Michelle Obama: Desperate Housewife?

The Burbist doesn't ordinarily rise to defend suburbia. As Gregory Rodriguez's fuzzy broadside in the Los Angeles Times last month shows, attacks on the suburban mindset usually misplace the blame for vaguely defined wrongs, like a guy kicking the cat after a bad day at work.

When Michelle Obama told Fox News in February that her household is "news free," Rodriguez, a Times op-ed columnist, took out his frustrations on the suburbs. "Her statement ... represented the culmination of the suburbanization of the American mind," Rodriguez wrote. Why he thought is so wrongheaded as to invite a reply.

The First Lady's admission, on Mike Huckabee's show, came during a discussion about her "Let's Move" initiative, aimed at raising awareness about children's fitness and diet. After a commercial break, Huckabee asked Mrs. Obama whether she watched Fox News. "I try to keep home kind of a news-free zone," she responded.."When you work above the shop, you can't just bring work home."

Rodriguez doesn't say exactly how the White House is representative of the suburbs--despite its spreading lawns, it stands dead center in our 27th largest city--or of any typical American lifestyle. Rodriguez says that Mrs. Obama's no-news policy exhibits a slightly paranoid suburban tendency to think that "members of the single family unit are their only allies." This nails, no doubt, what it must be like to live in the Washington bubble. But the dynamic has little to do with life in an anonymous suburb, where, if anything, family cohesion is atomized by commitments outside the home, Mom's work schedule and book group included.

Rodriguez's complaint is not only with our emotional state, but with that of our minds. Suburbanites' physical remove from the city, he writes, is paralleled by an intellectual distance. He blames a mentality of "escapism"--a notion he borrowed from a Harper's magazine article from 1946. Ergo, we avoid bad news.

Nevermind that most suburbanites today have escaped from nowhere but are, like Rodriguez, suburban natives; his evidence that we are becoming a "newsless" nation comes from a 2008 Pew Research Center study that found that a third of Americans under 25 get no news during a typical day. There's no indication that Pew's young people are primarily suburban. Indeed, the suburbs, given the predominance of elders among both newspaper readers and homeowners, are likely to consume news at a higher rate than urbanites.

Not that reading the news these days qualifies as an intellectual pursuit--not as long as trash-talking is passed off as serious argument.