In “Flyover
Country” Is an Insult to Midwesterners Like Me. So Is
“Heartland” Sentimentality,” journalist Matthew Wolfson offers a
sober and perceptive assessment of the popular sentimental image of the region
that “a broad swath of Americans — not least
Midwesterners — have constructed together.” He writes
The first time I
registered the term “flyover country,” my freshman year at a liberal arts
college in Southern California, I was more bewildered than angry. I had grown
up in Springfield, Illinois, population 117,000, and while I’d been eager to
leave and explore the coasts, I’d never thought of the city with anything other
than a sense of proprietary comfort. Yet here I was, aged 18, running into
pervasive, indifferent dismissal . . . . My reflexive response to this attitude
was to embrace the rhetoric of the “heartland,” the inverse of “flyover
country,” in which the Midwest became the most exceptional place in America.
This was a helpful if dishonest way to turn every critique of the region into a
virtue.
No need to apologize, Matthew – we’ve all done it.
Wolfson’s reminiscence was prompted by the recent
publication of three books that take up the cudgel on behalf of the Midwest and
that, as Wolfson puts it, “try, with varying degrees of success, to the give
the region its due, to define what, if anything, makes it unique.” In Flyover
Lives, novelist Diane Johnson recalls her childhood in Moline and her adult
search for her roots; the title of historian Jon K. Lauck’s The Lost Region: Toward a Revival
of Midwestern History, says most of what the book merely
elaborates; and Ohioan David Giffels reflects on how the region’s postwar
industrial economy became today’s post-economy economy in The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays
and Dispatches from the Rust Belt.
Wolfson finds not enough in these works to cheer the
region’s thinking patriots, if such creatures exist. His piece does offer
something to cheer to readers grateful for frank talk about where they live
from a loyal son of the region.
This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2014.
