#midwestern nice

Here's the most Chicago thing I've ever seen: I was driving down Lake Shore Drive, traffic at a near standstill, and in the lane next to mine, a truck was trying to steamroll a small car in front of it: riding its bumper, slamming the horn—general dick moves. I could see the truck driver's face. He was angry, yelling. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but it's fair to assume it was not nice. What did he want the smaller car to do? What did he think his honking, his middle finger, his rage would accomplish? Finally, the woman in the car had enough. Smack-dab in the thick of the clogged four-lane expressway, she turned off her engine and got out, closing the driver's-side door behind her. Slowly she lit a cigarette and leaned back in the sunshine, puffing luxuriously while cars inched past and the guy in the truck lost his mind, laying on the horn and gunning his engine. She turned to him with a big, dazzling smile—and waved.

How many times must I say this?

tl;dr Alien in KY; Alien everywhere

To live in the Midwest is to experience two realities: the first, all sunshine and bland pleasantries among other potluck-suppering churchgoers; the other, a red-lit underworld where people relay vulgarities through the learned second language of euphemism, eye rolls and loaded silence.

What is Midwestern Nice?

What is Midwestern Nice? We should start with what it isn’t. It isn’t the feigned kindness of the South, where people sipping bourbons at cocktail hour reserve the right to boot-heel you when you turn your back. It’s not the abrasive honesty of the Northeast, where everyone speaks, as Don DeLillo once put it, in the same nasally, knowing cynicism. It is genuine, Midwestern Nice. I grew up in Iowa but I’ve heard the same line repeated of people from Minnesota or Wisconsin or Nebraska, and always with the unfussy grammar of the plain-spoken: “The Midwest is a great place to be from.” It is nurturing and civic-minded, maybe due to the Scandinavian and German Protestants who settled the land, living by the Golden Rule, and its history is a continuity of compassion: the territory of Iowa in the Antebellum Era refusing to segregate schools, an idea that even Ulysses S. Grant called radical; a president from Illinois who ended slavery; Wisconsin laborers, in the early 20th century, receiving workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance decades ahead of the New Deal; Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, in the modern age, allowing gay marriage years before the progressive movements in New York and California could do the same. The Midwest takes pride in all this; it would just rather not talk about it, you see, because that would be boasting, and boasting is not nice.  That humility permeates everything, helping to create the most remarkable facet of Midwestern Nice: the restraint from speaking ill of others, even if others should probably be ill-spoken of. I remember sitting at my grandmother’s table, in the hour before supper on a summer afternoon, watching her read the newspaper. I must have been 10 or so, in the last years before I learned to fully appreciate her – a woman who grew up in the Depression, survived TB, raised six daughters alongside her farming husband, collected eggs from the chicken coop every morning, and read voraciously each night. She was always cheerful, which isn’t remarkable in the Midwest, but it is worth mentioning because reading one article that afternoon, I remember her eyes narrowing and her lips pursing themselves into an ugly knot that I never saw. She was upset, so upset that she soon read aloud that there had been, if memory serves, a murder in a nearby town. Police had arrested a suspect. She walked over to a dining room window and seemed to almost shake; she occasionally shopped in the town. Staring out at the bright afternoon, she looked in a trance, and even I could see the thoughts racing through her mind. But she just turned back to the dining room, and the one thing she said she half-muttered to the floor, in that flattened-vowel lilt of hers: “And on a day like this.”

And yet... Of course, the duty to be nice and consider the feelings of others has a downside: the whole universe of things we have to repress. As a kid, there was an almost tactile pressure hovering around the Christmases, Thanksgivings, and birthday parties at Grandma’s house -- so much stuff we maybe wanted to say but couldn’t, even though we were family. The tension beneath the vanilla chitchat exhausted me, and I often left her home relieved that I could relax and be myself. Here again, though, I was wrong, or at least only half right, and as an adult I discovered the fun of old-fashioned Midwestern innuendo: the way my aunts, say, could achieve the perfect degree of half-smile when extending their barely dead-toned goodbyes to my sister’s boyfriend, which told her how very much they disliked him. In fact, people from outside the Plains think they can mimic us by elongating some O's, but in truth we communicate far more in what we half-say, or fail to say entirely. To live in the Midwest is to experience two realities: the first, all sunshine and bland pleasantries among other potluck-suppering churchgoers; the other, a red-lit underworld where people relay vulgarities through the learned second language of euphemism, eye rolls and loaded silence. We are the alpha and omega of passive-aggressiveness.