David Michael Miller
We are not the #%&*@ Rust Belt, for cryin’ out loud!
Yet that’s the way Wisconsin’s region is usually depicted in the national media and too often by our own. In a recent New Yorker story on the Trump campaign’s strategy, the term “Rust Belt” was used no fewer than 10 times in a story of about 800 words. What’s even more insulting is Trump’s theory that he can win here. I can’t wait for November, when Wisconsin kicks him in the teeth again as we did in April.
Why there isn’t more (or any) regional outrage about the use of this term is perplexing. If branding matters, then how much worse can you get than to conjure up the image of an abandoned, deteriorating infrastructure and by logical extension an economy to go with it?
Moreover, it’s not true. Unemployment in our region as a whole is less than the national average.
What if we referred to the South as the “Guns & Grits Belt”? Or the Northeast as the “Elitist Belt”? Or the Pacific Northwest as the “Slacker Belt”? Most regional stereotypes have their kernel of truth, but what other region gets smeared with the worst thing you can imagine about it?
Sure, manufacturing isn’t what it once was in the Midwest, and we’ll never match Silicon Valley or Boston for high-tech. But the Great Lakes region has at least two key advantages that could make it tremendously powerful in the near future: water and relative climate change security.
The coasts are seeing more and more flooding, and more frequent and much stronger hurricanes. The West faces chronic drought. More powerful storms and tornadoes are ripping through the Great Plains and the South.
But here in the Upper Midwest things are relatively quiet. We’re not immune to the effects of climate change, but the severity of those impacts is muted compared to other parts of the country.
And as for fresh water, we have more of it than anyplace on earth.
So, why don’t we just explode when our home is referred to as the Rust Belt? Where’s the righteous outrage? Where are the letters to the editor? Demands for apologies? Why don’t we insist on being referred to (and thus defined) as we wish?
And what would that wish be? Well, for the states that border the lakes, just calling us what we are — the Great Lakes States — would be just fine with me. It’s honest, it calls to mind something good, and it represents at least half of what could make us an economic powerhouse in the future.
I probably consume too much media that originates in New York or Washington, but I can’t be the only one who’s sick and tired of coasties revealing the depths of their ignorance when it comes to my region and who Midwesterners are.
There’s one pejorative that may be even worse than Rust Belt, and that’s Flyover Country. Well, you know what, New Yorker writers? Just keep flying on over from the Elitist to the Slacker belts. Soon enough the Great Lakes will be ascendant.
