Dan,
It is the nature of community boosters to boost, and I have noticed that the content of their boosting typically has little to do with the qualities of the community that you or I would hold dear. When conventions seemed to be a growth business, they boosted restaurants and other conventionalia. When dot-coms were (briefly) in flower, they boosted our supposed high-tech prowess, summoning up stuff like the invention of the first computer at U-Penn in the 1940s. One of the defining qualities of Philadelphia, indeed, might be its adaptability to whatever strain of boosting is currently infectious since there’s a little of just about anything you care to name around here somewhere.
You’re right: A city that spends a lot of energy trying to promote itself as “major league” is probably a minor league sort of place. It’s the old Calvin Trillin disease, rubaphobia (fear of being thought a rube) as public policy. Fortunately, most Philadelphians pay little if any attention to all this image stuff; they’ve got lives to lead and goals that don’t depend on whether somebody in Columbus has a positive or negative image of the region.
That doesn’t mean a little civic self-consciousness isn’t useful, particularly if it sensitizes people in authority to their constituents’ real needs. If it took the Republican National Convention to get us cleaner streets and less graffitti, then let’s have more such.
I had never been to the Barnes until last summer, when I took the family on a Sunday morning. Fabulous–just about everything I’d seen in my art history 101 course was there in the flesh–er, frame. The funny thing was, when I raved about it afterwards to friends and colleagues here, the most common reaction was on the order of, “gee, I’ve always heard about it, but I’ve never been.” It’s like New Yorkers and the Statue of Liberty–the locals never go. Go figure!
Andy
