Midwestern musings

By Patricia Hunt
Published: May 30, 2008

Warren Buffett has been the most successful investor in recent history. I keep wondering if the Oracle of Omaha could have been as amazing had he lived nearer an ocean. Would Wall Street have had fewer scandals and bubbles and crises had it been located in Omaha instead of New York? I never thought I would say this, but I find myself yearning for good-old, boring Midwestern sensibilities and common sense.
One of my cousins married someone who grew up in the middle of the country. Gloria landed in this nest of people from the South. What on earth did she think of us?
We found her to be a no-nonsense, completely grounded person. She can balance a bank account, get things done, and strikes me as having little taste for fads or glitz. She has a nose like a bloodhound for whatever is false. She communicates in plain speech. I think she and Warren Buffett would get along just great. I think both of them are what this country needs more of.
There would have been no sub-prime mortgage crisis if Gloria and Warren had been running the country. This lending money to people who have no chance of paying it back, and then slicing and dicing the mortgages and unloading them onto someone else would have violated their very DNA and Midwestern upbringing. Good sense would have prevailed.
I suspect that if Gloria and Warren had been in charge, there would have been no invasion of Iraq. They would have followed in the tradition of another Midwesterner, Dwight Eisenhower. War is hell and absolutely the last resort. Don’t do it if there is any other way to deal with the problem. Both Eisenhower and Omar Bradley were known to be entirely competent and as down to earth as a pot of beans. No glory seekers, either of them. No power mongers. Just getting the job done. Midwesterners are like that.
Almost everyone thinks this country is in big trouble on so many fronts. We’re broke, collectively and individually. We’re stuck in a war no one is sure how to get out of. We can’t pay for our lifestyle anymore.
We have flirted with the celebrity culture of Hollywood. We’ve imbibed the infatuation with the big money of Wall Street. We have bought every electronic gadget that the high-tech crowd can come up with in Silicon Valley by way of Chinese manufacturers. We’ve swaggered with a couple of presidents from Texas with their boots and horses and sagebrush. We’ve enjoyed the cornbread, peanuts and warm folksiness of Southerners. Maybe it is time the nation started channeling our inner Midwesterner, and put a little Warren and Gloria back into our lives.
The Midwest lacks the glamour of New York and Los Angeles. It doesn’t have Broadway or Hollywood. I have tended to think of it as, well, boring. It was so Midwestern of Gerald Ford to declare himself a Ford, not a Lincoln. And when he died, he was described as “decent.” When someone asks Americans about their dreams, rarely do the words Ford or decent come into play. But maybe Lake Wobegone and decent are beginning to look good at this time in our history.
I vote we move the capital to Omaha and turn Washington into a national park. Maybe if the president and members of Congress could absorb the ethos of Nebraska, they would come to their senses. This would also help the impossible traffic problems in Northern Virginia.
Let’s move Wall Street to Wichita and turn lower Manhattan into a memorial to the many immigrants who have moved through there. While we are at it, let’s put in a Museum of the Middle Class to remind people of an era when ordinary mortals could afford a roof over their head, health care and had a little money in the Savings and Loan on Main Street.
This country has a colossal hangover from years of wretched excess. We need to reconnect with the Midwestern in us. People on the coasts have derisively called it “fly-over country,” but maybe we need to land there for awhile. They may have just what the doctor ordered.
Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.