August 14, 2011
dear clusterflock
The part of the country you understand the least.
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Whichever country that happens to be.
For me it’s the mid-west. The whole area strikes me as a pool of sameness. Great tides of gelatinous opinion and mono-culture corn.
Truth is–I don’t really know much about the area and don’t want to insult flockers from that region. And Jesus–I live in Texas after all. Filled with hicks who would take on the job of U.S. President in a second, believing that having an ass to put in a chair is the most important qualification.
The part that should still be Mexico. Most of the Louisiana Purchase. Then again, I think I understand these places. I just don’t want to.
For me I think it’s the North East. And it’s mostly because of lack of experience there, but I realize it’s the culture that seems the most foreign to me. I have people from the Mid-West and California. I’ve lived in Texas, and Colorado, so I can extrapolate South-West, South-East, and North West, but I don’t have people I grew up with from the North-East, and haven’t lived close enough to understand it. Even if the Cowboys play in the NFC East.
I definitely understand the part that should still be Mexico. I think I understand pretty much all of the U.S., really. I prefer the less harmonious parts to the comfortable ones. The American Heartland scares me.
It sounds like Daryl understands the midwest perfectly.
All of that mono-culture corn is pretty scary, Daryl. Also soybean fields extending to the horizon.
I think I understand Florida the least. Except that I do understand it. Partially, I think.
(Ponce de León, Fountain of Youth. Humidity. Bugs. Real estate scams. Funeral homes offering pre-paid plans for elderly Jews interested in “northern shipment.”)
I just don’t get why anyone would choose to live there, given the option not to.
I hope Mike Dresser isn’t reading this.
I don’t think the Midwest is the same at all. They put up all that monotonous landscape to mess with the rest of us. You can’t tell me Chicago is full of sameness. It is an incredible city that makes my blood race when I start to get close.
And it is not the “place” so much, because it is physically breathtaking, as the people I am unable to wrap my arms around. And that is the stereotypical New Englander. I mean I love Boston and places I’ve toured in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. But I sometimes find myself wanting to psychically poke and prod certain New Englanders, provoke them them into being something they’re not. Which never works, btw.
Chicago exists despite the midwest, not because of it.
If you’re within 30 miles of a major metropolitan area, you’re not in the midwest.
Sheila, yes–Florida! I don’t understand Florida at all. I like it that it’s shaped like a dick, though.
Carole, you understand well how tricksy we midwesterners can be.
Listen at that. I just said “we midwesterners.”
Well, I guess by now I am one. I’ve lived in the Midwest since 1975. Give or take, southern Illinois being not quite Illinois. And closer to Memphis than to Chicago.
In truth, I’m not sure there is a region of the US that really baffles me. Maybe that comes of being the child of New England parents, raised in Texas, who has lived her adult life in the Midwest (with occasional stretches in southern California and in southern Illinois, which is part Ozarkian and part Lower Mississippian and a little bit Appalachian by virtue of migration).
Maybe the region least familiar to me is the Great Plains. Kansas. Nebraska. The Dakotas. I don’t really know any people in those places.
Oh, and Carole? There really is something dark and inaccessible at the core of a New Englander’s soul. I know because there is a little bit of that inaccessible darkness in me. Hawthorne. Melville. Dickinson.
This is hard.
Washington DC. Politicians.
You got it Ryan! I’ve been in the D.C. area since January 1980. I remember a beautiful, warm last day in Birmingham, AL. I think I went to “Missy” Kathy’s and she cooked me breakfast. People were playing touch football in the parks, barefooted. I flew to D.C. to a blast of cold air. After work I would walk/run from Union Station to my rowhouse on Capitol Hill, freezing, and not because I was trying to get in some exercise. More than a few times I threw myself on my bed and cried. What have I done? Why did I come to this miserable place? I never got Potomac Fever, more like captured up in quick sand. It is a strange place of transients and “natives” who mostly haven’t been here very long either. The roots are short, sparse and very weak. I think it’s why so many think they can behave badly here. Nobody much is “from” here.
Shelia, that’s a good word for the midwesterner we are dissecting, tricksy. You can’t pin them down, they don’t like that. And it would make sense about that bit of inaccessible you are talking about in yourself, after all. New England blood and all.
And I hate to admit this, being a southernist. But Midwesterners are sexy beasts. They are not flamboyant about it. But they’ve found a simple solution to all that endless cold weather. My mother-in-law and her friends did not mourn endlessly when their spouses passed away. A respectful time would pass and they were going out again, socializing, traveling with a new sweetheart. Life goes on. I admired it.
This is just my notion, anyway.
I can’t speak just now, too much going on. If I can later, having been a mid-westerner my whole life, I’ll say something. This much I’ll say just now, “I am a stranger here myself.”
In California, we make it a point not to understand any other part of the country-it’s hard enough understanding California.
I don’t really understand rural America. I’ve ridden my bike through parts of rural California and it mostly doesn’t make sense to me.
I think rural America used to make a lot more sense than it does now.
I also think it’s funny that so many Americans live in suburbs and exurbs, and I’ve lived only in cities and the sticks. (I guess Madison [pop. 233,209] qualifies as a city. Sort of. Anyway, if you have the state university and the state government, you’re not really the sticks.)
I think Ryan might have been right about DC.
The fact that Deron wrote the ‘North East’ and not the ‘Northeast’ speaks volumes.
The Midwest is a strange place. There is ubiquity, but there is also deep subversion. (I’ll give you two guesses which I find myself in more often.) I will say, I love the Midwest more the either coast both of which require a sort of arrogance that send me on tilt.
I’ve never lived in the South: Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia. My only substantial knowledge of it is early 19th century Southern authors.
The South seems like such a living stereotype to me, but there’s a part of me that feels it can’t be so cut-and-dry. It did, after all, give us Poe and Twain, Bill Clinton and the Blues.
Carole, I think you’ve nailed DC pretty well. I’m all the way out by Leesburg, and I’ve never seen people behave the way they do here. There’s a terrible sense of entitlement (which might be a Loudoun County thing) combined with… I’m at a loss of how to describe it. It goes beyond indifference. It’s almost passive-aggressive. Polite belligerence. Nobody assumes good faith, and many assume bad faith. It makes being pleasant and helpful into quite an exhausting chore.
I don’t understand DC culture – not just politically, either. I feel like there’s just an incredible rudeness as a default. Something I didn’t really even see in NYC when I lived there, and that’s where everyone’s supposed to “eat you alive”, right? I think it’s tied in with the entitlement and polite belligerence Dave mentions. It’s like we don’t realize we all live in a city, and there are a lot of other people to be considerate of.