Journalist Joan Acocella, who usually writes for The New Yorker, has written this article in the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine, in which she offers her own theories and explanations for the behavior of people in New York City. New Yorkers, she says, often get a bum rap from people from other parts of the United States for being rude or brusque. What they’re really about, she says, is a sense of shared survival that is necessary for living in such an overwhelming place, and a sort of forced intimacy that comes from that “we’re all in this boat together” sensibility. New Yorkers usually have no problem telling you exactly what they think, but that’s because they’re trying to be helpful, not angry. And if sometimes it comes across a little too bluntly, well, you’d be crabby too if you had to live there.
My take on this is that anyone who has ever called a New Yorker “rude” has obviously never been to Boston. New Yorkers do not even scratch the surface of rudeness compared to the way people treat each other here. Even people who are PAID to be nice to you, like salespeople in department stores or, even worse, small independent businesspeople are far more likely to tell you to go fuck yourself here than they are in New York. I can’t tell you how many times I have been made aware by some retail clerk or cashier or person standing in line that I am interrupting their day with my stupid and worthless insistence on being helped. And we won’t even begin to talk about the driving.
If New Yorkers are united by a sense of being in it together, we here are segregated into thousands of tiny cells of privacy that are squished together like soap bubbles, yielding as little as possible even as we are crammed tighter and tighter, so that when the bubbles inevitably pop we are unwillingly thrust into some new bubble not entirely to our liking. The prevailing attitude here is “hooray for me and to hell with you”, and people will stop at NOTHING to prevail in even the pettiest encounter. Which is not to say that you don’t run into this sort of thing with New Yorkers. I think it’s a behavior common to people in general, but taken to a whole new level by Massholes.
Though I have lived most of my life in New England, I lived for nearly eight years in Chicago during the 1980s while attending college and grad school, and Chicagoans are several orders of magnitude nicer than people in Boston or New York. There’s still enough general assholery to go around, but the level of congeniality is high. So high that at first I, the dyed-in-the-wool New Englander, found it off-putting to deal with so many nice people every day. Eventually I got used to the difference. People in Chicago are just as rushed and hustling as New Yorkers, but they deal with the pressure without feeling like they need to be in your face. My wife and I also lived in Bloomington, Indiana for about 18 months while I started my doctorate, and we had to adjust once again to the slow-and-easy style of that area. Coming back to uptight-and-tight-lipped New England was a culture shock.
When we finally settled in the Boston area about a dozen years ago, my wife, who grew up in Newton, had no trouble reverting to her in-born Masshole self. She is particularly in her element when driving — honking if the car in front of her doesn’t react to the green light within seven nanoseconds of it changing, swearing a blue streak all the time, slamming the gas pedal so she can cut people off at the slightest sign of an open space on the road. It took me quite a while to learn the ropes of driving on 128 or I93. Even now, I am still intimidated when I have to drive on the surface roads of Boston itself. But I have also taken on the necessary public persona of willful disregard one needs to interact with ones fellow Bay Staters.
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