The main question we want you to address is: What do you think and feel about Muncie?
I began this entry on the morning after the Super Bowl—the high civic holiday in the United States, a barbarous spectacle of violence and consumption that would shame Caligula and ought to shame us, good Christian nation that we self-righteously claim to be. I didn’t watch the game (which was by all accounts dull) or partake in the celebrations that leave most Americans exhausted and hungover the next morning. Instead I woke early, filled with a restless energy and the residue of a nightmare. I was haunted by the sum of a constellation of percepts and fears: an intuition, bordering on conspiracy theory, that I didn’t quite have a handle on. But serendipity has granted me this workspace to think it through, and I thank you for your forbearance; onward.
- How long have you lived here? If you were not born here, indicate where you came from and why.
When my wife was interviewing for the job that brought us to Muncie an Eastern city, almost exactly nine years ago, I decided to take a walking tour of the town—from the Ball State campus to downtown, and around the older part of the city. What I saw frankly appalled me. Blight. An alarming number of abandoned houses, with a few kept-up homes scattered in between trying fervidly to pretend everything was normal. Rental houses that no one but students or the desperately poor would want to live in. A mansion on Washington Street that had partially burned around its chimney stacks—which stood naked, jutting against the sky, while the elegantly appointed lower floors gaped open to the elements. Potholes and more potholes, and the neglected remnants of traffic lines painted on the streets some long time before. A downtown that felt eerily depopulated, with a few grim Brutalist buildings surrounding a sad little block of gentrified restaurants and shops and a century-old Carnegie Public Library that was, apparently, no longer the public library, which had moved (along with nearly everything else) to the pedestrian-unfriendly McGalliard shopping strip. Police cars—more than seemed proportionate to the number of civilians or any actual threat level—trawling around, looking for trouble. A huddle of grizzled homeless men next to a Christian men’s shelter, and a few more near the bus station. As much as my wife wanted the job at Ball State (and she wanted it a lot, so that she could be closer to her family and because she was unhappy with her position back east) I did not want to live here. The city repelled me. It made me feel despondent, desolate—the more so because being a part of our previous hometown’s post-industrial reinvention had felt so invigorating. Here everything was just dead.
- Are you happy with where you live? Do you feel like you belong?
What I would learn and experience in the years since then did little to change my feelings. I learned that Muncie had rapidly expanded and industrialized 130 years earlier, during a sickeningly wasteful fossil-fuel boom—and bust.[1] That it was the way it was because automobile industry manufacturers had fled the area in droves in the decade prior to my visit, most recently the vast BorgWarner plant in 2007, taking with them the union factory jobs that were the mainstay of the blue-collar economy.[2] That it was also that way because of the political clout of real-estate developers and speculators, who neglected the properties they owned and who fought to keep property taxes so low as to immiserate the public school system. That the city’s politicians and petit bourgeoisie[3] were a smug, obtuse, deliberately incurious tribe, on the whole, self-satisfied in their role as the professional and administrative class; that this same social class once filled the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan in the early years of the last century, when it was a prestige social club frankly dedicated to white supremacy; that as late as 2014 there was a high school athletics program in Muncie insolently calling themselves the Rebels;[4] that during 2017 the city’s largest homeless shelter served 79,074 meals and furnished 20,754 nights of lodging;[5] that as of this writing there is a plan to convert an abandoned school into a 500-bed jail because the Invisible Hand of the Market has determined that some elements of the lumpenproletariat are more profitable as incarcerated convicts than as free workers and consumers;[6] in short, that very little had changed since Woodrow Wilson was President, really, except that all the money was gone and the teacher’s college had gotten a big head and colonized much of the city northwest of the White River.[7]
But you, future reader, presumably know all these facts and statistics. In aggregate they portray a drowning city that is being pushed under the water even as it struggles for breath. Everyone here knows it—if only as a latency, a feature of the collective unconscious that each individual recognizes or suppresses in their own way—with only a few, relatively powerless, voices raised against it, and many willing to take advantage of it.
- How would you describe Muncie to someone who has never been here? What are its most distinctive characteristics
So I’ll leave the facts to the geographers and economists, and return to my lived experience of Muncie. My wife and I bought an enormous old house downtown, built in 1896. It was an extravagance, all that empty space and just the two of us, and it needed a lot of work, but it seemed a shame that it should go unused, left to decay like some of the other houses in the neighborhood. Probably if we’d been ten years younger and I were in better health, we would have risen to the challenge of completing its restoration, and turned it into a writers’ and artists’ retreat, or an anarcho-syndicalist commune. People have done that sort of thing in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities where real estate is cheap and the hypnotic sway of surveillance capitalism is held almost in abeyance: the house adjacent to ours back east was a squat cum artists’ commune, for instance. We weren’t those brave people, and we didn’t. We ended up selling it to move to a smaller house nearer to campus, but along the way little bits of Muncie have stuck to me until I found myself a dual citizen of sorts: observing as an outsider, but also getting involved in one thing here, one there.
I served on a neighborhood restoration and rehabilitation committee that brought me little satisfaction and some good deal of frustration (although we managed to update the impotent by-laws); I stood by in horror as an abandoned house on our block was used for paramilitary tactical exercises by the Muncie Police Department, unannounced, presumably because they thought no one would mind,[8] and my wife tweeted at the mayor until he officially condemned the exercise; I watched as that same house was bought by a speculator and rented to a low-income family who couldn’t afford to move out when the basement flooded with sewage and the power went out and all the vermin that had been living in the basement fled for the higher ground of the family’s living space, and I attended a City Council meeting where new regulation was considered to make the landlords more accountable.[9] I hired a roofing contractor who didn’t do the work I paid for, who was rumored to deal methamphetamine, and who almost certainly was high on meth when he failed to fix my roof. Every day brought a trickle of homeless men, some with obvious alcoholic dementia, who dunned me and my neighbors for the opportunity to do yard work, badly, for a few dollars cash. Occasionally we would see prostitutes working our neighborhood, and I was chilled by the casual ease with which all blame for the sex trade fell upon the prostitutes—not the johns, and never the economic forces that made prostitution the best of a handful of bad survival options.
Good things have happened, too.
A Georgian mansion down the street from us, built by a wealthy Klansman at the turn of the last century, has become a theater mask studio and local safe space for LGBTQ+ students and faculty. A block in the other direction, a mammoth temple built by the Freemasons, another of the secret brotherhoods that bound together Muncie’s white businessmen in the 20th century, was repurposed as a community arts center. Elsewhere in the East Central neighborhood, investors who live locally have bought and restored a number of homes. Several apartment buildings have been restored or constructed for low-income tenants. There’s an Old Washington Street Festival every year that draws public attention to the neighborhood’s rich architectural history. Here and there, art happens, thanks to a cadre of persistent local artists. Compassion shows itself in food banks and daycare and employment programs for the developmentally disabled.
But here’s the thing. As you may have detected, there remains a lot of nostalgia for “the good old days” in Muncie. The problem with this Muncie nostalgia is the same as the problem with American nostalgia in general: the good old days weren’t really all that great, especially if you were one of the Native Americans displaced or murdered to make way for white settlement, or one of the African-Americans restricted from living in white neighborhoods, or the poor white workers who relocated from Appalachia to work in the factories and were bottled up in their own district—Shedtown—where opportunities were limited and public services were few. Or anyone stricken with influenza or polio before vaccines were developed. And so on. For every one of the bright spots I see in Muncie, there is a plasma bank,[10] a vape store,[11] a weed-covered cleared lot. A pawnshop. A charter school. People addicted to the opioid pain medications they were initially prescribed to cope with the many hurts and aches of manual labor.[12] Abandoned pets and idle potential workers. The snarled threat of a Confederate battle flag (yes, even today) hanging from a front porch. The neighborhood covenants written decades ago and meant to exclude low-income people and African-Americans are still in effect, de facto if not de jure, and that the lines that delineated the city’s neighborhoods by class and race, town and gown, haven’t changed much in a hundred years, even as the industrial jobs have gone away, resulting in swathes of urban poverty and decay. The “good old days” mostly never were, but the bad replicates itself in new forms, while much of the population waits for the high-paying union industrial jobs to return and bring back those “good old days” again. (You, dear reader, will know better than I that these jobs are not coming back, no matter what our very stable genius Fraudster-in-Chief says.)
A few years ago, more or less on a dare, I started working as a volunteer tax preparer with a program run by a large national nonprofit organization. Let me unpack that. In the United States, the calculation and annual payment of personal income tax is incumbent upon each taxpayer, and usually involves negotiating a vast body of nearly impenetrable law governed by a byzantine bureaucracy, which supports an echelon of advising attorneys and accountants, who charge hefty fees for their consultancy. For wage-earners—i.e., those least able to afford a tax adviser—the employer typically collects a percentage from each paycheck to pass along to the government. The taxpayer is often owed back a surplus amount at the end of each year, but it is up to them to calculate that surplus. If they make an error in their calculation, they have to pay a penalty. In other words, to avoid costly penalties for making errors in figuring out surplus tax paid, the taxpayer must consult a professional, who normally charges a fee, which most low-income workers cannot afford. Yet many working people depend on their annual refund of tax paid. That’s where I, as a volunteer free tax preparer, come in.[13]
The position requires a lot of studying and hard work each year just to take the exams to become qualified, but it affords me a detailed look at people’s lives: how much money they make (at least in the legal economy), the number of people in each household and how many generations they comprise, whether they have disabilities or other health issues (or, for that matter, health insurance), if they’re in debt (and how much), and so on. It’s very illuminating. It’s also often heartbreaking, especially this year, Year One of the 2017 Tax Reform Law.
Because the tax preparation program I volunteer with operates under the auspices of a nonprofit that advocates for retired persons (though we serve everyone in the community because the Internal Revenue Service’s free tax preparation program no longer operates in Muncie[14]), most of the other volunteers are themselves retired persons.[15] This in itself leads to certain problems: in just the past few weeks, our District Coordinator (a wonderful, inspiring woman) passed away suddenly, and two of our preparers required surgical procedures that will keep them from working for at least a month. Workflow is often slow because of manpower shortages; many of our elderly preparers’ grasp of information technology is tenuous at best; and, well, older Hoosiers tend to do a lot of extraneous chatting. Yet we carry on.
This year so far, the number of refunds disbursed has been down by about 25%, and the dollar amount of those refunds down over 8%. We’ve seen the five stages of grief enacted more than usual. This year there has been more crying, more anger, more insistence that we must have made some mistake. As a younger person, who came of age in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, with far less certainty of economic security as I grow old, I sometimes feel resentful and unsympathetic when older taxpayers—who have the pensions and the Social Security checks I may never see, as the current regime guts social programs and runs up massive deficits—complain to me about their financial hardships. It can be disheartening when arguments break out between critics of the regime and those who perversely support it.[16] It is a peculiar but proven psychological phenomenon that we buy into what we want most desperately to believe, and double down when presented with evidence that we’ve been conned. The Con has been rebranded as the Marketing, but buying into it is still the most American thing there is. We here cannot accept it, but Middletown is no longer representative of the whole nation, but only of the forgotten interior colonies from which the very wealthy of the coastal cities extract whatever value they can.
But what’s to be done? We are addicts on our last, desperate binge before we get clean. Those of us here in the cheap seats, the colonies of the interior, expend our nervous energy on craptastic Super Bowl spectacles and TV shows and cheap sugar and drugs. We consume caffeine and nicotine to keep us alert because the number of hours we work (and in many cases the number of jobs we have) allow little time for rest.[17] Some of us fret noisily and lose sleep over the next emergency medical payment we might have to make, the next hottest year on record we will certainly endure, the next mass shooting no one could have foreseen that might claim us or our loved ones.
Corporations, meanwhile, spend profits buying their own stock instead of spending it on workers or investing in upgrades. “Infrastructure Week” is the fucking punchline to any given day’s news cycle, and health care and education are no longer a priority because our ostensibly freely elected leaders have decided, Why should they be? Thus people in hospitals die of sepsis and measles outbreaks occur because we won’t fund basic healthcare and science research,[18] or even agree on established scientific facts; as universities shutter whole departments because they cost too much to keep open and who cares about higher education anyway if it can’t get you a job to pay off your student loans? The capitalists, prognosticating a dim future, have been setting themselves up to cash in on climate catastrophe and social unrest and then head for higher ground, but the catastrophe is now happening sooner and faster than expected, and the official motto of finance capital, IBGYBG—I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone—is suddenly perhaps no longer operative. Despite what we say to each other, despite what we try to believe, we are all so very anxious and afraid. That is the essence of what you must know about us: we have been deceived, we have wanted to be deceived, and the rare glimpses of truth we allow ourselves through our self-deception scare us shitless.
- What are your feelings about Muncie’s future? What are your hopes for Muncie? How do you expect Muncie will fare in the years ahead? What changes do you expect?
My belief in reason and humanity’s essential goodness has been tested and found wanting, again and again. Yet my own irrationality manifests as the desire to find and nurture the good in people in spite of all contrary evidence; the sense that truth, beauty, and kindness are fragile and rare, but remarkably persistent, and worth seeking out. Such is my absurd faith. This is why I am writing to you across the abyss of many years—to substantiate my faith. I am dead. But I know that you live, and are reading these words. I must believe in you, or I cannot be bothered to go on. Please, please, be.
P.S.: I wrote this essay in a mad rush, and I see upon re-reading that it is very dark, and that its tempo becomes more frenzied as it goes on—descriptions of things that you know from prior research if you’ve come far enough to read this sad little diary, lists of things that have already come to pass for you: much aggregation, but little assimilation or analysis—still, I have decided to let it stand; I feel it is necessary for me to bear witness honestly, and my state of mind is a part of the warp and weft of my time. Behold the insanity of February 2019. Farewell, and Godspeed.
[1] “When the Indiana natural gas belt was discovered, the citizens were unaware of what they had found. Nearly a decade passed without action to recover the resource. Once its significance was realized, further exploration showed the Indiana gas belt was the largest deposit of natural gas discovered until then. In addition to the massive quantity of natural gas, in the 1890s developers discovered that the field also contained the first giant oil reserve found in the US, with an estimated one billion barrels of oil. The resource was rapidly tapped for use. Because the gas was being wasted in use, the Indiana General Assembly attempted to regulate its use….In a series of cases, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law. The poor understanding of oil and gas wells at the time led to the loss of an estimated 90% of the natural gas by venting into the atmosphere or by widespread misuse. By 1902 the yield from the fields began to decline, leading to a switch to alternative forms of energy.” (Source: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
[2] The white-collar economy primarily comprising Ball State University and Ball Memorial Hospital and related support services, of course.
[3] Those who hadn’t fled city limits in order to send their kids to better schools, because Muncie’s schools are broke because the petit bourgeoisie has fled city limits, taking their property tax dollars with them. Also: yes, there will be class analysis.
[4] As in supporter of the white supremacist Confederate States of America circa 1861-65.
[5] Per the Muncie Mission website.
[6] Per Indiana Public Media.
[7] The past is never dead. It’s not even past, as Faulkner succinctly observed.
[8] Coincidentally, at the same time this was happening, my wife was giving a new Ball State faculty member a tour of the neighborhood, trying to convince her that it was a great place to buy a home and raise a family.
[9] It didn’t pass.
[10] A place where one can donate the plasma portion of one’s blood, for medical transfusion use, in exchange for a paltry amount of cash. As you can imagine, the donors comprise the most economically precarious citizens. Plasma banks are to cities what polypores are to tree stumps: a sure sign of death and decay.
[11] These sell the paraphernalia used by nicotine addicts as an alternative to cigarettes, and represent the tobacco industry’s latest attempt to remain profitable in the U.S., where smoking cigarettes is banned in most public buildings and is now viewed as a marker of low status. A small electronic device is used to heat a flavored, nicotine-infused liquid to the vapor point. The vapor is then inhaled, producing a short-lived mental clarity. While not as sure a sign of socioeconomic disorder as plasma banks (above), a disproportionate number of them can be an indicator of trouble, and “vaping” has become very popular among teens.
[12] The opioid medication debacle is a subject too large for this essay, but—like tobacco use, day drinking, the casual prescription of benzodiazepine tranquilizers and amphetamine diet pills, legal gambling, and high-fructose corn syrup—the deleterious effects of opioids on the health of Americans and the U.S. economy cannot be overstated, and the story of how the pharmaceutical industry (Purdue in particular) foisted Oxycontin on the world is a rich and clarifying one. And I’m not even going to touch on the lax gun laws and willful blindness toward right-wing extremist groups that serve to maintain us in a state of low-grade terror.
[13] If this tax regime seems cruel and ridiculous and regressive, it is. That’s the implicit point: to keep wage earners poor and anxious and in their place, and to support a parasitic, well-to-do, consultant class.
[14] The prevailing trend is that many social services that were incorporated into the state and federal governments in the 1930s and 1960s are now run by nonprofit organizations, or by religious organizations, or even (in the cases of school and prison administration—see above) for-profit corporations, and have less oversight and are less inclusive than the original government programs. This is by design, part of the Big Bait-and-Switch: the privatization and commodification of every aspect of life. The corollary is that hard-to-commodify caring and social welfare work is to be done for low wages, or for nothing, because those activities belong to the magisteria of the church or the household.
[15] By historical accident, this means that they are among the last cohort of Americans to consider it at least somewhat normal to work at a single job their entire adult lives, and receive a good pension upon retirement; to expect that they will then also receive Social Security benefits and Medicare until they die; that, having worked and paid into the system, they have a right to enjoy their retirement as they see fit, free from unmanageable debt and the fear of losing their health insurance. They almost certainly attended functional public schools. If they worked in industry or public service, they are also more likely than not to have been union members; they are also probably members of a mainstream-denomination church, and (among the men) military draftees. In short, they tend to have certain attitudes concerning the social contract between oneself and society at large, and those attitudes include a sense that one should give back to the system that provided for them. This cohort does the lion’s share of volunteering in other areas as well.
[16] It is this writer’s empirical observation that, more often than not, support for white supremacy trumps economic self-interest—pun intended, and Adam Smith be damned.
[17] I regret not possessing to enter into the record any representative photos of the checkout lanes of our superstores—arrays of sugar- and stimulant-laden snacks and drinks assail the shopper’s eye; our every impulse to consume something pretty or appetizing has been weaponized against us, and we usually relent.
[18] Or, in the case of hospital sepsis, because low-wage hospital employees are too damned tired from overwork to care about using simple prophylactic measures like washing their hands or wearing masks.