INDIANA

[82_28]

I was just thinking of posting something about this state and just so happened upon this Rude Pundit post:

Oh, sweet people of these United States, the Rude Pundit cannot express how much he loathes Indiana. He lived there for a good seven years, and it is like the third nipple of his life story: weird, useless, and aesthetically displeasing to all but the most perverse. Imagine charming middle America, and then fill it with shit - shitty people, shitty landscape, shitty food, shitty big events, just shit. And then make sure that the people not only don't care that they're shitty, but they love it. They just love all the shit and wallow in it and coat themselves in it and elect the shittiest of themselves to lead them and then pretend to be shocked, just shocked when something shitty happens, which just makes them even shittier than they were in the first place, which was pretty damn shitty.

That's Indiana. Its license plates should read, "Scat Fiends' Paradise."

This has been a terrible week or so for Hoosiers (let's not get started on the utter and complete stupidity of that word). Most of the country is pissed off that the legislature passed and Governor Mike Pence signed into law something that quite clearly and by design was written specifically so that fundamentalist Christians didn't have to serve gay people. Then everyone was pissed because Pence kept denying that the law that was created to legalize discrimination against the LGBT community was created to legalize discrimination against the LGBT community. Get ready for the backlash to the backlash, where all the people who really want to discriminate against the LGBT community get all pissed off that they might not be able to do so.

But if you want another dose of uncut Midwestern fucknuttery and blatant cruelty masking enormous injustice, look no further than northern Indiana. No, not the poverty-stricken hellhole of Gary. Further east, in the Granger/Mishawaka area. The Rude Pundit told you in February about Purvi Patel, an Indian-American woman who was scared of her strict Hindu parents because she got pregnant from sex outside of marriage. When she miscarried the fetus, she tossed it into a dumpster behind her family's restaurant. She was arrested and found guilty of both feticide and child neglect.

Yesterday, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison because she didn't handle her miscarriage in the way that the state of Indiana believed she should have. She could have been given a suspended sentence or house arrest because, you know, she was kind of fucked up by the whole situation, but the prosecutor in St. Joseph County wanted to send a message to women: Your fetus is more important than you.

At the trial, the prosecution couldn't prove that the fetus had lived outside the womb, couldn't prove that Patel had taken the abortifacients she had ordered online but said she never ingested, and couldn't establish the actual gestational age of the fetus to show whether or not it could have survived the miscarriage. That didn't matter. What mattered was that Patel wrapped the body in plastic in a panic and dumped it. Then she went to the hospital for severe vaginal bleeding.

Patel is the first woman in the United States to be sent to prison for feticide. And with the number of Indiana clinics performing abortions dwindling down to possibly just two in the entire state, the burden on women who want to end their pregnancies will be greater. So if a woman tries to abort her fetus herself (and there's no real evidence that Purvi did that), instead of compassion and outreach and counseling and forgiveness, Indiana is saying, "Lock the bitch up."

Stay shitty, Indiana. Who are we kidding? Of course, you will.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2015/03/ ... n-for.html

I have four good friends here in Seattle who all agree is a shithole -- because they are from Indiana. They all sought escape and came here. For over a decade from these friends I have heard nothing positive about this place. NOTHING positive. I remember as a kid sitting in the back seat as we drove through and looking at the countryside and city-side of what a shithole it was. I asked as a kid, where do they go to sled? I had friends who went to school in Missouri and the one notable thing I noticed was that they used the term "hoosier" as an insult. "That dude's a total hoosier". This was in the 90s. I have tallied off the states and there is nothing that springs to mind about Indiana that is redeeming. I guess for some Notre Dame maybe, but, fuck Indiana.

This Indiana thing is weird. But as Rude Pundit says, get ready for the backlash to the backlash. Your guess is as good as mine how this will play out.

[semper occultus]

...read this the other day...

[Nordic]

Sure, let's hate an entire state and all its inhabitants.

[Nordic]

I've recently become a huge fan of writer Phil Rockstroh. Here's what he wrote on Facebook about this and I have to agree:

Indiana's recently enacted law alleged to insure religious liberties is, of course, little more than a state issued Bigotry License.

Yet: State capitalism itself is, by its inherently exclusive nature, prohibitive to the point of punitive in regard to those devoid of privilege due to racial and class status. Capitalism's most sacrosanct right, private property, is, all and all, a troll's bridge; one cannot cross without proffering an exorbitant toll. Withal, the poor and the economically buffeted laboring class are all but born excluded from crossing over into the guarded precincts of privilege and power.

Under stop-and-frisk harassment and driving-while-Black, police state tyrannies, minorities are excluded from their right of freedom of movement. Moreover, the US's poor and the nation's racial minorities are excluded from equal treatment under the law from the US criminal justice system. Under state capitalism, freedom, in general, is the exclusive right of the economic elite.

Conversely, the areas in which the economic elite are excluded include: Fighting and dying in US wars and freedom from the consequences of their social transgressions and economic predations.

Of course, the actions of the poe dunk political class of the state of Indiana are reprehensible, but the situation also falls into the category of the kind of pat and context-narrowed controversies permitted under neoliberal/corporate oligarchy. The umbrage directed at the petty minded bigots of the state of Indiana is a safe fight, of the sort liberals evince endless avidity, because it does not challenge entrenched economic power.

[82_28]

Sure, let's hate an entire state and all its inhabitants.

No, bro. It's the governance of this state that I happen to hate. I clearly said that I have friends from there. They live there no longer and still have connections and family and friends and BANDS. You completely missed my point in a way that may or may not have been missed. I would never "hate" the entirety of a "state". Just, that's how it goes. As semper brought up, Indiana is a rare breed and I would love to drop by and borrow that book.

[Nordic]

You might want to go back and read what you wrote. I'd help you in that regard but for some reason I can't copy and paste anything right now. No redeeming qualities. A shithole. You go on. You talk like its an immense toxic waste dump inhabited by flesh eating zombies.

I could easily be from Indiana. So could you. I could have family there. So could you. As it is my parents were from Missouri and I have family there, some of whom, in spite of their faults, have some Redeeming qualities. As in they don't hurt anyone, try to get by and feed their kids and pay their bills and wonder why the world is so fucked up.




PS - be on the lookout for countless instances of divide-and-conquer media events and political stunts in the next 18 months or so. Election season.

[kelley]

indiana wants me

but i can't go back there

[82_28]

I'm just going off what I know about this place. It is all vicarious AND it is an issue at the moment for all of us. I brought it up because it happens to be so. I didn't want to argue and also I knowingly deferred to rude pundit to "take it away". One of my good friends oversaw a grand farm in Indiana which her grandparents passed down to her and her brother -- only to lose it. All I can say is with our "coastal qualities" Indiana definitely seems fucked. The beautiful pastures are not lost on me.

[Elvis]

WHOA!

Now hold on here just a ding-blast-it minute.

My grandparents lived in central Indiana their entire lives. My father -- a highly intelligent, virtuous and loving man -- grew up there and went to Purdue. As a kid I spent many happy days on my grandparents' wonderful farm. My Hoosier grandparents were the salt of the Earth. A more loving person than my grandmother -- a nurse angel who tended to the sick during the Great Depression -- I cannot imagine. She was an Indiana Quaker.

My grandfather worked from dusk 'til dawn growing and harvesting food for his family and the nation. He loved his hogs just as my grandmother loved her chickens. I remember her softly cooing to them as she spread feed around their chicken house yard. (Of course chickens were chickens when it came time to hang them on the laundry line and slice their heads off with a scythe that she sharpened herself. And those were the best-tasting goddamn chickens you ever ate.)

The soil of their farm was judged to be the richest soil in the country, so richly packed with nutrients and minerals, and deep. My grandmother had a vast vegetable garden in that soil that produced Indiana tomatoes the likes of which you will probably never experience. The dead, tasteless things sold now as tomatoes never fail to disappoint me. By now, sadly, the soil could be wrecked by nasty agri-chemicals, which came into much greater play after my grandfather's retirement and sale of the farm. That Indiana soil was the Earth's gift and blessing.

Let me tell you about the people I knew in Indiana. In one word: Real. (That RudeJerk writer -- who the fuck? I don't even want to go look to see where he's coming from.) They worked hard. Growing your food. They didn't think, "I'm working so hard!" They just did it. You worked hard and spent the evenings with your family.

Late in life, not realizing he was too old to drive, my grandfather unfortunately caused a traffic accident and some people were injured. His guilt over this drove him mad. Literally. Heartbreak over heartbreak. That's the soul of Indiana I knew. He never wanted to hurt anyone. He told us he "shot over their heads" during the Great War.

They had a direct connection to the land. The land was Life. They were pious, but not the nutcase Christians who make so much noise nowadays. Sure, in Indiana there were assholes, like anywhere, for instance the farmer down the road who cheated them on a land deal (he was among the first to take it 'corporate'). But the people I really remember were good people who helped their neighbors and would look up from their toil in the fields to wave at any passing car. They were just that way -- friendly.

My aunt H. was a flapper in the 1920s -- the embarrasment of the family! Yes, Hoosiers could be modern. Who first introduced me to those old Frank Edward books on UFOs and other paranormal phenomena? It was my grandmother, the Quaker farm housewife and nurse whose Christian raising didn't close her mind. She was genuinely intrigued by these mysteries. They both read a lot, though my grandfather preferred Treasure magazine and Old West. I pored over those as well during my visits, which sometimes lasted a whole summer. Heaven!

When my brother announced at a big family dinner that he was gay, she didn't blink and her unconditional love never wavered for an instant. Even though she was born in 1895, in Indiana, she was a nurse and she knew about these things, and she understood that people are different. Even in Indiana. Gosh.

I was always awed by the natural forces in Indiana. A fond memory is standing on the front lawn of the farmhouse at night, feeling the warm wind and gazing out over miles of corn and soybean fields, watching distant thunderstorms light up the sky and feeling the energy in the atmosphere.

My grandfather was a master story teller. He knew a great deal of lore. He loved stories of persistent heroes who wouldn't give up. But one of his silly ones was the origin of the sobriquet "Hoosier." Y'see, when the settlers were moving out West, passing through Indiana, on lonely nights of travel they'd come upon a lone farmhouse and knock on the door, looking for rest and maybe to trade some stuff. Known for their hospitality, the nevertheless-surprised Indiana farmer would call out, "Who's there?!" -- pronounced, "Whoozhair?!" (Eliciting laughs around the dinner table.)

I spent many hours walking freshly plowed corn fields looking for Indian arrowheads, which abound in the area. And why wouldn't they? The place abounds with life. I found several; if anyone's curious to see them, I'll take photographs (something I've been meaning to do for years anyway).

The young Indiana farmer who bought my grandparents farm was also one of the most virtuous men I've ever known. It absolutely broke his heart to see greed and corporate agribiz take over -- literally take over -- the family farming that was the bedrock of so many people. Pointing out a yuppie Mc'Mansion being built a few fields over -- on land that for centuries provided life -- he started to cry. Just me and him, out standing in our field. And he starts to cry for the land.

He was soon forced out of farming by big ag companies. He found doing farm work for others too disheartening and instead worked in construction (he had a university degree in it) to feed his family (he married a Peruvian woman and they had three kids).

He looked at me. "All I ever really wanted to do was farm."

Indiana didn't ruin Indiana farming, Wall Street greed and technocratic agrindustry did.

I haven't been back to Indiana since the late 1980s but I often think I'd like to see it again -- to visit that guy, to smell the soil and feel the warm air and the electricity in the sky. Indiana is a magical place.

So this RudeJerk's obscene shit-talk about Indiana rubs me the wrong way. Sorry!

There's me, in Indiana. Held by my dad, who learned to design and test jet airliner wings. In Indiana.



Bath time In Indiana. And the old Ford tractor, the first vehicle I learned to drive, at age five. In Indiana. I would drive it out along the edges of the fields to "the woods" (every decent farm had a good patch of "woods" left wild), park and jump down and roam through the trees and brush, maybe hoping for a glimpse of a fox or exotic bird. (You can see our woods in the distance behind me in the lower right photo.)



The heart of America never lived in New York or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. or even Indianapolis; it lived in that farmhouse. In Indiana. The magnificent oak tree on the right provided shade and good climbing, and yes, it had a swing. A testament to how well houses were built back then, that house was originally built in the next field but was picked up by a tornado, with my grandfather in it, and set down where you see it there.



Out standing in my field. Yeah, I know -- corny joke.

Edited to add here: "My grandfather worked from dusk 'til dawn" should obviously be "from dawn 'til dusk."

[norton ash]

Quite lovely, Elvis. Kurt Vonnegut was from Indiana. No time to Google, but I'm sure there are many good people from Indiana, and it struck me as warm and 'country' when I hitched there in the 80's.

The governor is just an opportunist taking money from Xtian Tea Party assholes, playing to the basest of the base.

[82_28]

Sometimes you can get into trouble for bringing anything up, even among friends.

Rude Pundit is awesome. My friends are awesome. They have roots in IN and do not hate the people they left behind. Just could not put up with the wingery. My friends who inherited a farm were pushed out by a corporation, which I would believe, I'll have to ask them, was because it was small time. There's always good and there is bad.

Well, I can't argue in defense of IN nor against it. However the great state of Indiana is in the news. Not because of me, but because of well. . .

We all know.

[semper occultus]

.....I think I'll just start to shuffle sideways v-e-e-e-r-y slowly away from 82.28 whilst pretending I've never seen him before......

[Elvis]

Sometimes you can get into trouble for bringing anything up, even among friends.

Rude Pundit is awesome. My friends are awesome. They have roots in IN and do not hate the people they left behind. Just could not put up with the wingery. My friends who inherited a farm were pushed out by a corporation, which I would believe, I'll have to ask them, was because it was small time. There's always good and there is bad.

Well, I can't argue in defense of IN nor against it. However the great state of Indiana is in the news. Not because of me, but because of well. . .

We all know.

82, you know I love you, brougham, and btw I'm coming down there soon and we'll be hanging out again. This time try to have your ID up to date so we don't suffer the ignomy of being thrown out of a nice Queen Anne bar.

I can understand your assessment, given what's in the news, what your friends tell you and the fuel provided by RudePundit. I must have read him before and if you say he's awesome he probably is. But certainly he went a little over the top that time. Absolutely, Indiana has bigots and bigotry, I won't gloss that. I never spent much time in the cities but have heard enough about 'race' relations there.

But even good ol' tolerant, "liberal" Washington state has its own history to answer for: in the early 20th century, the small town I grew up in (Issaquah) was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity. Bellingham, same thing: about 40 years ago, in a house built by one of the early "city fathers," a secret chamber was found, filled with KKK robes and appurtenances.

Then there were the Bellingham "Hindoo Riots" of 1907, when a town mob, largely comprising members of the "Asiatic Exclusion League" (whose members ironically included some of the few black men living there), rousted the local East Indian population (they were actually Sikhs, mostly) in the middle of the night and ran them out of town. They fled north to Canada. That's one reason Vancouver has a large East Indian population, and only recently, slowly, have they returned to the Bellingham area. We still hear people calling Sikhs "Muslims" or "Arabs" or "terrorists."

Another story, possibly apocryphal but evidence supports it: Bellingham early on was a mining town, among other things, and Chinese immigrant workers were encouraged to come in and work them. Then in the late 19th century, the mines were closing down, and -- it is alleged -- to avoid paying the Chinese miners, the owners simply flooded the mines, downing them all.

These kinds of events occurred all over Washington, and everywhere. And they continue today; I've written about the judicial railroading into prison of a young black friend of mine who was innocent.

One might say, "oh but the South, the Civil War..." but the famous Confederate general, George Pickett, was a Bellingham "city father" (and possibly the one in whose house they found the KKK regalia, I'll have to ask around; the local museum has these items, and knows their provenance, but has covered the whole thing up). The house Pickett built for himself in Bellingham still stands today as the oldest house in the city. (Indiana was with the Union, of course.)

So I can't really abide the singling out of Indiana, or any US state, as being morally "below" the Western states or any other state.

As my dad once pointed out (before digital communication made the world so much smaller), Indiana and the Midwest were always culturally five years behind the coasts. But most places, most of us, are at least five years behind where we should be, right?

There are positive things to learn from Indiana. And mistakes to learn from.

Kurt Vonnegut was from Indiana. No time to Google, but I'm sure there are many good people from Indiana, and it struck me as warm and 'country' when I hitched there in the 80's.

The actor James Dean grew up in the same town as my father, they played together.

[82_28]

Time machine Indiana sounds awesome! So does time machine Seattle. So does just about everywhere I have ever been.

I only brought this up because it is "trending". I only put the rude pundit up there because he is an articulate liberal dick who is a college professor. He actually brought me sanity during the bush years. I don't always agree with him, but I do love his delivery.

Somewhere, I have time machine photos of me in Kansas, PA, OH, DC, CA, SD, NB etc in which all of my memories are actually fond. I simply remember friendly people.

[Iamwhomiam]

Yeah, that was pretty scathing. While I was reading it I was reminded of Screw Magazine's centerfold of Nixon's cabinet, all wallowing about in the Oval Office in the same stuff. Surely, the most obscene and scandalous rag I've ever read.

You posting was beautiful, Elvis and thank you for sharing it along with your memories and memorable photos. Memories of what was is what's influenced who we've become and tears for what's become of those places that formed our fond memories. But otherwise, yesterday's life-sustaining rain nourishes no crop today.

"The heart of America never lived in New York or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. or even Indianapolis; it lived in that farmhouse. In Indiana."

I appreciate the sentiment, but a century ago there were still farms in NYC, farmed by hard workers like you've described. The house I grew up in was built in such a farmer's field, in fact upon the land once owned by Alan Zwieble's grandfather. Alan was a Little League teammate and a good friend and did we have fun telling jokes and keeping each and others amused. It was only a year or so ago I noticed his long involvement with SNL.

Even then, as a child, I longed for what once was but no longer is. My eyes have always seen what was. Perhaps that's why I'm obsessed with history. Treasure what you have, even if only fond memories, for they do give comfort. The Long Island I grew up in no longer exists and I have little desire to return - well, I would go back to surf Montauk, but sadly, that's not likely to happen.

I can't speak to LA , but DC was a swamp. And wherever there were farmers, there were hard workers. And all the trees were cut by hand, and stone fences built from rocks and stumps cleared from their fields with the aid of a mule or oxen.

As religious fanaticism seemingly takes hold of our world, let's try to remain rational.

One man's overreaching sarcasm should be understood as one's reaction to a situation they cannot control and their frustration in recognizing their own powerlessness to prevent the spread of fanatical religious discrimination. Of more concern to me is Walker's appeal to those who hold this mindset.

Just a reminder that things could get much worse.