It's Not Empty Now, Either.

My father remembers a time when American History began in 1492. Columbus laughed off the naysayers and set out across the Atlantic to prove the Earth was round. Arriving in the Caribbean, he declared that he had found a shorter route to India and founded a persistent mythology. Following on his Genoese heels, John Smith at Jamestown and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation each made a white foray into the empty continent (the other part of my dad's memory of American History that is weird and arcane). As he learned it, North America was an empty continent waiting to be explore (and conquered). Sure there were Indians (thanks Columbus for that bit of misinformation) cast either as heroes (Pocahontas and Squanto) and villains (Powhatan for trying to kill Smith in the first place) but they only existed to fill their role in the narrative of the United White States of America, they had no story of their own.

As you can imagine, this view of the continent is quite convenient. The forefathers can be held up as the brave precursors to a great civilization, rather than backhanded, racist land thieves. The rebels at Lexington and Concord are Average Joes tossing off the burden of a foreign colonizing force, rather than businessmen and aristocrats who had lived a cushy life in the colonies and who now resented having to pay for the privilege to call themselves subjects of the king. The prevailing image for westward expansion is the filling of an empty land, rather than the hijacking, raping, and pillaging of numerous indigenous cultures. The problem with this image of American history is that it is false. The land was never empty, nor is it empty now.

I mention this because in the decade since I left Michigan I have noticed a tenet of coastal thinking is that there is nothing in the middle of the country. Clearly this is not meant to be taken literally, even the most Brahman of the Bostonians and the hippest of the L.A. trendsters could name a couple of cities in the middle: Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit. Like the aforementioned Indians, these locations play a part in the narrative of the American perimeter. People move from the interior in an outward migration, so the middle is not where people are, but where they are from.

When the middle garners national attention, it is usually negative- Kansas and Creationism, Big Agra throughout the plains, the Rustbelt. In film and on television, the people are portrayed as either backwards and two-dimensionally folksy or desperate and depressed.

Recently this disregard for the middle has taken on a more gut turning character. In the latest recession, the reasonably comfortable people around me in the affluent bay state in which I reside have taken to complaining about the economy. While I understand that it is a Massachusetts birthright to complain about everything from the weather to the Sox (unless they are playing the Yankees), I feel that here they cross a line. Bad economic times are a subject about which Boston knows very little. While the latest unemployment rate for the state of Massachusetts is 9%, Michigan has been experiencing higher unemployment for a longer period of time. The pain in my state was not caused by the inflation of housing prices, and greedy homeowners trying to make a buck on a quick flip. Instead it is caused by the death of an industry and the desperate mass hallucination of a population that it will come back.

Hollywood has traditionally ignored or caricatured us, we are too dumb to see the writing on the wall and too backwards to adapt to the times. Director Jason Reitman's new film, Up in the Air, portrays the middle in a different light. The story of layoff specialist and motivational speaker Ryan Bingham's quest to make connections keeps the film moving forward, but that is not what it is really about. It takes place in the middle of nowhere America. Bingham travels around the country 240 days of the year firing people. He spends most of his time in the places where the recession is worst. While he might become a kind of gleeful grim reaper who triumphs in the downfall of others, instead he exudes compassion. He understands that he is participating in the worst day of many people's lives and as such treats them with dignity. Still, this could just be a touching character drama that centers around one man's growth. The genius of Reitman's approach is that he cast actual people who had been laid off in the middle of the country (St. Louis and Detroit) as most of Bingham's assignments. This human touch gives an otherwise unremarkable film the poignancy and immediacy to deserve an Oscar nod.

I am not interested in defining real America vs. the elitist sycophants of the coast. That type of thinking is divisive and has largely contributed to the polarized political mess that we find ourselves mired in. I simply think it is important to remove ourselves from the sheltered cocoon of our own problems and see the country as a whole. So, when you find yourself tempted to deride the holdouts of the American auto, coal, and steel industries as delusional dinosaurs living for a bygone era, please remember that you are talking about real people, who have dedicated their lives to something that is vanishing up into the air.