FREE VACATION TO SCRANTON, OCTOBER-NOVEMBER: Don't all sign up at once

Thanks to alert reader Steve, your host has a link to a YouTube clip of SNL's Jason Sedeikis, in character as Joe Biden, describing Scranton, Pennsyltucky. (See here.)

"I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and that's as hard-scrabble a place as you're going to find," he goes. "I'll show you around sometime and you'll see -- it's a hell hole. An absolute jerkwater of a town. You couldn't stand to spend a weekend there. It's just an awful, awful sad place, filled with sad, desperate people with no ambition. Nobody, I mean nobody, but me, has ever come out of that place. It's a genetic cesspool. So don't be telling me that I'm part of the Washington elite, because I come from the absolute worst place on earth -- Scranton, Pennsylvania. And Wilmington, Delaware, is not much better."

That's cold.

DD has really spent a weekend in Scranton. It was for a wrestling tournament in college in the Seventies. I regretted every minute of it. Look at it this way. When you were twenty, would you want to be spending time on the weekend drinking cheap beer and feeling up the rump and titties of your first really serious girlfriend? Or be stuck in a hotel room in Scranton with a bunch of glum guys, looking at gray sky, snow flakes and a street covered in cinders, when not having one's nose pushed into a rubber mat the rest of the time?

Of course, you could say the same stuff about most cities in the US. And many do. In the late Eighties/early Nineties, your host worked for a newspaper in Allentown, PA. A big business magazine, Forbes -- if my memory's accurate -- had just dubbed the town one of the most unlivable and charmless in the US in a yearly poll of America's best places for conducting business.

The morning editorial meeting was spent ranting about the calumny of it and what should be done. Finally, it was decided.

"This will be your project, Smith. Get something on those people," the section editor told me. It was to be a revenge operation.

And it was one I quietly avoided. Short attention span being the order of the day at the newspaper, the task was never pursued. What, exactly, did they want me to find out, anyway?

That the business magazine was run by Commies and liberals disguised as free-market capitalists?

It is only by cosmic accident that Scranton has come to be part of the national conversation in 2008. If you believe in a guiding deity, and one with a piquant sense of humor, then this is surely evidence of both.

When Sarah Palin namechecks Scranton in her acceptance speech and goes on about her closeness to Joe Six Pack, she (and many others) take an issue that's intrinsically stupid way too far. C'mon now, lady, a lot of us have been there. We drink six-packs of the cheap stuff and still distinguish between being there and not being there and the unimportance of both in the measurement of character.

"I cannot stand people who drop their ‘ing’s,’ mother used to tell me describing one of her pet peeves," wrote the editor and publisher of the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader on Sunday. (Think Scranton's sister city.) "It’s an insight into their laziness."

"Oh Boy. Mother would not like Palin’s folksy, I-am-one-of-youse dialect."

And Joe Biden covers the same territory. It's as if the VP choices were in a verbal arms race seeking to win the title: Most Authentic Heevahava.

"Joe Biden was born at Mercy Hospital, went to school at St. Paul's, played baseball at Maloney Field, scrapped with local toughs, skinned his knees on the dirt roads," wrote some tourist at the Washington Post a couple weeks back, getting his writerly piece of the Scranton pie.

"When he returns to his old Green Ridge neighborhood, where he spent the first 10 years of his life, he likes to pick up a 'regular hoagie,' the one with the special sauce, at Hank's Hoagies."

Yes, who among us does not like regular hoagies with special sauce? The elitists and snobs reveal themselves when they hold their noses.

"This city of working-class charm and struggle has become a microcosm of all the fears and hopes and restlessness of Democrats who believe they should win this presidential election but are not convinced they will," continued the Post, troweling it on as thick as possible.

Common geography doesn't guarantee affinity. And absence, in my experience, almost never makes the heart grow fond.