When I was young man and just getting out into the world, I noticed that the gap between myself and my coevals grew quickly once I ventured outside our shared confines. I had friends in school who had never left the state and did not have much interest in what was beyond their little slice of heaven.

Once I was regularly venturing beyond the perimeter, a gap between myself and them started to grow. At the time, I did not get why they lost interest in me, but I also had my own new interests. I lost touch with them and that was it. Within a year or two, people I talked to every day had become strangers.

Travel changes the traveler in ways the traveler does not notice. When you’re young you don’t know these things, but through travel you begin to figure it out. As I sink into decrepitude, I find that my only close friends are people who have had a fair amount of travel. My trips usually involve meeting these friends somewhere new or possibly visiting them at their new digs.

In a gathering, I can quickly figure out if someone has a lot of miles on them. There’s an aloofness, an otherness, that comes from travel, particularly living in strange places for extended periods.  I suspect that it comes from having seen humans in various natural environments and discovering that settled life is mostly the same everywhere. Life in Portland Maine is pretty much the same as life in Portland Oregon.

Once you figure out that your way is not all that special, it is hard to remain a provincial. The heart of provincialism, it seems to me, is the belief that your way is unique, not necessarily better. Once you see that it is not unique some of the ropes tying you to your ancestral lands are cut and you can no longer feel the same way about it.

Saying that, I have know men who have traveled for work, yet lost none of their provincialism. I worked with a guy from Pittsburgh, who got on a plane every Monday going somewhere. He and his family had moved a few times around the country for work. Yet, everything about his professional life was geared toward getting back to Pittsburgh and getting off the travel circuit. He was and would always be a Yinz.

There’s also a gap between people who travel beyond their native lands and those who just travel around their country. I have a friend, one I was visiting with recently, who has lived all over the world. He has a different air about him than friends who have stuck to North America. I think you acquire a sophistication about humanity when you observe foreigners in their native habitat.

I suspect this is why Europeans seem so sophisticated to Americans while the English just feel like funny talking rubes to us. There’s familiarity too. Most Americans know enough about the English to understand something about them. Living in a land where over the next hill live a bunch of weirdos speaking gibberish probably makes provincialism difficult.

I once worked for a company that moved managers around every two years in order to break their provincialism. The theory was that living in a bunch of different places would make them company men rather than “Bostonians” or “Iowans”. Anyone who does not understand the link between corporate ideology and fascism has never worked at a large corporation.

The FBI used to follow this model, but for entirely different reasons. In order to avoid corruption, agents moved from field office to field office every two years, while they were field agents. They wanted fresh eyes, but they also wanted to avoid the possibility of corruption. The “Zip” Connolly story shows why that was a good idea.

Part of what drives the managerial elite’s hatred of the American middle-class is this cosmopolitan – provincial tension. The girl who went off to Holyoke to major in public administration and womyn’s studies was not trained to hate normal people. She acquired it through travel and class solidarity. First she went off to college, then maybe grad school, with internships in DC and NYC in between.

By the time she lands in the bureaucracy somewhere, she looks back on her parents and childhood with a degree of contempt. Those local yokels seem small and stupid to her, because, after all, they have not seen the world. The fact that she may be as dumb as a post only reinforces this dynamic. Her tribe is the vast army of cubicle jockeys in the bureaucracy, naturally at war with the “other”, who happen to be Americans.

With that in mind, it is not hard to see why the Maoists and Khmer Rouge sent these people out to the fields. I’m fond of pointing out that the commies are often pretty good at noticing the problems. It’s their solutions that are criminally insane. The Asian commies really understood the gap between the cosmopolitan and the provincial and how it warped the relationship between the ruled and the rulers.

That and it was probably a lot of fun sending egg heads out to the rice paddies. Who amongst us have not seen a guy like this and thought it would be a good idea to send him out to the mines? But, that’s a topic for another day. I have to unpack.