The Middle
No one from Southern California thinks that there's any life east of Las Vegas. And everyone from the East Coast thinks that civilization ends just west of Philadelphia. The Midwest, however, is acutely aware of the coasts, and it regards them with suspicion.
After all, this is what Midwesterners tend to do best: regard, with suspicion.
The Midwestern mentality is by far the most earnestly judgmental. Whereas the Californians live and let live and leave judgment to their fine courts, East Coasters tend to be a discerning bunch. There are things they want to know, and your answers to these questions, you can be sure, will determine the way they categorize you, which is, after all, a kind of judgment all its own. To name a few, usually phrased in slightly more subtle ways: How rich are you, where do you buy your clothes, how good is your family's name, where do you ski, do you ski?, where did you attend boarding school, these kinds of things. The Midwesterner does not understand the moral and decisional limbo in which the Californian lives, and the blunt evaluative tools of the Easterner do not satisfy the Midwesterner's appetite for rock-solid truth and the harsh-if-necessary justice that is its natural consequence.
If a Midwesterner gets a new haircut or decides in some way to "change his style," or her style, s/he had better be prepared to give an explanation. The judgmental closeness that the Midwest breeds in its many clucking subgroups is reminiscent of being home again for the holidays after months or years of having been away. Things will be discussed. This is not up for discussion.
You might be able to argue that I was born in the middlest place in the whole world.
And before you get started, no, that does not mean that I, or the place I happen to be talking about, is necessarily the center of the universe in any way. My father, a stern sort who liked to smoke cigarettes, always made sure to tell me, whenever I made unreasonable requests of his time or money, in bursts of teeth-clench, rehearsed vitriol: "Son, the world does not revolve around you." And I'm here to tell you, beyond the shadow of any doubt, despite statements you've probably heard attributed to me and things that have been deliberately misconstrued by the media--that my father was absolutely right. I've leave it at that.
Now, the thing about St. Louis, Missouri, is that it's very close to the geographical center of these United States. There's a name for whatever they call the actual like center of area, but I don't remember what it is--you'll remember if you can dig up the memories of balancing precisely cut foam triangles on pencil points; look it up, let us know--but the real point is that we're talking a really central spot here. On some sort of a profound level, I think you'll agree with me.
You've heard about the four points that they have there in the Southwest, where you can go out to the borders of Colorado and Utah and New Mexico and Arizona or something like that and get yourself all spread-eagled at some highway rest stop or something and have a hand or a a foot in each one of them at the same time? That's all well and good but if you'll indulge me for a minute and think of it this way, you could walk yourself out to a spot, who knows where, in some random point probably near some field in central Missouri, and you would be--literally--in the middle of the country. Like if--at the moment you were standing on this invisible spot in this cornfield--if you took out a gigantic jigsaw and cut out the [continental] United States out of the Earth just perfectly along the lines you could see on any common map, and you turned it upside down... The whole thing would balance perfectly on your head. And it wouldn't even be like Atlas, holding the whole world up because of his great strength, or anything like that. You'd just be in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time... See what I mean? If your back could stand the pressure, the distribution of the weight itself would do the work. Kind of crazy. That's the thing about the middle.
I, myself, though, wasn't born in the middle, actually, I was born in a little place outside of St. Louis about twenty miles from the Mississippi River, a place called Webster Groves, where the first city folks who were sick of the smoke and the crowds and the encroaching blacks decided to escape to, to live in houses where they could get some space and some peace from one another, where they could put a solid twenty feet and a white picket fence between themselves and their neighbors and be a lot happier and more neighborly because of it.
They called it Webster Groves because of the larger apple orchard that was its chief geographical landmark when before the commuters took over. Initially, there was this huge debate about whether to call the new community Webster Grove or Webster Groves. Apparently--the newspaper coverage suggest that the issue was contentious and hard-fought--the vast majority of people agreed that Webster Groves sounded more elegant, more appealing, more plantation-like, and this is certainly what they all were going for in moving out to the country. But the hold up was that a large contingent of the new settlers--though not quite a majority--just didn't think it was honest, in spite of the name's obvious appeal, to name the place Webster Groves when there was only, in point of fact, one grove. In the end, of course, as tends to be the case (though not, typically, in parts like these), those who preferred to play fast and loose with the truth in the interest of painting a rosy picture won out over those who might have preferred a slightly less impressive fact.
After all, this is what Midwesterners tend to do best: regard, with suspicion.
The Midwestern mentality is by far the most earnestly judgmental. Whereas the Californians live and let live and leave judgment to their fine courts, East Coasters tend to be a discerning bunch. There are things they want to know, and your answers to these questions, you can be sure, will determine the way they categorize you, which is, after all, a kind of judgment all its own. To name a few, usually phrased in slightly more subtle ways: How rich are you, where do you buy your clothes, how good is your family's name, where do you ski, do you ski?, where did you attend boarding school, these kinds of things. The Midwesterner does not understand the moral and decisional limbo in which the Californian lives, and the blunt evaluative tools of the Easterner do not satisfy the Midwesterner's appetite for rock-solid truth and the harsh-if-necessary justice that is its natural consequence.
If a Midwesterner gets a new haircut or decides in some way to "change his style," or her style, s/he had better be prepared to give an explanation. The judgmental closeness that the Midwest breeds in its many clucking subgroups is reminiscent of being home again for the holidays after months or years of having been away. Things will be discussed. This is not up for discussion.
You might be able to argue that I was born in the middlest place in the whole world.
And before you get started, no, that does not mean that I, or the place I happen to be talking about, is necessarily the center of the universe in any way. My father, a stern sort who liked to smoke cigarettes, always made sure to tell me, whenever I made unreasonable requests of his time or money, in bursts of teeth-clench, rehearsed vitriol: "Son, the world does not revolve around you." And I'm here to tell you, beyond the shadow of any doubt, despite statements you've probably heard attributed to me and things that have been deliberately misconstrued by the media--that my father was absolutely right. I've leave it at that.
Now, the thing about St. Louis, Missouri, is that it's very close to the geographical center of these United States. There's a name for whatever they call the actual like center of area, but I don't remember what it is--you'll remember if you can dig up the memories of balancing precisely cut foam triangles on pencil points; look it up, let us know--but the real point is that we're talking a really central spot here. On some sort of a profound level, I think you'll agree with me.
You've heard about the four points that they have there in the Southwest, where you can go out to the borders of Colorado and Utah and New Mexico and Arizona or something like that and get yourself all spread-eagled at some highway rest stop or something and have a hand or a a foot in each one of them at the same time? That's all well and good but if you'll indulge me for a minute and think of it this way, you could walk yourself out to a spot, who knows where, in some random point probably near some field in central Missouri, and you would be--literally--in the middle of the country. Like if--at the moment you were standing on this invisible spot in this cornfield--if you took out a gigantic jigsaw and cut out the [continental] United States out of the Earth just perfectly along the lines you could see on any common map, and you turned it upside down... The whole thing would balance perfectly on your head. And it wouldn't even be like Atlas, holding the whole world up because of his great strength, or anything like that. You'd just be in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time... See what I mean? If your back could stand the pressure, the distribution of the weight itself would do the work. Kind of crazy. That's the thing about the middle.
I, myself, though, wasn't born in the middle, actually, I was born in a little place outside of St. Louis about twenty miles from the Mississippi River, a place called Webster Groves, where the first city folks who were sick of the smoke and the crowds and the encroaching blacks decided to escape to, to live in houses where they could get some space and some peace from one another, where they could put a solid twenty feet and a white picket fence between themselves and their neighbors and be a lot happier and more neighborly because of it.
They called it Webster Groves because of the larger apple orchard that was its chief geographical landmark when before the commuters took over. Initially, there was this huge debate about whether to call the new community Webster Grove or Webster Groves. Apparently--the newspaper coverage suggest that the issue was contentious and hard-fought--the vast majority of people agreed that Webster Groves sounded more elegant, more appealing, more plantation-like, and this is certainly what they all were going for in moving out to the country. But the hold up was that a large contingent of the new settlers--though not quite a majority--just didn't think it was honest, in spite of the name's obvious appeal, to name the place Webster Groves when there was only, in point of fact, one grove. In the end, of course, as tends to be the case (though not, typically, in parts like these), those who preferred to play fast and loose with the truth in the interest of painting a rosy picture won out over those who might have preferred a slightly less impressive fact.
posted by Michael Deuser at 7:59 PM
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