Charting a future for the Midwest beyond its past

Does the Midwest matter?” That’s the question posed in an essay by Frank Bures in MinnPost today. Bures remembered his youth in Winona, Minnesota, this way:

Growing up, I remember feeling like greatness was something that belonged far away, and that if I wanted to do anything worthwhile, my only choice was to leave. That is, after all, the American story: Go west. Go east. Go somewhere. But don’t stay! For as long as anyone can remember, the Midwest has always been the place you left behind. It is preamble. It is backstory.

This is a sentiment expressed well in the late Paul Gruchow’s essay “What We Teach our Rural Children,” from Grass Roots: The Universe of Home,” which was a major influence of mine. Bures continues:

The world has changed much since the Midwest solidified itself in the nation’s psyche, and I’m not even sure if the term ‘Midwest’ is relevant anymore. Looking around I see that there are many Midwesterners, be they Africans or Asians, farmers or hipsters, Latinos or Anglos. I can’t help feeling like the days of Gopher Prairie and Lake Wobegon are long past.

Still, our anxiety about our place in the culture remains, and my fear is that it makes us unable to see the true value of things closer to home, that our inferiority complex contributes to a sense where we are allowed to be the culture’s consumers, but not its producers.

Bures found an example of the possibilities of the midwest standing in the Mason City, Iowa, architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright worked in a different era, at a time when people still felt a sense of destiny, before the energy it took to settle the region had dissipated, and back when almost anything seemed possible — even an entirely new, entirely American architecture.

When I stand in one of Wright’s buildings, I get the same feeling as when I stand in front of a Grant Wood painting, or when I read Mark Twain. They too were of the Middle West, but there’s no self-deprecation, no apology, no self-consciousness about this. There is only ambition and brilliance and the feeling that they were part of the whole, not just part of a part.

That is my hope for the new Midwest, and I believe we are on the way there, as a new generation of connected artists and thinkers push past the Hollywood tropes and Keillorian caricatures. Rather than feel like the national discourse is something we’re listening in on, we again feel like it’s something we have a voice in.

Amen.

Deep in the core of the newer generations of Americans – call them X, call them Y, call them the 21st century – beat hearts that yearn for things that are real. We have so many ways of replicating reality now, and we’ve tried them all. We’ll try more. What works is always what is most real. What is fake always falls hard, eventually.

I submit that the Midwest remains real. Not always pretty, though often. Not always welcoming, though compelling. But always real. Outside our towns and cities you find places to be alone, and we mean that. Alone. The landscape and the people draw energy from one another and, in between, I’d argue you can find a pretty darn good situation.

That’s Midwestern for “life of meaning.”

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