23 APRIL 1983, Page 11

Rotating in Middletown

Christopher Hitchens

In the course of last summer, I wrote an article for a New York paper which described one of the President's speeches as foolish, commonplace and 'Rotarian'. In due time, I received a letter from the chair- man of Rotary International, Mr Herbert Pigman. What, he inquired, did I mean by this last locution? I composed a letter by return, citing Evelyn Waugh's characterisa- tion of Lord Copper's famous address to the dinner for 'Boot of the Beast'. Cringing behind this authority, I sought to argue that 'Rotarian' was a legitimate synonym for small-town platitudes and petit bourgeois prejudices. I think I may have even attemp- ted a play on words, comparing Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt with John Updike's Rab- bit. Was Mr Pigman appeased? By no means was he appeased. He wrote to me again, very courteously. He caused one of his aides to telephone me, suggesting that I should see a bit more of 'Middle America'.

am now a regular recipient of the Rotarian, which contains a large number of well-written and thoughtful pieces on topics like nuclear war and international relations, as well as (I think) an unacceptably high quota of photographs of Rotarians. But my curiosity was aroused, and my fair- mindedness had been challenged. It was true that I accepted the term 'middle America' as a sort of sneer. It was true that most of my American friends lived either on the eastern or the western littoral, referring

easily to the tracts in between as 'flyover territory', signifying that they never saw it except from the air. Yet had not Nikita Khrushchev, on a flight from New York to California, been mightily impressed by the evidence of wealth and industry and pro- ductivity that passed below him? What about the mid-west after all? I have just made the voyage to Muncie, Indiana, and if Mr Pigman ever reads this I hope that he will take it as my trip to Canossa. Muncie became celebrated in 1929 (a good year for laying down your American surveys) because two pioneer sociologists selected it as the ideal type of the American heartland. The husband and wife team, Robert and Helen Lynd, gave Muncie the working title of 'Middletown'. This was not at all as patronising or sociological as it might seem, there actually is a Middle Town about three miles outside the Muncie city limit, and there are enough Plainsvilles, Pottsvilles, Minevilles and other similar set- tlements in American song, story and fact to Justify the designation. It would be easy enough to write satirical Copy from this dateline. For a start, it makes Noel Coward's comment about Nor- folk seem mild. Flat, Indiana, no question about it. The drive from Indianapolis takes upwards of 90 minutes, and in that span there is almost no relief in the landscape. The sight of a grain elevator, punctuating the skyline, comes as a blessed subject of conversation. Or at least, the first one does. As New Yorkers are over-fond of saying, there is no there here.

Yet arrival in Muncie is no let-down. 'See that?' remarks my escort as we cross the thoroughfare of Cornbread Road (blink and you miss it). 'That's where Close En- counters was filmed.' Civic pride is not ex- hausted by the claim. Every Muncian is fed up with Middletown questions. 'Fact is,' one of them told me, 'that we used to be called Little Chicago in the Thirties.' It seems that John Dillinger used to retreat to Muncie for R & R during his glittering gangster career, but never tried a bank rob- bery because of the unusual number of railway crossings in the town. Nothing holds up a getaway like an unscheduled railway crossing, and the Muncians are proud both of John Dillinger as a guest and of John Dillinger as a city slicker who couldn't pull anything on them. As a partial result, some approaches to the city find a semi-mocking signboard reading 'Model Town USA'.

I think that I was lucky in being the guest of Ball State University, Muncie's pride. The Ball brothers were prominent local en- trepreneurs, who operated a fruit-jar business that has now evolved and diver- sified into aerospace components and the other chips of the third industrial revolu- tion. According to Richard Lingeman in his marvellous book Small Town America, Muncie under the rule of the Ball family used to be rough and tough, with policemen acting as company cops and dissenters frog- marched to the city limits. But today, Ball State brings thousands of young people to the town and supplies it with an examplary cultural hub. Luciano Pavarotti and Itzhak Perlman will both be performing here this year — which is more than will be happen- ing in many European towns of twice the size. Is this, then, really what H. L. Men- cken termed in another connection 'The Sahara of the Bozart'? (He called Muncie, when he reviewed Middletown, 'A city in Moronia'.) Muncie is not without its scuffles and kerfuffles. Something over a year ago, a film about its teenagers was made, and local worthies managed to get almost all the se- quences on premarital and interracial sex 'quietened'. Unemployment, once the only topic of the headlines because Muncie sur- passed itself in being the worst instead of the average sufferer, is now alleviated by a slight recovery in the automobile plants. The Muncie Star, a distinctly wretched local paper, still features the subject as a bold contrast to the proclaimed and obvious willingness of Muncians (or Munsonians as some prefer) to work hard. The town is hardly less Republican than the state, but nobody here believes any more that the jobless are shiftless.

What about the Rotary Club? Robert and Helen Lynd discovered that, in the Twenties, Muncie had 458 clubs or, more astoundingly, one club for every eighty peo- ple. When you remember, as Alexis de Toc- queville was the first to point out, that it is the American male who is classically 'the joiner', that may suggest a central role for the Elks, the Lions, the Kiwanis and the rest. The proportion of women's clubs, however, is rising steadily, with articles in the Rotarian in favour. Mr Pigman can rest his case.

The town is not without its sleazy side. After the fuss about interracial sex in the films about Munsonian high school life, there was a nasty pox of Ku Klux Klan slogan-daubing. But, the tolerance of the place generally uppermost, this was con- sidered a local hoax or the work of a bad- taste guerrilla team. Perhaps that in itself is sad news, given Max Lerner's definition, in his book America as Civilisation: 'One might say that a small town ceases to be one as soon as someone who has lived in it a number of years finds unfamiliar faces as he walks down the street and is not moved to discover who they are and how they get there.'

In deference to Lerner, one might add that small towns get more bearable and more interesting as they get bigger. But, in deference to other authorities (not least Mr Pigman) it is less easy to deny that small towns embody something vital and charm- ing about America. Although I still think that the President made a cracker-barrel speech that day, I have uttered my last snig- ger about hicks and Hicksville.