Middletown, Teetering on the Divide

[MountainLaurel]

In the 1920s, two amateur sociologists went searching for a city that was singularly unexceptional. They wound up here.

They made a study of Muncie, asking its children how often they read, and its women how often they ironed. Then more sociologists came, and market researchers and documentarians and journalists, poking and prodding over the decades, measuring Muncie with the calipers of their trades.

snip

"As far as I'm concerned, the Republicans have turned things to ," he says. "I'm working two jobs now just so I can put gas in my van."

Cantrell talks about what it was like when his dad came up from the South, like so many others, to work in the parts plants in Muncie. How the city was thriving then. If people think this is Middle America, he says, they're wrong. Muncie doesn't represent Middle America anymore. Probably. "Well, I hope Middle America is a little better than what's around here," he says. "Otherwise, that's depressing."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/05/AR2008050502738_2.html