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Flyover Country
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Where do you live? New York? Awesome. L.A.? Awesome. Kansas City? Uh... where is that, like, in Idaho or something?note The name is a clue; it's in Missouri, of course. Well, about three quarters of it, anyway. There are actually two cities named "Kansas City", with State Line Road marking the division between the two. Usually it's the Missouri one (or the metropolitan area as a whole, including cities like Liberty and Independence on the Missouri side and Overland Park and Shawnee Mission on the Kansas side) people are referring to rather than the Kansas one. That's Flyover Country, also known as "the Heartland" or "Middle America" note which are not necessarily the same thing; see You Keep Using That Word for further details —American slang for the states which trendy liberal Bourgeois Bohemian coast-dwellers see only from the window of an airplane as they jet to their vacation or a work trip on the opposite side. Containing roughly half the country's population (if you're using a narrower definition) but much more of its landmass, this region includes everything between Las Vegas note although the area between the Sierra Nevadas and the Rockies is more properly termed "the Great Basin" and is culturally either Latin American Catholic or Anglo-Saxon Mormon, in marked contrast to the largely German Protestant or Scandinavian Lutheran character of the upper Midwest, Slavic and Italian Catholic character of the Great Lakes, the Scots-Irish Baptist or Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of the lower Midwest, Slavic Jewish or Southern European and Germanic Catholic character of the East Coast, Latin American Catholic or Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of the West Coast, and the Scots-Irish and West African Baptist character of the South. and Chicago at a minimum—and is often extended to everything east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the Alleghenies (if not the Hudson River). This famous (and oft-parodied) Saul Steinberg cover◊ for The New Yorker's March 29th, 1976 issue, known as "View of the World from 9th Avenue", parodies the stereotypical attitude of parochial New Yorkers to the rest of the country. Sparsely populated, largely rural, and perceived to be lacking in photogenic glamor and urban coolness, it rarely shows up in works which attempt to appear trendy or up-to-date. It gets much more play in political circles, however, as the quirks of the American electoral system make appeals to smaller states essential. When one talks about the "red state/blue state" divide in American politics, this is what is meant by "red state" — conservative-leaning rural/suburban areas where Walmart, chain restaurants, church, high school football, and the Republican Party are pillars of local communities. The phrase "flyover country" was, in fact, coined by right-wing talk radio hosts, to ridicule their imagined concept of what latté-sipping coastal liberal elites thought of the American interior. With that said, that "ridiculous, imagined concept" is in many ways far closer to the truth than many "coastal elites" would care to admit, with New York- and Los Angeles-based media having a nasty habit of writing off everywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies as hopelessly backward redneck country, whose lot in life would be vastly improved if they just accepted the obviously superior liberal values and policies of the coasts, with no real understanding of life or the issues in that part of the country - and indeed with no particular desire to understand it, as they're all just a bunch of racist hicks with no redeeming values. As noted elsewhere in this article, there is a great deal more ethnic and political diversity in Flyover Country than fiction would have you believe, and many of its denizens — particularly its Democrats — deeply resent being written off this way. Setting a show or a novel here can be shorthand for '50s-style social conservatism (and the common portrayal of this region by Hollywood in the actual Fifties did nothing to help), small-town insularity, or a crushingly unhip, even dorky ambiance — think Pleasantville or Napoleon Dynamite. However, it gets used at least as often to inspire nostalgia for Eagleland Flavor #1, a friendly, down-home environment full of old-time family values where all the women are strong, all the men are good-lookin' and all the children are above average.note It should be noted that the above slogan is used by humorist Garrison Keillor to describe the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, which is in the state of Minnesota—which, amusingly, is usually considered a solidly blue state (Michele Bachmann—who represented a carefully gerrymandered district—notwithstanding). (Think Smallville, Friday Night Lights, or an '80s Spielberg/Amblin movie.) The truth is a little more complicated. While the states of the central U.S. do skew more rural than urban, the major cities therein are as cosmopolitan as any coastal town. In truth, only five US states—Delaware, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming—don't have at least one major city of 100,000 people or more. Likewise, New York State and California both have conservative rural areas of their own that the media doesn't like to talk about. Politically, Midwestern cities tend to be much more liberal—socially and economically—than the surrounding region. Many of them are (or were) industrial towns with a strong presence of labor unions and minorities, plus college students who stuck around after graduating. In fact, people in the surrounding, rural areas who don't fit in with the arch-conservative lifestyle will tend to relocate to the nearest decent-sized city. These factors frequently produce Democratic islands within states that are otherwise Republican strongholds. Many don't realize that Milwaukee was one of the hotbeds of the Socialist Party up until the second Red Scare, and while North Dakota does lean to the right, it has a publicly-owned banking system unique in the nation. Culturally, the flyover region is a lot more diverse in religion and ethnicity than popular folklore tends to credit it. African-Americans and Latinos have long settled in the cities for the economic opportunities, along with immigrants from all over the world. The Detroit suburb of Dearborn has had a healthy Arab population for over a century, and it's home to the largest mosque in North America; and the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area contains the largest Hmong and Somali communities in the US. Also, several Native American reservations are located in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, and the Dakotas, which leads to the major cities in those states having significant Native populations. These nuances and many more tend to be lost on Hollywood. Shows set in New York City will lovingly show details of the landmarks and locales, right down to the street corner and the Jamaican food truck that's been there for the past 20 years. Meanwhile, the entire state of Ohio will just be "Ohio" with no distinction between inner-city Cleveland, suburban Bedford, or rural Sugarcreek. And if you think this doesn't have real-world consequences, people in Milwaukee have speculated that the stodgy and extremely-white portrayal on Happy Days and its Spin-Off Laverne & Shirley may have hurt its actual economic and cultural growth, as it didn't make the city particularly attractive to people outside Wisconsin who didn't know better. Producer Garry Marshall had never even stepped foot in the state until long after both shows ended. That all said, the depiction of the geographic landscape outside the cities can be quite accurate. The Midwest produces substantial portions of the global supply of corn, wheat, and soybeans, so fields in every direction as far as the eye can see is an absolute truth for much of the area. Furthermore, large parts of it are very flat with no more than some low hills (there's a reason the center of the country is called the Great Plains), but flatness is not universal. As mentioned above, if a show is actually based in one of the cities here, whether or not it's a subversion of this trope depends on how much research the writer has done. However, the following tropes and locales of Middle America feature highly in the media: |
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Columbus: Rarely seen or mentioned in fiction, despite being both the state's capital and largest city and home of The Ohio State Universitynote (Family Ties was about the only major media production in recent decades to prominently feature Columbus), but it's another hotbed of sociological study and commercial test runs due to its racial and age demographics closely mirroring the United States as a whole. Basically, it's Peoria or Muncie as a major metropolis. In the Alternate History If The South Had Won The Civil War, the Union moves its capital to Columbus. | |
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Kansas: The geographic center of the lower 48 states, Kansas' image, even more than the rest of the Midwest, is that of conservative small-town normality. The creators of Superman had him raised in a Kansas town literally called Smallville to emphasize that he grew up as The All-American Boy, this very wiki's trope for describing a character pulled into an abnormal world is titled Not in Kansas Anymore after an iconic line from the Wizard of Oz mythos (which had Kansas representing the "real world"), and when Thomas Frank (a native son of the state) wrote a sociological non-fiction book exploring the rise of reactionary populism in rural America, he titled it What's the Matter with Kansas?. | |
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The Hall of Justice from Super Friends was based off of Cincinnati's old Art Deco train station, Union Terminal. This was because Hanna-Barbera was owned at the time by Cincy-based Taft Broadcasting (yes, as in that Taft), and one of the H-B artists presumably used it as inspiration. (It came full-circle when the Arrowverse used footage of Union Terminal as a building that would later be confirmed as their counterpart to the Hall of Justice.) | |
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Madison: More beer, the Badgers, a metric ton of restaurants and bars, hippies, and car thieves. The Boy Who Drank Too Much was largely filmed here. Some exterior shots in Back to School were as well. Former home of both Clyde Stubblefield and a Civil War POW camp. The Badgers' football stadium occupies most of the former grounds of the POW camp. | |
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