Blue Jeans and Hotdish

The covert beauty of the Midwest, and the question of American culture.

BY GEORGE FASEEMO

In 2022, I fled the Midwest. I felt as though I had gotten my fill of this part of the world and wanted to experience something different, so I packed up and spent my first semester of college at the University of Toronto. I thought experiencing a nearby culture would reveal the deeper character of the Midwest and with that the character of the place that raised me. During my time in Toronto this did in fact happen, but I had revelations that I never expected.

Over the course of those few months, I regularly found myself reflecting on the truly unique characteristics of the Midwest (apparently it’s not always the norm for most people to be blond). I also found that the country and region specific stores that I had become dependent upon were sorely missed. No Target, no Kwik Trip, no Culvers, and unbearably, no Trader Joe’s. For a modern brainless consumer like me, it was unbearable. But beyond my access to Trader Joe’s Chocolate Covered Mini PretzelsTM being stripped away, I was noticing a deeper disconnect from my surroundings. I’ve come to describe this feeling as region-sickness.

Region-sickness is a condition that besets a person who leaves a region that they have become accustomed to. It’s distinct from homesickness in that it isn’t necessarily about your specific house, family, or hometown. It’s more centered around the institutions, weather, aesthetics, and the general vibes of the area that you’re from. Region- sickness does fade as you slowly adjust to the new area and grow to love its unique characteristics. But it takes time — time I didn’t really want to spend in a city that I didn’t want to love. And so, by January of 2023, I was back in the Midwest for good, with many new meditations on the nature of our region.

I think the best way to understand the fundamental character of the Midwest is by focusing on experience that I couldn’t stop fantasizing about during my time in Toronto. Picture this: You’re in a car driving through some rural Minnesota town on the way to somewhere that’s “actually worth going to.” The sky is the pale blue hue of our state flag, and as your eyes drift lower, the color of the ground makes an almost imperceptible shift in the distance into a stark white — the snow that covers the cornfields you pass. It captures what makes Midwestern culture great: an unassuming, unpretentious beauty that’s reserved for those who are willing to see it. Midwestern culture isn’t for everyone. Only those who are willing to still their mind and not ignore the hidden beauty within a dilapidated barn, or of a person down on their luck. I’ve never seen a deeper appreciation for imperfect people than in this land of imperfect surroundings. I think it’s also important to look at the critiques of American culture overall — or lack-there-of. To many, American culture doesn’t exist. It is but an augmentation of culture from other lands, a land whose “culture” is the pinnacle of capitalism. This is a reasonable critique, but there are 2 important things to note:

The first: It’s hard to properly define “American culture” because America has monopolized the global market on culture. We export our music, our movies, our stars, our entire culture, to the point where people don’t think of most of it as distinctly “American”. Beyoncé and Michael Jackson are Americans, but their global stardom has made us not consider them to be “American artists” in the way that we consider an opera singer to be a distinctly Italian artist.

The second: America is huge, and creating one cohesive culture with this many people is impossible. In fact, America to a certain extent breaks down the very idea of a national culture: the nationalist act of having concepts that apply to most everyone in a nation is impossible with a diverse 330 million person population.

There are of course problems with American culture, but there’s clearly so much good here too: especially in the Midwest. We are immensely privileged to live here, and to always be (at most) a few months and a short drive away from a snow covered corn field.