A few weeks ago I spent an unscheduled long weekend in Washington, D.C. Trapped by the big East Coast storm of 2016, I was forced to drink cocktails and eat my meals at the cozy old Tabard Inn near DuPont Circle for three full days.
Stuck with other travelers, I spent a lot of time unable to not overhear conversations. Near the sitting room fire, people from all over the world — Germany, South Africa, England, California — talked about all kinds of things and places. None of them mentioned the Midwest, except for one reference to Flint, Mich.
What struck me about it wasn’t what I heard, but what I didn’t hear. My informal and unscientific observations — not just this time but whenever I travel — tell me that the Midwest isn’t so much dismissed as it is disregarded. It just doesn’t enter the consciousness of a lot of people from major metro areas.
The Midwest is like the subject of the best put-down in film history. One of the characters in Casablanca says to Humphrey Bogart, “You despise me, don’t you, Rick?” And Bogart responds, “Well, I suppose I would if I gave you any thought at all.”
Still, so much of what passes for economic development in these parts is all about trying to replicate something that’s happening on the coasts, usually in Silicon Valley. We talk about angel investors and maker spaces and high-tech this and that. It all feels a little stilted as we clumsily try to import ideas and trends that were big in California a decade ago. Burning Man Oshkosh. Be there.
So what if we just stopped trying to be one of the cool kids and got comfortable with who and what we are? In fact, militantly comfortable with that. Radical Midwest.
Telling the coasties to just keep on flying over us, thank you very much, may sound crazy. After all, don’t we need their money, if not their attention? Well, we have two commodities that are going to be increasingly valuable: water and security. We have more freshwater than anyplace on earth, and we are relatively insulated from the worst impacts of global climate change. The hurricanes and sea level rise that are threatening the coasts don’t reach this far inside the continent. And as a bonus, apart from one spot in southern Illinois, earthquakes are not something we need to worry about.
You would think that water and geography are two things that our state governments couldn’t screw up, but they’re trying. Bills introduced this session in the Wisconsin Legislature aimed to make it easier to hand over local municipal water systems to private companies, dredge water bodies, fill wetlands and build structures on shorelines. And Oklahoma, while not exactly in the Midwest, has become the earthquake capital of North America thanks to that state’s passionate embrace of fracking.
Still, the kind of security that comes with geographic insulation can’t be exported. You have to live here to live in its protection. Water could be exported, so we have to fight hard to make sure that the only way it leaves our states is mixed with hops and barley and packaged in brown bottles, as former Wisconsin Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus said.
Like security, if people want Midwest water, they can have it, but they have to move here first.
So, everything the Midwest needs is already here. It just needs to be recognized, nourished and protected. In that light, bills in any legislature that make it easier to privatize, pollute or waste water should be thought of as direct attacks on the most golden of Midwest geese. Institutions that already exist, like the International Joint Commission, which has a lot to say about Great Lakes water law, should be invested in and strengthened if needed.
Likewise, the Midwest’s greatest human-created asset — its public land grant university system — should be expanded, not pummeled as Wisconsin has done to the UW. In his great book, Caught in the Middle, Richard Longworth points out that the Midwest has the greatest concentration of large research universities in the country. We should take his advice and do a better job of linking them together.
We shouldn’t forget art. The Midwest has long been known for its writers, but we should do all we can to encourage the making of theater and music and visual arts that reflect the Midwest landscape, history and sensibilities. We are a lot more than Fargo.
The Midwest will never have the West Coast’s weather or the East Coast’s government and media power centers. But we have our own, native advantages. We should better recognize them, protect them, celebrate them and speak up for them. Unapologetic, unrelenting, indestructible and well-hydrated, radical Midwest.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.
