Phil Christman

There’s something poignant about this folk etymology, in which the Midwest is a kind of abandoned frontier. You picture the whole region as a sort of once-shiny new mall marooned by suburban sprawl, left to crumble, only a few years after opening, in a no-longer-vital part of town. Such an image might help explain the sense of disappointment that grips so many of us here, the nostalgia for a moment that we can’t quite pinpoint, the feeling not that things once were definitely better, but that they were once understood to be on the verge, at least, of getting better. A place that almost happened;

Shortridge is right, then “Midwest” is a state of mind, or a name for a collocation of moods or tropes, some of them contradictory.

If you read the debates that surrounded the ratification of the American Constitution, the thing that seems most surprising, from our vantage point, is this: a lot of people didn’t want the U.S. to have a standing army. It ranked among the most popular arguments against a powerful central government. After all, why would you provide your rulers—those ambitious creeps—with a tool for seizing territory and enacting tyranny? Why would you prepare for war in the absence of the kind of unifying, immediate threat—invasion, dictatorship—that naturally arouses people to fight? Why would you fight a revolution and then immediately give your president what he needs to make him a king? And why would you do this when your worst enemy lay across an ocean?

American civilian is made to feel a signatory to two social contracts: the democratic one we learn about in school, and the imperial one, in which our enlightened, humane way of life is an unsustainable bubble in a dark world, maintained by an organization that terrorizes its employees, crushes dissent, scorns vulnerability, intermittently practices torture, resents the Geneva Convention. We are encouraged to see democracy as something that can only live in a symbiotic relationship with authoritarianism.

A utopia acts as a rudder on the future: it provokes friction, inconvenience, wonderment, bending the world ever so slightly more its way.

Failures,” writes White, “were the lifeblood of the transcontinentals.” And failing as they went, they became the prototypes of that modern American corporate consciousness—amoral, stupid, but sanctimonious, always demanding either its eminent domain rights or its bailout—that we now send kids to business school to learn.

No—when someone tells you that the needs of The Economy are in conflict with The Environment, with the usual implication that we must sacrifice views to dollars and places to funds, what they are usually saying is that the needs of some people who want to get richer are in conflict with the needs of some other people who want to stay alive. The ecocide of the Plains buffalo was simultaneously the intentional destruction of a Native economy.

Fordism killed the “the walking city of the middle decades of the 19th century,” in Kusmar’s phrase, “with its haphazard arrangements of stores, businesses, and residential areas,” and made possible its replacement by cities with planned neighborhoods. All too often, this meant segregated ones.

To have a history is to be made of many alive wriggling moldy embarrassments that preexisted you and over which you have no control.

Owing to a basically phlegmatic temperament, and the fear of hurting my parents, I made it to college without committing suicide.