Friday, February 02, 2018

Parochial Perspective

An amusing image that someone posted on the web: The World According to Americans.

Yes, many fellow citizens view the rest of the world in ten words or less, but don't all of us oversimplify topics we don't know well? And there's just so much information to remember on everything....

The map reminds me, as it may you, dear reader, of Saul Steinberg's New Yorker cover, the View of the World from 9th Avenue.

On my first job after graduation I saw the March 29, 1976 issue lying on a coworker's desk in the Alcoa building in San Francisco. (I regularly paged through someone else's New Yorker for the cartoons--I was too cheap to subscribe--but did linger on that cover.) The painting captured perfectly the parochial perspective of my college roommate, a Long Islander who had never been west of the Hudson.

I strongly hope that George has expanded his horizons since. Then again, he seemed perfectly happy with his life at the time, and who was I to judge, having lived on an island for my first 17 years?

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