Page 29 - ARUBA TODAY

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PEOPLE & ARTS Tuesday 18 July 2017
Scholar traces origins of Midwest ‘flyover country’ derision

By ANDREW WELSH-HUG- 1920-1965.” increasing hostility toward Etcheson, who teaches at
GINS Yet just a few decades the Midwest also discour- Ball State University.
Associated Press later, in an era of growing aged some writers from Among some additional
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — globalism, “vocal intellec- telling the region’s stories, observations in Lauck’s
The name of President tuals recast the Midwest including accounts of ev- book, published last month
Donald Trump appears as a repressive and sterile eryday life in the Midwest, by University of Iowa Press.
only once in professor Jon backwater filled with small- Lauck wrote. Others who — “Geography and history
Lauck’s new book about town snoops, redneck tried were pushed aside, and place and regional at-
perceptions of the Midwest farmers, and zealous theo- such as Ohio’s own Louis tachments still matter in the
as “flyover country,” and crats,” wrote Lauck, a his- Bromfield, a Pulitzer Prize- world. Fargo is not San Di-
then only in a footnote in- tory and political science winning novelist who is now ego. The revolts of the Que-
volving polling in Missouri. professor at the University little known outside the becois and Catalonian
Yet the book’s exploration of South Dakota. The book state. “It is a major cultural secession and Grexits and
of decades-old historical takes its title from an obser- problem in this nation, the Brexits continue to lead the
trends helps explain the at- vation by Nick Carraway in extent to which the coasts news and Scottish rebels still
traction Trump held in the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great kind of dominate the cul- fight the 1707 Act of Union.”
election for people who felt Gatsby”: “Instead of be- ture — Manhattan and This image released by the — “Victorian ideals were
alienated by the political ing the warm center of the Hollywood in particular,” University of Iowa Press shows especially strong in the ru-
and cultural mainstream. world, the Middle West now Lauck said in an interview. the cover of “From Warm ral areas and small towns
“When the twentieth cen- seemed like the ragged History professor Nicole Center to Ragged Edge: The of the Midwest, leaving
tury dawned, the Ameri- edge of the universe — so Etcheson dates coastal dis- Erosion of Midwestern Literary the region vulnerable to
and Historical Regionalism,
can Midwest stood tall as I decided to go East and dain for the Midwest farther 1920-1965,” a book by the criticisms of the literary
the republic’s ascendant learn the bond business.” back into the 19th centu- University of South Dakota modernists.” — “The early
and triumphant region_ec- The region’s isolationist ten- ry, when the area was still professor Jon K. Lauck Midwest was the place that
onomically prosperous, po- dencies after World War considered the “West,” a published June 1, 2017. the first genuinely Ameri-
litically formidable, cultur- II were out of sync with region inhabited by uned- Associated Press can tradition of democra-
ally proud, and consciously the rest of the U.S., Lauck ucated people including cy took root, after all, and
regional,” Lauck writes in said, and these tendencies an ungainly looking fellow “Flyover country has deep where the democratic tra-
“From Warm Center to clashed with the country’s named Abraham Lincoln historical roots in old region- dition expanded to include
Ragged Edge: the Ero- growing cosmopolitanism whose accent and de- al prejudices and attitudes more of the republic’s citi-
sion of Midwestern Literary and desire to be part of the meanor took the country of the East toward the zens and a functional eth-
and Historical Regionalism, larger world. Intellectuals’ some getting used to. uncivilized frontier,” said nic pluralism took root.”q