True North

Bob Collins at NewsCut commented on a letter to the editor in the Strib that aroused his ire. Collins’ comments - or, should I say, his sources - are a bit troubling as well.

Collins:

Are Midwesterners simply better than people in other parts of the country? Do we work harder? Are we less reliant on others for help when we need it? Are our values more aligned with the American ethic?

Being a good conservative, I tend to think more in terms of individuals than of groups, classes or communities. And while like a lot of Midwesterners I have had in my life a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the nation’s media’s big-city-centeredness, I have stopped believing that nobility and ignobility are regional, class or community virtues. New Yorkers on 9/11, for example, behaved like…well, humans.

And Midwesterners are perfectly capable of ignoble behavior under stress.

But we’ll come back to that.

Today’s Star Tribune “letter of the day” seems to think so. Writer Jeffrey Seyfert of Farmington compares Hurricane Katrina in 2004 with the flooding in Iowa and sections of Minnesota last week.

There is historic flooding involving five Midwestern states; Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. Where are the news anchors reporting from the bridges asking where is the federal government and when are they coming to the rescue, as they did back during Hurricane Katrina?

The reason you don’t see them is it doesn’t fit the template. It doesn’t fit the template that the federal government is supposed to be omnipresent in our lives and that self-reliance and self-responsibility are mere clichés of days long ago.

The difference is our fellow Midwesterners are picking themselves off the ground, brushing themselves off, and getting to work. Their first instinct is not to blame government; their first instinct is to help each other out and try to put their lives back together.

The letter ignores that, naturally, there’ll be plenty of federal help in the recovery (and I don’t doubt for a minute that the Strib letters editor knew that when they picked the letter over many no-doubt more reasonable-sounding ones for publication).

But there is a communitarian streak in small-town America; borne from isolation and impoverished German and Scandinavian ancestry, on the good side it does mean that these small, integral communities, mostly with roots going back generations, are able to pull together in a crisis pretty seamlessly. (On the flip side, it means they’re pretty suffocating, hidebound places to live, which is why a lot of people - like me - leave ‘em).

Just as there is a communitarian streak in small towns in the deep south, whatever their ethnicity. Traditions of community and family bring people together when there’s a problem.

And what does more than anything else in this country to destroy family and disrupt community?

We’ll come back to that.

Syefert’s letter could be dismissed if it weren’t for the fact it’s part of a growing chorus in the Midwest: black people got help in 2004, and the mostly white Midwesterns can’t catch a break.

I will speak at the risk of being accused of projecting my beliefs into a letter written by someone I don’t know (and as we’ll see shortly, I’m not the only one projecting, here); I think it’s fair to say that Midwesterners aren’t saying “black people got help” so much as “the media and punditry racialized New Orleans to create national hysteria over the disaster, turning it into a fundamentally racial issue, partly for political gain, partly to shame the nation into paying to rebuild the place. On the other hand, the coverage of the floods in the Midwest is, well, just another day’s news”.

Let’s not forget that Katrina was racialized by Al Sharpton, by Kanye West, by Ray “Chocolate City” Nagin. The media took up the story to use as a cudgel against the Administration (after carefully scrubbing out Nagin and Kathleen Blanco’s incompetence, and the fact that FEMA has been a disaster waiting to happen since the seventies).

I think there’s a certain amount of wishing, on the part of people who haven’t had their hip waders off in a week and are sore from sandbagging, for just a little hysteria sending goodwill their way.

Speaking of projection, Collins cites a ChiTrib article. I’m going to emphasize one passage for us to come back to later:

Today, the Chicago Tribune profiled the growing sentimentin the Heartland:

“Where is all the fundraising that Katrina victims had?” Ben Creelman asked, a disgusted tone seeping into his voice. “Is it because we’re not from the Deep South? Is it because we’re from the Midwest?”

Creelman didn’t put it in so many words, but his message was clear. The poor, mostly African American residents of New Orleans’ 9th Ward inspired a charitable outpouring not seen since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The flooded farms of the central Midwest, meanwhile, just can’t catch a break.

It gets worse. One man, sandbagging in Columbus Junction, Iowa said “even the Hispanics” were sandbagging, while pointing out that African Americans weren’t.

So - based on statements by two people in a Midwestern disaster area, the writer detects a “growing trend?”

I’ll allow that this might be writer David Greising’s first trip outside Chicago, but I’ve got two bits of news for him:

1. Redneck insularity exists
2. It - and its analogues - exist everywhere. Some call it racism; I call it “we-ism“.

I suggest - strongly - that it’s no more a “Growing Trend” than tribalism and ethnic insularity, both of which trace back to times when humans travelled in packs of hunter-gatherers and fought other packs for prime berry patches.

I might also suggest that, as Katrina was an excuse to find racism inherent at all levels of the system, that David Greising is looking for that seemy, David-Lynch-y underbelly to the Midwest that just about everyone in the media seems to think is lying in wait out there.

As for the government’s response, one difference in the Midwest is that there was one. At least $2 billion in federal aid is expected in the flooded area. Gov. Pawlenty toured Mower, Houston and Freeborn counties last week, declared it a disaster area, and triggered a review for FEMA help.
President Bush toured the area last week and promised plenty of federal help.

True enough.

But let’s get back to the notion of communitarianism, of multigenerational communities (rural, urban, or suburban for that matter) that just get up and do things when they need to be done. While the govenrment is going to help the farmers in the Midwest just as (Greising’s claims notwithstanding) they did in New Orleans, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look into the role of generations of government programs breaking down those very traits.

Thousands of acres of farmland has been lost to crops this year, and disaster payments to farmers will help cushion some of the blow.

Of course, the people of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois showed a resiliency in their crisis. Their recovery, however, was a team effort.

As most things are.

But to take the word of two tired, angry sandbaggers and a letter writer in the Strib as signs of a trend is…

…well, one of those parlor games journalists at all levels play.

I merely suggest there’s a lot less there than meets Bob Collins’ and David Greising’s eyes.

Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.