The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Where Are the Happy Places?

You can't buy happiness, we're told. The same, I suspect, holds true for optimism and satisfaction.

But you can find it, according to a new survey by Gallup and summarized in an article by the "creative cities" guru, urbanologist Richard Florida.

The article lists the cities where residents are most and least satisfied with their communities, and most or least optimistic that their towns are getting better. The standings won't make Midwesterners feel either satisfied or optimistic.

Can British-Style Rioting Happen Here?

In this tumultuous year, the whole world seems to have taken to the streets, most recently in the seemingly mindless rioting that seized London and other British cities this month. This outpouring of wrath raises the obvious question: can it happen here, in America, or more specifically, in the stricken cities of the Midwest?

We would seem to be ripe for violence, or at least protest. The connecting key to the British demonstrations seems to be a feeling of hopelessness or despair among young people, badly educated and unemployed, who see no future at all in post-industrial cities like London. All older Midwestern cities, even relatively successful ones like Chicago, contain ghettoes of people, both black and white, for whom globalization and its glitter are rumors at best, obscene jokes at worst.

So the tinder is there. Whether it ignites is less certain. It may be worth our time to compare rioting in England and the conditions that sparked it with the economic and social conditions here.

Our Summer of Extreme Discontent

I have an op-ed article in the Chicago Tribune today, commenting on the turmoil in our politics, as shown in the recent debt ceiling debate and tying this dysfunction to our inability to understand or cope with growing globalization and the country’s relative decline. Click here to read the article.

A New Midwestern Voice

For a last-minute shopping tip, it's hard to beat a book by a little-known but talented Midwestern author, a new voice bringing to life one of the landscapes of our minds, writing beautifully of a part of our collective past and consciousness. Such a book is Possum Trot, by an Iowa author named J. Harley McIlrath, published by Ice Cube Books, a small publisher in North Liberty, Iowa. I just received a copy, devoured it and recommend it highly. 

McIlrath inherits a long tradition of Midwestern writing, some of it among the monuments of American literature, which have helped define this region and this country. Some of this is city-based -- Richard Wright and Saul Bellow, for instance. But much has come from the small towns and farms of the Midwest -- Winesburg and Gopher Prairie and Spoon River -- obscure places that have become everybody's home town. Some of this is by expats looking back in anger or despair (e.g., Sinclair Lewis), some by people who never left, either in fact or psychologically (Marilynne Robinson, Kathleen Norris).

It's too early to put McIlrath and his first book in this pantheon. But it's not too early to suggest that we all keep an eye on him and what he has to tell us about ourselves.  

Race and Racism in the Midwest

The Shirley Sherrod affair has ignited new charges of racism from left and right and raised the issue of whether -- and to what degree -- racism survives in a nation led by an African-American president. Let's take this issue and bring it home. Does racism survive here in the Midwest which is, after all, Barack Obama's home turf?

Well, sure. Racism survives in the Midwest, just as it does in the rest of the country (and, as any traveler knows, around the world). The real question is where it survives, and to what degree, and is it affecting the way people think and vote?

Any report on this has to be pretty impressionistic. If there any accurate studies on Midwestern racism, I don't know about them. But I've been traveling the Midwest constantly for several years now and have tried to take the region's pulse on racism, as well as on other issues. So let me take an admittedly imperfect stab at this.

The Church and Globalization

When I wrote my book on globalization and the Midwest, I devoted a great deal of space to the people and institutions -- governments, mayors, planners, universities, newspapers -- whose job it is to deal with the problem and solve it. I made no mention of churches or religion, and this was a mistake.  I heard quickly from both pastors and laity, letting me know that the Midwest's problems are the church's problems too, and they want a voice in this debate.

That voice took shape recently at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, located on the Northwestern University campus in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. Garrett sponsored a three-day conference on "Ethical Leadership, the Church and the Global Economy." Ethical leadership and the church are well outside my area of expertise, but they invited me to sit in and I'm glad I did.

In Memoriam: Graham Hovey

They don't make them any more like Graham Hovey, and never will. The Midwest is the poorer for that fact.

Graham died last Saturday, aged 94, after a life of adventure, journalism and scholarship, much of it in service to the Midwest. He was an Iowan, born in Cedar Falls, attended what is now the University of Northern Iowa and later the University of Minnesota. He worked for the Waterloo Daily Courier and then for the old International News Service, first in Detroit and then, when World War II broke out, across northern Africa and into Italy and France, where he broke the story of the Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.

After the war, he came back to teach journalism at the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin. But daily journalism was in his blood and, in 1956, he joined the staffs of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, now merged into one paper. In 1959, the papers sent him to London, where he covered Europe for seven years, eventually returning to the U.S. to become an editorial writer and, later, Washington correspondent for the New York Times. He ended his career at the University of Michigan running the famous Michigan Journalism Fellows program, an on-campus year for working journalists.

I knew Graham during his London years. Basically, he was what we young reporters wanted to be when we grew up -- an erudite and sophisticated man, armed with a reporter's instincts and equipped by experience and scholarship to dig beneath the news to unearth its meaning and significance. He seemed the very model of the scholarly journalist.

And he did all this for a Midwestern paper. Graham worked at a time when many Midwestern papers routinely kept correspondents around the world. These men and women worked for papers in Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Cleveland, even Toledo. Along with the star-spangled Chicago Daily News lineup, he was the best of the best, but almost every big Midwestern newspaper felt an obligation to bring the news of the world to their readers.

All gone now. The Chicago Tribune was the last Midwestern newspaper with its own foreign service. The Star-Tribune and other papers threw in the towel years ago. Graham and many of the others flourished in an era of the strong dollar, when it cost relatively little to keep correspondents overseas. The rest fell victim to the more recent economic squeeze on papers and the shrinking of their coverage to little more than locally-focused news-you-can-use. At a time when the Midwest is more directly affected by global pressures than ever before, almost no Midwestern paper even tries to tell its readers what's happening to their lives.

Graham Hovey symbolized a time -- long before cable, before the Web and Twitter and instant communications -- when Midwestern papers upheld their constitutional mandate to create an informed electorate, and employed journalists like Graham to make this happen. He was, literally, the end of an era and that era passed before he did.

A Few Good People

The Midwest is still struggling to redefine itself in the age of globalization, but a lot of good people are engaged in that struggle. As a difficult decade ends and a new, perhaps better, one dawns, it's a good time to salute a few of these good people. They're among the leaders who are setting the Midwest's agenda for the future and who will help guide it into that future.

When I drew up this list, I ended up with several dozen names. In other words, the Midwest does not lack for assets, people who understand what's going on and what needs to be done. Anyone traveling around the Midwest quickly learns that the region is loaded with people who clearly see the challenges of this new global era and that the old Midwestern way of doing things doesn't work any more. Many of them toil in isolation, and one of our jobs on the site is to put them in touch with each other, to help them leverage their work and ideas into a regional recovery.

A list of all these people would go on forever, and inevitably leave out many more. So it makes sense to single out a few, not necessarily more valuable than the rest but typical of the good work going on across this region.

The Uses of Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is the store that everyone loves to hate, even when they shop there, and there's definitely plenty there to hate. But I wonder if it might be a solution to one of the Midwest's intractable problems -- food deserts, especially in cities.

Wal-Mart may dominate shopping in county seats across the Midwest, but it's had less luck penetrating the bigger cities. Chicago, in particular, has resisted the charms of the Arkansas-based giant. It has one store, on the West Side, and wants to open a second in another mostly black area, Chatham, on the South Side. This has been stymied so far by a coalition of opponents. Labor unions oppose Wal-Mart's anti-union policy. Politicians and other activists are appalled by its low wages, miserly benefits and mean working conditions. Smaller retailers in the neighborhood fear that a Wal-Mart in Chatham will do what Wal-Marts everywhere else have done, which is to put the little guys out of business.

All this is well-documented. Steven Greenhouse, the labor correspondent for the New York Times, skewered Wal-Mart and its subsidiary, Sam's Club, in his searing book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. Other writers have traced its medieval attitudes toward workers and women in particular from its roots in rural Arkansas to its treatment of employees across the nation. At the same time, thousands of small towns across the Midwest have learned that, when a Wal-Mart superstore opens in the county seat, it puts the last nail in the coffin of any Main Street within driving distance. Often, the arrival of a Wal-Mart 30 miles away is enough to ruin small groceries who can't compete with Wal-Mart's prices. This may be good for shoppers seeking low prices. It's not so hot for the towns and its residents, who are left with no place to buy fresh food.

Some Random Thoughts

Christmas week is no time for lengthy essays. So herewith are a few quick thoughts spinning off the week's news.

The climate change negotitions in Copenhagen and the damp squib that emerged proved two things:

1. Global problems, like global warming, demand global solutions, not national ones, that must be overseen by global organizations.

2. Getting this job done will be the work of years, not a fortnight in Copenhagen.

Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, called the new health bill "not a mansion but a starter home." He could have said the same about the Copenhagen compromise.

But it's a start.

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Speaking of the health bill, the final Senate version droppped a proposed tax on cosmetic surgency, but replaced it with a tax on tanning salons. That figures.

Most cosmetic surgery is done by wealthy cosmetic surgeons for wealthy patients who can afford the high fees. Most tanning salons are like the ones on Midwestern main streets, tiny places owned or franchised by a farm wife or factory worker, trying to make a few extra dollars by giving a cheap tan to locals who can't afford to spend the winter in Florida.

Cosmetic surgeons have lobbyists. Tanning salons don't.

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It seems that Tiger Woods is being cast adrift by Accenture, which is scrambling to erase his image from its advertising, as surely as former Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev vanished into unperson-dom once they became an embarrassment.

This is odd. Tiger Woods and Accenture have much in common. Accenture, after all, is the company that emerged from the wreckage of the Chicago-based accounting frim, Arthur Andersen, when that icon, like Tiger, got distracted from what it did for a living.

While it was paying Woods those big fees, Accenture could have been even more useful by advising him how to keep his eye on the ball.