Back to the Stone Age.(Binghamton, New York)

Byline: Maggie Cutler

The Bing Hamptons. That's what I've taken to calling the upstate New York area where my husband and I spend weekends, my joke being the horrific contrast between the fashionable, exorbitant Long Island Hamptons and the increasingly destitute city of Binghamton, which lies about an hour north of our place. After a few trips up and down the social ladder that spans these two areas, you begin to notice something touching: namely, that whereas rich Americans have a lot of projects, poor Americans have a lot of fantasies.

Hardheaded practical types abound in the Bing Hamptons. Still, many heads up there teem with mental phantasms of escape. (Vegas! Florida!) Others nurse fantasies of vindication. ("After the next terrorist attack those downstaters will wish they lived here.") Many embrace wishful fantasies of easy money and tumor-curing deities, or consume dubious corporate fantasies whole-hog, like the one about fat-free potato chips' being healthy.

One family I met lived entirely on fairy tales. The mother, having compiled a book of local news clippings, imagined selling it for a big advance. Her husband entertained rosy memories of how, back in his day, companies took care of workers out of the goodness of their hearts, without the prodding of devilish unions and governments. Their divorced daughter dropped out of nursing school in the hopes of landing a rich husband.

What makes fantasies different upstate, where people desperately need them, from downstate, where people get rich marketing them, is that city people don't confuse wishful thinking with purposeful thinking... Or do we?

Sometimes when upstate, I imagine taking over our local paper. I excise its gushing front-page features about local merchants, whose undercapitalized enterprises usually consist of ...