitely not Joe the Plumber. I'm a computer programmer. Or at least, I'm currently a computer programmer. My career of choice is high school teacher, and I'm just taking a temporary leave from that career. Teaching is by no means a blue-collar job, but it's certainly in a league below/above computer programmer and stock broker as far as Unwashed Peasant/Salt of the Earth status goes. But it's a tough call -- a teacher works too hard performing a vital service to society for too little pay and far too little gratitude, but she's also a person who has filthied her mind for 4 or more years in halls of higher learning. It could really go both ways. And since I have switched jobs, now working a slightly better-paying desk job in the profit-driven private sector, it's very possible that my family values and my sense of What America Is were damaged in the switch.

There is, of course, one niggling little side note. In Sweden, a plumber can easily make more than a computer programmer, and ridiculously more than a teacher. If Joe is going to make over $250,000 a year, then apparently that's also the case in the states as well. Who knew? I mean, when we're all trying to figure out who we are and where we belong and how much people think we ought to pay in taxes, it's rather rude of people to go messing up the accepted hierarchy like that. But I suppose in a sense, what with both Fredrik and I possibly having lay-offs looming on the horizon, struggling to make mortgage payments (on our very modestly sized house, thank you very much) that have gone up dramatically in size because of interest hikes due to the financial crisis, and seeing the savings that we have so scrupulously put aside eaten away at by a bad global economy, it could be said that we're part of the problem, and not the solution, when it comes to inappropriately mingling outside of our so-called class. It seems kind of crazy I guess, but it makes me start to wonder if people in New York and San Francisco are also being hit hard by this financial crisis. In that case, I can understand if I'm not the only one who's confused about which of these two seemingly well-defined camps I might belong to.

One would have thought that the last two presidential elections would have given us a much easier time defining ourselves. I mean, since the universal adoption of the terms Red State and Blue State, a person could simply, when in doubt, look at a map or ask his neighbors. However, when I tried this, I just got more befuddled. Despite the fact that Minnesota hasn't voted for a Republican president for years (hello folks, who voted for Mondale? That's right, only us), they keep calling us a Swing State or a Purple State. I can't argue with CNN and MSNBC and Fox on this point, as I'm sure they know what they're talking about. But it means that, instead of helping me solve my identity crisis, I merely feel a much heavier weight of responsibility on my supposedly election-swaying shoulders. If Sarah Palin would just stop being so coy and just come out and tell us which parts of America are more pro-America than others, then it would make things a lot easier for all of us.

Wait, I just thought of something. I suppose that since the corridors of knowledge that I was tainted by were at St. Olaf College, an expensive private school, then I'm clearly in the... well, but wait, St. Olaf is located in the tiny rural community of Northfield, whose slogan is "Cows, Colleges and Contentment." And hang on, I've also attended the University of Minnesota and was a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. Oh, and of course, I got my teaching degree at Linköpings universitet. Those are all state schools! Well, but... actually, I might also be an over-educated elitist. I do really like arugula, and I've never touched a six-pack.

I suppose -- and it would be really unscrupulous of me not to mention this -- that the death-blow comes in the fact that I'm also a European. I mean, I feel American, but I'm now a Swedish citizen and I've lived here for over 6 years. I mean, it's not France or anything, but I guess I do have to admit that I'm surrounded every day by the fabled Culturally-superior-but-morally-inferior-especially-by-virtue-of-being-culturally-superior.

The verdict seems clear. I'm out of touch. I'm Wall Street. I'm, uh, Big Town and have Big Town values. No, wait, I don't have any values, that's how it probably is. I'm a snobby elitist that is supposed to, by traditional standards, make a ton of money and stomp on the Little Guy (and the fact that I don't is probably just some sort of failure on my part).

I should clearly vote for Barack Obama.

But see, that doesn't feel right. I clearly don't want to be a part of the Big Town. Being part of Small Town America sounds so nice. I want to be respectful and wholesome. I want to be hard-working and patriotic and pro-America. I would like to think that I value common sense and fishing and not locking your door at night and America being awesome. I want to be a Real Person with Real Values (tm). Even though it appears that I'm a fake person with no values, I wouldn't want people to know it.

I guess the best thing to do is to vote for McCain and Palin. I want to vote for them because I want to be a Real American because it sounds good. When it comes right down to it, the Republicans have always had the best track record of watching out for the little guy and sticking it to Wall Street.

Er, wait...