Hardheaded practical types abound in the Bing Hamptons. Still, many heads up there teem with mental phantasms of escape. (Vegas! Florida!) Others nurse fantasies of vindication. (“After the next terrorist attack those downstaters will wish they lived here.”) Many embrace wishful fantasies of easy money and tumor-curing deities, or consume dubious corporate fantasies whole-hog, like the one about fat-free potato chips’ being healthy.
One family I met lived entirely on fairy tales. The mother, having compiled a book of local news clippings, imagined selling it for a big advance. Her husband entertained rosy memories of how, back in his day, companies took care of workers out of the goodness of their hearts, without the prodding of devilish unions and governments. Their divorced daughter dropped out of nursing school in the hopes of landing a rich husband.
What makes fantasies different upstate, where people desperately need them, from downstate, where people get rich marketing them, is that city people don’t confuse wishful thinking with purposeful thinking… Or do we?
Sometimes when upstate, I imagine taking over our local paper. I excise its gushing front-page features about local merchants, whose undercapitalized enterprises usually consist of random assortments of shabby goods offered for sale in pathetically inaccessible locations. Instead, my newspaper interviews laid-off workers; it exposes the local government’s habitual cronyism, its reluctance to enforce environmental restrictions on property use, its aversion to zoning. Miraculously (because this is a fantasy), local businesses advertise in my pages anyway.
I start giving free business courses, impressing upon grateful townspeople that their hatred of city types is self-defeating. “Granted, many weekenders are spoiled, condescending brats,” I explain sweetly. “But those who think that manufacturing will return here are delusional, and you do not have the luxury of detesting your only growing customer base. Here, let me show you what will sell, and how to sell it!”
I finance a giant amusement park, turning the Bing Hamptons into “The Stone Age Capital of the World!” My half-clad guides pole tourists downriver on hand-lashed rafts, past fiberglass mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. My theme bars promise to “Bomb you back to the Stone Age!” with cocktails named the Cambrian Shale, the Triceratops, the Firestick. Those locals who detest outsiders get paid to grunt and scowl at them while wearing pelts of animals they brought down themselves with spears.
The point is, it’s hard to pass time in the Bings and not imagine modernizing the economy, making peace between rival groups, establishing an independent press. But in reality, many of my compatriots upstate would rather starve than embrace the combination of ingratiating attitudes, critical edge and let’s-not-go-fishing drive that enables urbanites to achieve such things. Fantasy seduces me in the Bing Hamptons, as it did our administration in Iraq, not because change is impossible there but because the road to it promises to be so hard.
