Dialectic Slide; Passing Through (Midwest)

Punk pastimes; incoherent artifice; genocide

Quinn McClurg

You peel yourself off the spit-stained concrete, lean against a fence post outside the Underground. It’s night. There’s a dirty drag off a cigarette; the weight of an interstate above. An exhale. A new, billowing cloud. The opening door brings the crowd back to you: muffled lyrics too prescient to slur; the chorus of a hundred dragging bike chains. It begins, too, deep in your throat:

“My lovely city / My lovely danger / My favorite lovely stranger / … / And the bars of the cage / And the trash in the gutter / And the people coming out of the clinic: / It gets worse every minute”

I grew up in the Midwest, mostly hating every minute of it. Born in Iowa, raised in Eau Claire (Wisconsin), waylaid in Hudson and Stillwater (Wisconsin and Minnesota respectively). But eventually ending up in the Twin Cities. I joke that I’ve been inching here my whole life. I still hate the Midwest, though not fully in the same immature ways. 

I knew there were exceptions, but the stagnancy was resounding and the boxes too tight, the stares too long and the talk-about-town too fast. Sure, Eau Claire has a population upwards of 60,000, but a stepdad from a nowhere town and my poor public schools made my town seem far smaller. 

If you don’t know this specific weight, it’s suffocating. It’s a desperation saturated within the can crushers and the pulltabs in shag-carpeted bars. It’s in the creeping mold in your grandmother’s house, the unfinished “I used to want to(s),” and the bare lawns—sunbaked and desolate as strip mall parking lots. Other than a grocery store owner or a trapped poet, what else could I have aspired to be?

The few solaces I found were in my special spots in public parks; on county roads, winding through forests and bluffs; or in some latent aspects loosely evoked by the rolling of late summer wheat, flush to tree lines. I was embraced by the natural world and the folkloric archetypes beneath it all. And music married them, amplifying their poetic severity; “Grown Ocean” alone walked me down from many bridges.

Though I harbor some irrational hate still, the rest of my Midwest distastes are formed from its histories—pasts that naturally bleed through to the present, sometimes into violent personal experience. But the last four months have seen the complete flaying of the present’s skin, unleashing the deep, crimson gush of our country’s ugliest wounds. The Midwest never ceased being a battleground.

A parallel to this gruesome present can be found after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In an immediate response, Barry Goldwater and soon-to-be President Richard Nixon engineered the Southern Strategy, a means of shifting the core of the Republican Party to the deep South by appealing to sensationalized racism. Unfortunately, many in the Midwest began to feverishly adopt this rhetoric, perhaps owing to the demographic majorities (more than 70% of the population being white), desires for personal gain / control born from cultural uncertainty, the latent spectres of racism, or the Republican Party’s founding and history in the Midwest (created in 1854 to be anti-slavery, pro-union; the underlying Protestant work ethic / self-reliance / frugality brought by white immigrants). Hence, the divide as old as our country further reopens—a wound through which the blood of slavery, genocide, and bigotry comes pouring through again. 

Sixty years later, and the Trump administration is disappearing citizens off the streets. Iowa has become the first state to remove Civil Rights protections. Existing as I do now effectively makes me an outlaw in the state I was born into. Also, I, among others, have tattoos and documentation that would prevent reentry into the United States. And outside the law, my stopping for gas anywhere outside of the Cities could inspire a hate crime. Summarized: The bigots are emboldened, and we’re losing more civil liberties everyday; the administration won’t stop their for-profit prison camps for anyone. “It gets worse every minute / It gets worse every second you’re in it.” 

But turn back to our Midwest histories: John Brown’s militant opposition to slavery helped bring us the Underground Railroad and victory in the Civil War. The Haymarket Affair helped secure the 8-hour work day and an end to child labor. The Nonpartisan League drove Ku Klux Klan members and secret intelligence agencies out of the Twin Cities’ police forces. And the Minneapolis Baldies became the direct precursors of current worldwide networks of anti-fascist action. 

Remember: We are inevitable—BIPOC, queer, trans, unionized, informed, everything, or otherwise. As long as we have our nature, history, and music, our spaces, selves, and each other, they can’t kill us all—we won’t let them. We’ll keep scrapping our own ways through, long after they’ve self-destructed. Until then, ash your cigarette; open the door back into the venue.

“It’s love, love and rage / Soon be the day”