Of Drunkards and Dimwits

Where I come from, dreams go to die. I don’t mean Mordor. That’s where Balrogs go for iron-plated armor. I mean Fresno, California, which was recently ranked by Men’s Health Magazine as the drunkest city in America—this coming off of a 2009 distinction by the Daily Beast as America’s dumbest city.

Take a moment. Let this sink in.

The drunkest, dumbest city in America, the country that non-ironically embraced the Macarena, the country that went wild when one fat guy shed some pounds by eating Subway. The dumbest of all that.

And it’s not like we can blame it on a small application pool. The U.S. is huge. You could fit eight South Koreas in Texas, 2,700 Liechtensteins in California, and like, maybe an Australia and a half in, like, the southern-ish part of, like, most of the country...But I digress, which, incidentally, is a word I’d get shit for using in Fresno.

Before you go judging me and my native brethren for our wet and wilted intellects, perhaps I can do a bit of explaining.

The Fresno metropolitan area, located in California’s Central Valley, is home to over a million people, 90 percent of whom own cows, 10 percent of whom are cows. Not that I’m saying this is a bad thing. Somebody has to grow cows. And unless you’ve got bovine saplings sprouting in your closet, Fresno’s going to have to pick up your slack.

But Fresno pays a price for this. Time spent in the field is time spent out of the library, concert hall, or studio. Fresno’s essential preoccupation with agricultural matters leaves Fresnans few cultural or recreational options. In short: we drink.

In high school, before I discovered alcohol, I spent most nights deciding between doing nothing at my house or driving to the mountains and chucking dirt clods at trees.

Whenever I reveal that I’m from Fresno, people respond in one of three ways.

Some say, “I’m sorry,” which I find both offensive and compassionate. Others say, “Oh,” as in, “Oh, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And some, the worst, those with knowledge of Fresno’s low average IQ and resemblance to Middle America, say, “Oh,” as in, “Oh, you must be an ignorant, god-fearing, war-mongering crazy.”

While such assumptions of ignorance are themselves somewhat ignorant, they’re not entirely unfounded.

Fresno, sitting between Los Angeles and San Francisco, suffers from the most heinous brain drain of any American city. With such satisfying metropolitan alternatives so close by, few people with advanced degrees choose to stay in Fresno. For most, Fresno’s just the place where “that homeless guy once licked my hand” or “where Ron Howard once left his son at the Krispy Kreme” (this is one of the most exciting things ever to happen in Fresno).

From our ivory tower here at Harvard, it’s easy to unsympathetically dismiss or even resent intellectually undeveloped Fresno.

After the 2004 election, Robert Smigel wrote an SNL skit in which Santa Claus brought presents only for the blue states, insisting that Middle America (to which Fresno is party ideologically, if not geographically) was not actually part of the Union and was instead a separate state, “Dumbfuckistan.”

But there is a huge difference between consciously choosing to live in Dumbfuckistan and living in Dumbfuckistan by circumstance. It’s true that Fresno is a sad place intellectually—an ad in our airport says “Welcome to the land of free TV”—but it’s not exactly Fresno’s fault.

It’s easy to understand the value of Matisse when you can sub to Midtown for an afternoon at the MOMA, but Fresno’s only real museum recently closed, leaving no communal cultural outlet for its more than a million potential patrons.

After my first year of college, I found myself frustrated and angry at the ignorance, bigotry and intolerance of my hometown. It felt like Dumbfuckistan, and I counted my lucky stars (four!) at having escaped it. But more time and more exposure to people jumping to conclusions about the Fresno way of life have led me to feel differently.

It’s true that no Fresnan will soon be winning a Nobel, but to judge and despise Fresno for its shortcomings without considering what it struggles against is as ignorant a thing to do as, say, spending $36 million on a minor league baseball stadium (Fresno’s Chuckchansi Park!).

And with that, I’m going for a drink.