On Parks & Recreation and Place & Patriotism

by Philip Tallon

There are a lot of reasons to be deeply taken with the show Parks & Recreation.

• Ron Swanson.
• The way the show perfected what The Office set out to do: using the banality of everyday American life as a backdrop for a sitcom.
• Amy Poehler’s brilliant portrayal of Leslie Knope, the strong-yet-flawed female lead.
• Ron Swanson.
• Etc.

One reason that I’m especially fond of Parks & Recreation is the way that it gets right something about the nature of patriotism. What it means to really care about a place that’s less than great.

The fictional Pawnee, Indiana isn’t identical to where I live, but it has a lot in common. It’s an unspecial, mid-sized town with lots of urban sprawl and disposable strip malls. There’s not much crime, but there’s also not much culture. It’s a place where nobody would choose to live, but it’s where most of us, in fact, do live.

Yet Leslie Knope feels a strong, almost maniacal devotion to Pawnee. To her, this IS the greatest place on earth. One part of this attachment is perhaps due to her naiveté about the outside world. She seems a little foolish in a season 2 episode, "Sister City," when, before welcoming Venezuelan dignitaries for a visit, she says, “Remember, everyone, Venezuela is a poor country. These men are not used to the wealth and flash that we are used to in central Indiana.” The episode has a lot of fun reversing this expectation. The dignitaries do little but belittle Pawnee’s dullness compared with Miami, or its squalor compared with the luxury they are used to as high-level politicians in an oil-rich country. In this way Knope’s a bit like many midwesterners who think a town with no sidewalks, tons of strip malls, and decent roads is as good as it gets. Who could ask for more?

Here and elsewhere the show has its fun poking at the way Americans are often content with, and unaware of, sad elements of modern life. The visiting dignitaries poke at the weaknesses of American civic life repeatedly. Talking to the city planner, one remarks,“This city was planned? Driving in I saw at tattoo parlor next to a school next to a Taco Bell. It looks like it was designed by a very stupid rodent.” This would be funnier if I didn't live in a town that has the same shoddy planning. The local school, for instance, is a hunched, virtually windowless monstrosity that looked like it was designed merely to maximize air conditioning efficiency (which it probably was).

(This critique of depressed urban spaces is especially pronounced in the British The Office, where, in one episode, Ricky Gervais' David Brent reads W.H. Auden's poem about Slough, which essentially says that the depressing town where the show is set would be better off being bombed.)

But the more interesting, and more rare, aspect to Knope’s patriotism is the way her deep loyalty to place transcends jingoism. It isn’t that she’s blind to the bad-making features of Pawnee. She sees a lot of them. But her perception of these flaws doesn’t dent her affection. It drives her to improve Pawnee by making it a prettier place to live (through parks) and a more pleasant place to live (through recreation).


A good part of the comedy of the show grows out of her perennial, unstoppable desire to improve the place she loves, and how her efforts to this end are ground up in the gears of government bureaucracy. Knope’s optimism is highlighted by Swanson’s general apathy and distrust of government. Her natural energy is channeled into public works. His laziness and secrecy are abetted by some version of libertarianism.

To wit, Swanson:

• I work hard to make sure my department is as small and as ineffective as possible.
• I think the entire government should be privatized. Chuck E. Cheese could run the parks. Everything operated by tokens. Drop in a token, go on the swing set. Drop in another token, take a walk. Drop in a token, look at a duck.
• My idea of a perfect government is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk, and the only thing he’s allowed to decide is who to nuke. The man is chosen based on some kind of IQ test, and maybe also a physical tournament, like a decathlon. And women are brought to him, maybe ... when he desires them.

You get the idea.

Anyway, the point is, Leslie sees the flaws of the place, but loves it anyway. And her love for the particular (fictional) town of Pawnee drives her to make it more lovable. This is what patriotism means.

E.g. in season 4’s episode “Lucky” we hear a Venezualan-sounding evaluation of the town of Pawnee from a muckracking journalist, who is interviewing Leslie about her run for city council. The journalist describes Pawnee thus: “Home to the Sweetums Candy Corporation, 19 waste repositories, and not much else.” Complaining about the airport, he says, “This airport seems to me like a metaphor for the town. Out of touch, out of date, perhaps, lost, insignificant, and sad.” Leslie pushes back, recognizing the airport’s “desperate need of refurbishments” and Pawnee’s lack of “big-city amenities,” but pointing out that Pawnee “makes up for it with hand-working hearts, I mean hard-working hands.” Perhaps I should have mentioned one plot point in this episode is that she is drunk during the interview. Regardless, Leslie rightly hammers home her commitment to making things better: “I’d rather talk about ways to solve problems in this town...We can talk about ways that I can improve the airport or our many, wonderful parks.”

Leslie’s a patriot not because she ignores the bad things but because she loves Pawnee enough to try to fix them. G. K. Chesterton’s comments on patriotism could almost as easily have come from Leslie, and apply to Pawnee (the rest of the piece is really just a long quote from Chesterton):

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing—say Pimlico [England's version of Pawnee]...It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

Like beauty and the beast, sometimes you have to love something to make it loveable. Sometimes, in the short run, this love can even look a bit like hatred. Perfect love sometimes requires us to say that the thing we love is less than perfect. Fans are often the biggest critics. Chesterton again:

The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics...The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

I’ve found Chesterton’s insight here indispensable for thinking about loyalty ever since reading it. So many people get patriotism wrong, but whoever is writing Parks & Recreation gets patriotism right. And this is part of why I am utterly devoted to this show, even though the recent Leslie-running-for-office storyline is a bit tiresome, and the Ann-Tom relationship is utterly ridiculous. But these are only small criticisms. I share because I care.



Philip Tallon (@philiptallon) is the author of The Poetics of Evil and the co-editor of The Philosophy of Sherlock Holmes (forthcoming later this year).