Look at who made the front page of yahoo.com this AM – John Thune confidante & scholar Jon Lauck. Check it out here as Jon talks about his new book:
…Yet just a few decades later, in an era of growing globalism, “vocal intellectuals recast the Midwest as a repressive and sterile backwater filled with small-town snoops, redneck farmers, and zealous theocrats,” wrote Lauck, a history and political science professor at the University of South Dakota.
and…
The region’s isolationist tendencies after World War II were out of sync with the rest of the U.S., Lauck said, and these tendencies clashed with the country’s growing cosmopolitanism and desire to be part of the larger world.
Intellectuals’ increasing hostility toward the Midwest also discouraged some writers from telling the region’s stories, including accounts of everyday life in the Midwest, Lauck wrote. Others who tried were pushed aside, such as Ohio’s own Louis Bromfield, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who is now little known outside the state.
“It is a major cultural problem in this nation, the extent to which the coasts kind of dominate the culture — Manhattan and Hollywood in particular,” Lauck said in an interview.
Funny! This pseudo-intellectual completely missed it. The Midwest wasn’t “isolationist” at all. We just rejected, and still mostly do, the growing deviant mindset, pro-globalist, anti-God, progressive movement which was infecting places like Hollywood and Manhattan. As it stands, if the democrats, progressives and RINO’s, like Thune. Rounds and Noem have their way we’ll soon become just as sick as the rest of the nation.
oh it’s fun to be so contrary and cavalier to the studied thoughts of lauck, but don’t accidentally exemplify and reinforce the negative stereotypes which do exist and are used by elites on the coasts and in the beltway, to repress and keep the silent majority silent. lauck nails it.
when others put you in a box, you kick open the box, kick it apart. you don’t tell everyone you’re proud of the box.
even with the huge shadow of encroaching radical Islam over the globe, we live in the best and most exciting times that any american ever lived in. our internet interconnected lives, our marketing and mobility have helped to make this nation more socially and structurally cohesive and consistent than any other time in history. we are as ready as anyone has ever been to meld the many communities into a colorblind american society. we are only limited by the yin and yang of politics, the tug of war between left and right that splits society into pieces for political power and gain. to cheer and explain away the isolation of flyover country as a good thing, is crazy. we must unite or die. that american imperative from our earliest days remains before us.
I’m interested to see if Lauck takes a look at the dichotomy between the cultural perception of postWW2 Midwest versus the policymakers elected from the region. While, culturally, the Midwest might have been more inward-looking and opposed to globalism, policymakers and other influential folks from the region were oftentimes front and center in shaping the post-WW2 identity of America far more than places like New England.
Additionally, I hope the description of the Midwest as “anti-globalist” in the postWW2 world isn’t colored by current events. It is very easy to apply a present lens upon the past, and – if there are any weak points in his works – that would be Lauck’s.
Nevertheless, the work he does with the MHA and bringing oft-forgotten stories of our region to light is greatly appreciated from this Midwesterner at the very least!
And Minnehaha ignores Harding, and why is that? Because there are more people in Sioux Falls, than Buffalo. It is just that simple.
This is not a new phenomenon, rather it is a political and social reality, which is not unique to America.
One only has to look at all of the talent that comes from the Midwest, or the Great Plains, or “Fly-Over Country,” that makes it, to understand that the division or differences between the coasts and the heartland are merely the genesis of what is right about America and not what is wrong about it…
Some will exploit these differences in order to divide for their own political expediency, while better minds will understand that they are variables of a greater equation and outcome, which, in turn, makes us a great nation…
A true sign of a self manifested inferiority complex is to complain about others, to complain that one is ignored, and to find relevance in what one identifies as an other or others short comings. But a confident person or people do not complain and a competent person or people understand their part in the greater equation of life itself and its institutions….
First week of college in DC, both of whom most would think educated, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, I have conversations about:
1) How I don’t know how to pronounce the capital of South Dakota (even though I grew up in Pierre). As hard as I tried to explain the pronunciation was anglicized intentionally because the locals didn’t like the French, this person held to the position I was wrong “because nobody had every told me that before.”
2) the level of sanitation in South Dakota where this person was shocked we had running water, toilets, and potable water. Again, I was argued with because it wasn’t what they knew and the reality I was from South Dakota was irrelevant.
Back in ’79, I attended a mock UN conference In New York City with fellow high school students from across the country. A kid from Long Island, who attended the conference, asked me how I made it to NYC. He asked if we had airports in South Dakota. Part of me wanted to tell him that I took a stage coach to Minneapolis then flew from there to NYC, but I didn’t…. (Yes, we have airports in South Dakota, but unfortunately no true New York pizza…)