Petty-Coat Junction!

Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 11, 2021

You are all too young to know about this, but back when I started watching tv (birth) coincided with something happening on television called "the rural purge", because in the 1970's, the cutting edge of modernity, we were all about the gritty reality of Starsky and Hutch and The Streets of San Francisco and wanted New Yorkian stories like Taxi and whatnot. Your Quinn Martin production of that age was not rubes being obliquely country, but crooks and cops being abruptly urban. You know, despite the genius of Hee Haw, rural/small town entertainment was not appreciated for this era's kicks, unless you count stuff like The Dukes of Hazard and basically anything with a truck, a CB radio and a monkey (and why were the 70's and early 80's so interested in trucks, CB radios, and monkeys)? 

(Truth is, the thing with monkeys almost feels like a mainstreaming of Bonzo Reagan-era B-movie hijinks--of course people love monkeys. Much of my childhood is weirdly stereoscopic because I retcon how politics might've influenced any of it, and wow! But like, stalwart Republican Clint Eastwood in "Every Which Way But Loose" with Clyde: tell me where that math doesn't start to add up, amirite? Because people don't for real have monkey buddies. They just don't.)

Anyhow, in the 1970s and 1980s, and I guess the early 1990's, Big City crime was just this obvious joke thing. The actual crime rate went down since. 

But in conservative land, the rural purge never happened and the big cities are still weird places where folks have different values and do terrible things, but the real America with Andy and Opie and them is still the place where the hearth fires glow with books about evolution and CRT and JD fucking Vance, who is not actually an unfrozen caveperson, wants to know where to stay in Nueva York where he won't get mugged like he never ventured out of Mayberry before. 
 

Vance is a phony's phony. He's from the flatlands and wants to hail from the hills (then run in Ohio--like he never left). Well, hail, no. His carpetbag is pricey, but it is what it is. He's as authentic as a very synthetic thing. And he can stay wherever he stayed doing media on his big-ass book-tour. He isn't new! He isn't going to drown in the cement bird pond in the big old park they got thar in the Metropolis. 

Not to say Mandel is authentic at all. Oh fuck, he's a smacked ass. But I dunno. Vance is try-harding at shameful levels for a c-lister. 

UPDATE: I also want to point out that I am a dozen years older than this podgy middle-aged wheeze and if he reminds me of the Lawrence Welk era my grands enjoyed he certainly isn't relating to the youngs. So how will he ever fair in Youngstown?