Every election cycle we are plagued by the Republican fantasy rhetoric of the Common Man (this year, the Common Palin), which is the companion to another Republican rhetorical myth, those sacred and ever-vaunted Small Town Values.

However, in my experience, the most prevalent small town value, which cuts across everything they stand for, is elitism.

Watch a few episodes of the Andy Griffith Show, and you’ll find an obvious sense of small town snobbery running through them. A common plot device which the writers used quite frequently was to have some big city outsider come into town and, by the end of the episode, the big city outsider has either been evangelized into believing in the moral superiority of country living (and therefore stops being a criminal or a broker or whatever other ‘foolish’ big city pastime they have), or is in some way made to be embarrassed by their big city way of doing things, and they leave in a huff, with the grinning Sheriff Taylor waving goodbye in a way that says ‘don’t come back unless you’re ready to be just like us.’ Roll credits, and cut to millions of people saying to themselves, ‘gee, if only America was still like that.’

An example that I can think of right off the top of my head is this episode where some big law enforcement agency comes into town to capture a fugitive, and in the end the fugitive is caught not because of the efficient and organized work of the professional outsiders, but because country bumpkin Sheriff Taylor allows the fugitive to try and get away in his rowboat, which just happens to have a hole in it. The boat starts to sink, the fugitive is captured, and the big city cops are made to feel stupid about all their big city shenanigans.

In elections, this translates into constant talk of the ‘heartland,’ and Sarah Palin’s and others’ rhetoric about ’small town values.’ Well, having been born in the heartland, and having seen some pretty small towns in my life, I think this is a myth which needs finally and totally to be put to rest.

There is no place more snobby than a small American town. Sure, on their face, most small town people are perfectly nice and polite to strangers who are passing through, especially those strangers who stop and eat at the local restaurants, or shop at the local markets, or fill up their gas tanks at the local stations on their way to somewhere else. Oh yes, give those small town folks your money, and they’ll be nice as the day is long to you. (And they’ll also use home-spun phrases like “as the day is long” in conversation.)

But move into town, and you find something different entirely. You see that the town is full of divorced alcoholics who loudly proclaim the concept of moral virtue wherever they go. You find that underneath the folksy charm (if there even is any anymore) there lies an inherent intellectual conflict. Namely, these small towns wear their isolation as a badge of honor, but at the same time they believe that they are the only ones who still believe in ‘community.’ In other words, they have created for themselves communities of isolation - or, as we might call them, communes or compounds.

Every small town has their Mayberry Machiavellis, the person who is in the chamber of commerce, and is the president of the garden club, and is the head of their church council, and who makes it a point to have their finger in everything simply because they are a massive control freak. In fact, small towns are full of these nosy busybodies, these gossip mongers who giggle mercilessly during their weekly bridge game about the family that went through the divorce, or the girl who went away to have an abortion, and who will make you feel unwelcome at the slightest hint that your politics don’t match theirs exactly, and who will mercilessly fight you if you even remotely get in the way of their personal ambition.

And then there is the notion, which they wear as a badge of honor, that small towns are paragons of moral virtue while big cities are dens of hedonism full of homosexual communists who want to kill your babies. This is an inherently elitist attitude, and how these same people can get away with calling someone else elitist, or calling ethnically and culturally diverse cities elitist, is beyond me. It is the height of shameless and completely un-self-aware hypocrisy to imply that culturally diverse Chicago is elitist (since Barack Obama came from there), but that small town Alaska, with far fewer people and almost no cultural diversity, is not.

But far more reprehensible are the millions of Americans who have deluded themselves into believing this Mayberry mythology, that small towns are happy, friendly places with band concerts at the gazebo and picnics in the park. In fact, most people in small towns drive their gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs to the local bar to have a cheeseburger, smoke a few cigarettes, play some video poker and get drunk because that’s all there is to do in their ’superior’ little town.

I was born in a medium-size city, and I experienced a little of this when I was growing up, this fervent desire to stay in one place, to eschew anything new or different, and to mock that which you don’t understand. This is small town America, a nation of people who worship at the altar of god, football and guns, and are proud that the rest of the world doesn’t want anything to do with them. They are proud of their ignorance, their closed-mindedness and their cultural isolation.

They are fiercely proud to be Americans, but they hate America.

Here then, are your small town values voters: farmers who demand government subsidies but then complain that taxes are too high; red states that have higher divorce rates than blue states; hypocrites who complain about political correctness while feigning mock outrage at trumped-up sexism; people who loudly trumpet their own moral virtue while forgetting, I guess, about the virtue of humility.

Real small town values are cultural isolation and hypocritical moralism, a constant mix of us-against-them elitism and self-righteous self-aggrandizement. And this is exactly what we’ve seen in the White House for the last eight years, and this is exactly what we see in Sarah Palin.

The Dems are only marginally better, of course, but I’ll take Chicago over Mayberry any day, thanks.