ON THE LITE SIDE - Costco Forever!

"Clueless in Costco" by Timothy Egan, New York Times

For a native Westerner, the slights from the other end of the country start early, and build through a lifetime: national broadcasters on election night who cannot pronounce Oregon (it’s like gun) or Nevada (it’s not Nev-odda), or a toll-free clerk who thinks New Mexico is part of old Mexico.

“You’ll have to go through your own embassy,” a resident of Santa Fe was told when trying to order Olympic tickets for games on American soil.

Geographic illiteracy from the Eastern Time Zone is a given, especially among the well-educated. A New York book publisher, and Harvard grad at that, once asked me if I ever take the ferry up to Alaska for the afternoon. No, I replied: do you ever go to Greenland on a day trip?

Norman Maclean, the great Montana writer, had a worse experience. He complained that an editor turned down his masterpiece, “A River Runs Through It,” because it had too many trees in it.

A media titan, The Washington Post, recently announced they were calling home their remaining national correspondents, explaining that the paper was perfectly capable of covering the rest of the country from inside the Beltway. By that reasoning, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner can discern what’s happening in the capital from their home base near the Arctic Circle.

Sports is a grievance category all its own. If you Google “East Coast Bias,” up comes a long litany of stories about how the West never gets any respect from those great deciders in the East.

So, naturally, Toby Gerhart of Stanford didn’t receive this year’s Heisman Trophy, awarded annually to the nation’s best college football player, despite leading elite colleges in rushing yards, rushing touchdowns, total touchdowns and points scored. Many of the voters were asleep, or Saturday-night-blotto, when Gerhart was dazzling the football world this fall. The voting map was a geography of bias.

These are all minor annoyances, mind you, in a world with daily reminders that an embittered, small-hearted senator from Connecticut can hold up health care for millions, or some people would rather read a “book” by Hulk Hogan than a short story by Sherman Alexie.

But every now and then those of us who reside on the sunset side of the 100th meridian get a chance to rub one in the other way.

Consider the fuss over Costco landing on the island of Manhattan last month. Costco is the nation’s third largest retailer, with more than 400 warehouse stores in the United States alone. Liberals love Costco because they pay their workers about 40 percent more than their big box rivals.

Conservatives love them because they sell Sarah Palin’s book by the pallet, next to the camo wear.

Costco is a brilliant retail concept, but it’s not news. It’s been around for, oh . . . a quarter-century or so. Some of the gushing posts on New York-based Web sites after Costco opened on East 117th Street have all the breathless urgency of a tourist who has discovered bagels in Boulder.

“It’s amazing how many things you can get for a fairly decent price!” One shopper wrote on Yelp New York, the online review site. Um, that’s the idea. And other observers have seemed befuddled in the big box, overwhelmed by the lure of tube sox and toilet paper to last a lifetime.

Most Westerners may not know schmear from schmaltz, but they can tell a sophisticated urban shopper to stick with the to-die-for olive oil, cold-pressed just a few weeks ago in Tuscany, and the $1.50 quarter-pound hot dog when under the high fluorescent sky of a Costco warehouse.

Speaking of my newspaper — please, it’s the holidays, a time for indulgence in all things — they recently discovered a newsworthy item from the Mountain West: Jews in Montana. Imagine!

One more bit of news on this front: the nation’s first elected Jewish governor was a Western man. And a Democrat. In Idaho. Moses Alexander governed the land of famous potatoes from 1915 to 1919.

As a longtime Western representative of The New York Times, which is well read in these provinces, I feel the rub of faux-rube pandering both ways. Here, people are amazed I can find Twitty, Texas, on a map, and — more surprising, can vouch for the peach cobbler. There, the wonder is that I know which side of the plate to keep the salad fork. Sort of.