by Armie Chardiet
Mass media stories about the Midwest tend to reify the perspective that the Midwest is America’s backwater, that it is a place for the old, the backward, and the poor. By virtue, average Americans will only hear about the Midwest in the negative. The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio has the national eye wandering back to my one-time-home. The train, carrying toxic chemicals, including vinyl chloride, derailed, dumping its contents into the surrounding ecosystem, infecting the water and air with cancer-causing particulate matter that could affect the community for decades to come.
After the derailment, the Norfolk Southern Railway Company, the company responsible for the spill, could only muster a $1,000 dollar ‘inconvenience’ check for local residents. Of course, incidents like these are not uncommon—there are around 1,475 train derailments a year. To make matters worse, another Norfolk Southern derailment occurred after the East Palestine accident, killing the conductor.
When reading the news, we often forget the material reality that folks affected by the disaster are living; in capitalist media, people very quickly become nothing more than numbers, disasters nothing more than expenditures.
We have national amnesia about the Midwest. Flint, Michigan was recently dropped from a corporate sponsorship for bottled water, despite its continued water crisis. It may have faded from headlines, but it’s still happening. Real people are turned into nothing more than abstractions when America’s metropolitan elite portray the Midwest as the backwoods swamp of the country. It would be irresponsible to consider the relationship between the Midwest and the rest of America as anything other than an issue of class relations.
“Her green waters a twisted visage of the factory ridden beachside that would only be engulfed by her gluttony. Her mist put us to sleep with dreams of possibility and adventure to far off lands.”
Growing up in Cleveland felt like snow flurries and snowball fights, like summers that stretched into the orange of autumn, like cool air that kissed you enough to make your cheeks red. The popular belief that Cleveland is some dingy American backwater of abandoned houses and bullet shells is a falsehood constructed out of coastal metropolitan elitism. The factories were never ugly; in fact, their carcasses became a breeding ground for graffiti art, underground music, and photography for young people. When I moved from Cleveland to North Carolina at age fourteen, I was struck by everything I had taken for granted. Snowy winters were replaced with a lukewarm imitation that could never match the excitement of a first snow.
“We’d exhale chimney smoke between our blue lips that prayed for someone to wake up and hold us in their arms. Outside the window Great Lake Erie loomed over us like a titan waiting to swallow us whole with its prevailing November winds.”
Many of us live in the belief that if you don’t reside in one of the United State’s metropolitan centers, you’re missing out on everything; it’s a society-wide FOMO felt by many Midwesterners, including myself. With a nickname like “mistake by the lake” it’s hard not to feel the bias against the Midwest. It’s no surprise that even positive media, like the LA Times’ article that claims Cleveland is “now on the cusp of cool,” patronizes the Midwest into a subaltern status.
It is the expectation that Midwest cities like Cleveland will ‘transform’ into a New York or Los Angeles—even when that might not be a good thing. I’m here to say that most opinions about the Midwest are based in mass media bourgeois propaganda and classicism.
When speaking about my childhood in Cleveland, crime, natural disasters, or the ‘deathly’ mundanity naturally come up. Most folks are shocked when I tell them that my experience, and the experiences of many others, are overwhelmingly positive. Their surprised looks never fail to amuse.
For us to understand the regional discrepancies between the Midwest compared to the East and West coasts, we need look no further than Antonio Gramsci’s writing on the concept of cultural hegemony. Gramsci, a socialist intellectual from Fascist Italy, wrote about his own country’s developmental stagnation when comparing the North of Italy to the South in his essay The Southern Question. He not only finds issue with the economic exploitation of the South but also the ideology the North propagates about the South; an ideology that “disseminate[s]… among the masses…by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie” that “the south…prevents the social development of Italy.” For Gramsci, the ideology of cultural hegemony allows for the easier subjugation and exploitation of a region due to the perceived subaltern status of that region.
In the United States, we spread similar propaganda about the ‘backwardness’ of the Midwest. Midwesterners become the butt of a joke to make a point about how these states—generally Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana—are places to escape from. Yet I have never felt more trapped than I do on the East Coast. I’m reminded often of the fast pace of life, of an expectation to drag yourself along with everyone else lest you be left behind. It was a culture shock for me to move to the Northeast after living in the Midwest and the South; I find myself standing, never sitting down. The ‘fast life’ is captivating, I can’t deny the allure of Northeastern cities, their breadbasket full and ripe for the taking—at least so it seems. Even having sex is faster on the East Coast; when having sex in the Midwest, long johns and layers force you into a meticulously awkward ritual of pre-sex undressing.
So how do we undo the years of indoctrination into an ideology of dissonance, of division? How do we prevent the gap of solidarity between workers of the coasts and Midwest from widening? When will we hold corporations, mostly headquartered in major U.S metropolitan areas, accountable for disasters like East Palestine? I’d like to suggest an ointment—a topical solution for this issue of classist regionalism —include the Midwest in the project of changing this country.
The Woodlands 