Editorial

From the standpoint of the thesis defining John Sperling's new book, “The Great Divide: Retro Versus Metro America,” if ever there were a community “on the cusp” between the two deeply-conflicting national trends so deeply reflected in Tuesday's election, it is the City of Falls Church and like-minded NorthernVirginia neighborhoods around it.

Sperling's book is an attempt to understand the sharp division in the U.S. population that has translated into the last two bitterly contested presidential races. It's a divide that runs far deeper than political partisanship, special interests or single issues. It goes to a struggle over the kind of core values that were evident even in the pre-Civil War days when Alexis deTocqueville observed American culture.“Metro culture,” Sperling writes, is urban, progressive, inclusive and tolerant compared to the rigid, traditional religious values and male Caucasian-dominated “Retro culture” that prevails rural America. The two major political parties align, predominantly, with one or the other cultures. They don't create those cultures, they reflect them, and each tries to turn them into an electoral majority.

“Metro culture,” says Sperling, constitutes 65% of the population in the U.S. living on only 35% of the land. It creates the overwhelming bulk of the nation's wealth, and transfers a net of $200 billion tax dollars a year to regions dominated by “Retro culture.”In the case of Falls Church, swimming in a suburban rim that is a narrow buffer between hard-core “Metro culture” on one side and "Retro culture" on the other, the city's voting pattern is consistently “Metro” by a two-to-one margin (as Tuesday's election returns once again confirmed), but the battle over the city's own issues and identity is far more evenly split.

Parents, students, fans and coaches at Falls Church's George Mason High School learn to appreciate how geographically proximate full-blown “Retro culture” is. A 35-minute trip to the Brentsville Unified School District, for example, is akin to “culture shock.”

However, lest Falls Church smugly marks itself in the “Metro” column, there remains a difficult tug-of-war, culturally, in the city that manifests itself in pitched battles over such issues as large-scale mixed-use development projects, affordable housing and the ability of the community to accommodate to the massive demographic shifts in the racial and ethnic make-up of the region.

Large, conservative, Caucasian-male dominated protestant churches still cast a long shadow over the "rural village" mentality that many entrenched residents stubbornly retain, dominating school curricula and stifling genuine tolerance and inclusion. But these “Retro” elements are being seriously challenged by many of the city's newer residents and, oh yeah, “Metro” culture is the forward, not backward, looking one.