The recently revived television show “Gilmore Girls” portrays small town America in an interesting light skewed by coastal elite sensibilities. The town rituals on screen are devoid of any attachment outside the ritual itself. No Memorial Day parade where parents come out to have their grief and lose supported by their neighbors. As the rememberers become the remembered, the bedrock of the foundation of America. While, it is easy to say the small town is idealized, all stories contain idealizations. The media is not too unkind to New York. It is all a fiction anyway outside of documentary. I do think it is worth considering the exact ideas behind the representation what was the motivation to build the statue?
In “Gilmore Girls”, Stars Hollow functions as a close knit town that used historical re-enactments and other festivals in honor of the prior resident’s legacies to boost a tourism industry as most residents worked within the town lines. They export themselves and weathered the erosion of the last thirty years. It is an unreality, a politically correct 50’s serial. Religion replaced by History and Legend. The Gilmore family being D.A.R. and the town surrounded by myth. The community is real forged with organized weekly devotion at the often frillious town meeting. The residents sit in a single room on simple chairs and listen to Taylor, who is Napoleon. A couple working at the local grocer can pay for a family of four. No one is left behind and not all the young people leave. It is the recognition that small towns have a place in all world views. We need to reinvest and deurbanize in order to revive the small towns and continue their traditions
-E.C. Fiori.
The Radical Centrists 