Speaking of the Midwest...

I was pointed toward this post from the improbably (unusually? incomprehensibly?) named blog Kung Fu Monkey. It is a great rant and a better explication of why I, for example, am a better representative of "the heartland" than the farmers shopping at Walmart.

The last graph sums it nicely like this:

I am just, I guess, well and truly tired of being told what "Middle America" wants, when Middle America is my age and lives in a goddam city, just like I have for my entire life.

But my fave might be:

Hell, I grew up in Massachusetts, and we didn't go around nodding and saying"This is the very birthplace of America both geographically andideologically, those idiots in Kansas have no idea what being a real American is, like we Commonwealth bastards." One would be considered insane. Whatever connection people in rural America have to the "idea" of America is the exact same as mine -- the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They are public documents, accessible by all (well, for now), and last time I checked the versions printed in textbooks in Kansas didn't have special magical ink and secret clauses not included in the versions handed out in the Northeast urban great city of Philadelphia where, if we remember, the damn things were actually written.