Tuesday, November 06, 2001

Our place in the world

Sometimes I think that the reason midwesterners exist is to explain things, in words of three or fewer syllables, to everyone else. We're awfully good at it. Just look at Walter Cronkite: he was one of us and, even after years out of the daily public eye, is still revered for his ability to make a complex world understandable and a little less scary.

If we can't explain something, we have a failsafe fallback: an arsenal of folk stories and homespun maxims, learned at the knees of our fathers and grandmothers. We can spin them out with considerable vigor and animation and, by the time we reach the climax, you will have forgotten why you considered the matter important in the first place.