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Martinsville, Indiana was minding its own business when I showed up there, and I’m sure that my having come and gone will make no difference whatsoever in the lives and worries of its denizens. I came here looking for a typical Midwestern small town, and I guess I found one.
On my first pass through the quiet downtown on a pleasant autumn Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t find a diner that was open. I found a few diners around the courthouse square, but they weren’t open. Had they gone out of business, or were Martinsvillians still in church and/or at home watching football? I drove out of town and around on Highway 37, past the new Martinsville High School (“Home of the Artesians” – Martinsville bills itself as the “City of Mineral Water” as well as, charmingly, the “Gateway to Beautiful Southern Indiana”), the Wal-Mart, and the inevitable strip mall with the usual fast-food purveyers.
I thought I had left that sort of detritus behind in Indianapolis, but no such luck. So I came back through downtown and found The Olde Northside Bar & Grille, where I ordered the least unhealthy item on the limited menu, a breaded chicken sandwich, and a salad, from a very polite young man in a football jersey, backwards baseball cap, and blond pony tail. The TV in the bar was showing a NASCAR race somewhere in Florida.
I was in Indianapolis to take part in a panel discussion addressing the question “Is Pakistan a problem that needs to be solved?” The short version of my answer was that it depends on your premises and point of view – many Pakistanis, I suggested, see America as a problem – and I added something that I seek out opportunities to say: that security and freedom are antithetical, and that I prefer freedom. There’s a Pakistani community in almost every city in America, as well as well-meaning Americans who are concerned about the collision course the two countries seem to be on, and I have things to say about that, so I show up whenever I think I can add something useful to a necessary conversation. But a side effect of the kind of traveling I’m doing too much of these days is that I get frustratingly brief glimpses of many different parts of America. And I want to emphasise that they are different. Bouncing around among airports, where only the kitsch versions of American cultures are available as you sit around waiting or rush to your gate, is a depressing and severely distorted way to see America. The real America, as distinct from the America you see on TV, is a vast and various country.
In my books about Pakistan and Haiti I’ve made it a point of pride to experience and portray those societies at ground level, and I insist on doing the same in my planned American road trip book. As my colleague and friend Tony Davis memorably said to me years ago, on a hotel rooftop on the Thai-Burma border, “There’s no substitute for the sniff on the ground.” Surely that’s as true of America as of any other country.
Thus all I’m in a position to tell you so far about Martinsville, Indiana in particular is that I can’t tell you much about it, because I haven’t spent enough time there. Perhaps I’ll return next fall for my book and get to know it better. For now, I’m using Martinsville as a stand-in for thousands of similar towns all over the huge, ill-defined region known as the Midwest or the heartland. I grew up in such a town. I suppose such all-white towns (Martinsville’s official website says 98.62 per cent of its 11,698 citizens are white) are what Sarah Palin meant when she coined the term “the real America” during the 2008 presidential campaign. I object to Sarah Palin’s definition of that phrase, but the demographic she was pandering to and exploiting must be respected and reckoned with, not scorned and dismissed.
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