THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I’ve visited a Red State since the election. It’s not that I haven’t traveled. Just that my travels have not taken me to Red State USA. I’ve been to Boston and New York City. Those are both Blue Cities in Blue States. I’ve been to Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. One might consider all of Canada to be Blue. I don’t think even Alberta would go Red if given the chance. This Red State is Indiana. It’s not Texas but it’s still pretty Red. The city is Indianapolis which, despite Richard Lugar’s tenure many years earlier, currently is led by a Democrat. Both Houses of the Legislature are Republican. The governor is Republican. I think a lot of the Democrats are Republican judging by my reading of the newspaper today.
Remember Potterville? My spouse and I sometimes jest that it is the ideal Republican City. This alternate reality from It’s a Wonderful Life. Indianapolis has some elements of that. It is one part antebellum southern city. One part city of Oz. One part Omaha with taller buildings … at least five of them. One part European sophisticate. The Simon Companies that helped develop the Mall of America has established itself like an octopus in the sky in downtown Indianapolis. A brand new mall leaps across streets at the skyway level. Luxury condominiums under construction sour skyward and connect directly with the mall. Downtown manages to look both tattered and renewed at the same time. Civil War era behomeths such as Union Station have been beautifully preserved or restored and converted, of course, to a use other than transportation. One can find a huge Irish Pub in one of these old buildings. Theater. Restaurants. Starbucks. Plenty of chain stores. It’s no downtown Minneapolis. It’s bigger but not quite as together as downtown St. Paul. Neither of these just mentioned cities has as many homeless people. Rattling change in cups. Bumming cigarettes. I was approached for change about five times over the course of a late afternoon and evening of wandering around. Never aggressively so. I have a lot of trouble giving these guys money — and they were almost exclusively men — because I know it will go toward drink before it goes toward food.
Indianapolis has a solution for homelssness. Just across the way from the aforementioned luxury condos I was hearing this horrifically loud noise. It sometimes sounded vaguely like a machine gun firing. Sometimes it sounded vaguely like an angry barking german shepherd. I was puzzled by this for a short while. Then I wasn’t. In Northfield, Minnesota, a local grocery store used to have a loud speaker in its parking lot to keep teenagers from hanging out there. But in typical Minnesota fashion the “noise” was not a futuristic barking dog firing a machine gun. Instead: classical music. Beethoven. Bach. Horrors.
I stopped in a very expensive Japanese restaurant and was offered a seat at the sushi bar. After scanning the regular menu and seeing a first course that was upwards of $30 I settled comfortably on the sushi menu. The waitress suggested a soup which I ordered and it occupied me while I waited for the sushi order. When the sushi was placed in front of me I had to take a moment to admire the presentation. I wasn’t terribly hungry and this was just right. Plus. Fireworks. This experience served to amplify the starkness of the Potterville experience. Stepping out onto the sidewalk after my meal I shortly came upon firefighter first responders standing on the sidewalk in front of me, doing nothing. Looking down at a slumped figure. I didn’t stop walking but it appeared to me that this man was not breathing. After going a few more blocks I looked back. Now there was a police car and an ambulance there in addition to the firefighters. By the time I was coming back that way in my rental car, the police had gone. The apparent death had been noted and it was up to the ambulance crew to bring out the body bag.
Returning to my inexpensive suburban hotel room I followed the signs pointing to I-65|I-70. Look at a map of Indianapolis and you will see it has managed to become the crossroads of nearly every major Interstate highway in the Midwest. The downtown seems to be surrounded on all sides by freeways. My hotel stands next a double freeway — I-70|I-465. Every one I’ve seen is at least eight lanes. This, of course, is the regional rail system of Indianapolis. I will note, however, that the very modern buses I saw puttering around downtown all were powered by natural gas.
Indiana is something of a paradox. Republicans control everything. In my reading of one day’s newspaper — the Sunday paper mind you — it was my observation that Republicans here seem less hysterical. Less reactionary. They still do a lot of the things Republicans keep trying to do in Minnesota. Cut funding to education. Balance the budget by freezing payments to local governments forcing school districts and municipalities to raise property taxes (across the street from the Capitol is parked a stubby white school bus emblazoned with the initials of the Indiana teachers union and a big sign “Save our Schools. The bus is covered by signatures of teachers from across the state). Rejecting the governor’s proposal of a one percent income tax surcharge on the wealthiest taxpayers in order to balance the budget within one year. One sees a passing reference to the dispatch with which both houses approved a bill to put the marriage question on a statewide ballot. The Indianapolis Star finds Democratic legislators who sing the praises of the governor. He does not demand anything in return for the crumbs he doles out to legislators in Democratic districts because he knows it’s just the right thing to do. Meanwhile on the front page of today’s paper, the Olan Mills family picture of a cherubic five-year-old boy who finally succumbed to continual beatings at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend with whom they were living. The poor. The people living on the streets. The young poor. Capitalism shall choose who will live and who will die. Red State America.
