Inner States

My 9-year-old admitted in early December that they already have a list of the most stressful things about the holiday season. Number one? Buying presents. There are things about your kids you can’t take credit for, and others you can. Unfortunately for my kids, I think I can take credit for that one.

The holidays are a good excuse to treat the people you love. And it is so satisfying to give someone a good, special gift. Doesn’t have to be big, just thoughtful. But sometimes it take a lot of thought! Combine that with feeling like money’s tighter than you’d like, and that becomes just one of a number of stressful aspects of this season of joy and celebration.

This week on Inner States, we’re trying to avoid Christmas. Mostly, we’re going to fail.

We’ve got five approaches to the season.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Special thanks this week to Joan Hawkins, Yané Sanchez Lopez, Erin and Michael Grudis, Caroline Tatem, and Jillian Blackburn, for her first Inner States story!

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar, and the artists at Universal Production Music.

When you hear the term “American Heartland,” you probably think of fields of wheat, barns, quilts, and farmers—probably of northern European descent. There might be a sense of nostalgia. Perhaps even the sense that, as the non-multicultural counterpoint to the more diverse United States as a whole, this is the region that represents the core of the country, a core whose essence must be protected at all costs. Especially from people who seem like outsiders.

That’s not what the term meant at first. It didn’t even refer to the United States. Originally, it was part of a theory that whoever controlled the central Eurasian landmass – that was “the heartland” – would control power globally. It wasn’t until the Cold War that it was used to describe the American Midwest. Even then, it was about United States’ ability to wield global power. It was even more recently that it started to be about agrarian nostalgia. But whether during the Cold War or since, “the Heartland” has often been about denying the ways the American Midwest has been involved with global forces, shaped by them, built by them, home to Native Americans, Latin Americans, Haitian Americans, and more.

This episode springs from a panel I hosted at the conference of the Midwestern History Association in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last May. To understand the global roots of the Midwest, I also talked with historian Kristen Hoganson, about her book, The Heartland: An American History. You’ll hear snippets from the Midwestern History Association panel. If you’d like to listen to the whole thing (it’s worth it!), it’s available on their website.

Many thanks to the organizers of the Midwestern History Association, especially Cory Haala, for helping to make this happen, and to the panelists: Cory Haala, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Andrew Klumpp, Emiliano Aguilar, and Camden Burd.

Inner States is produced and edited by Alex Chambers. Special thanks to our associate producer, Dom Heyob, for helping to make this episode happen. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

If political news is too much right now, we’ve got a solution. It’s a story we aired a while back: The Third Time Rita Left. You can find the first two chapters here and here. The story takes place in the fall of 2016. Another election season. In Chapter 3: Missing Rita, things are not looking good. Kayte’s partner thinks Rita was probably eaten by a coyote. Kayte’s boss says cats just have their own plans. But reports are coming in from a neighborhood near where Rita was lost. Has she been sighted? Will Kayte be able to coax her home? What if she doesn’t want to come home? How do you deal with a lost cat and a lost election at the same time? It doesn’t hurt to work in a place that takes your missing cat seriously.

If political news is too much right now, we’ve got a solution. It’s a story we aired a while back: The Third Time Rita Left. The story takes place in the fall of 2016. Another election season. In Chapter 2: Finding Rita, we hear how Kayte and Rita first met, then met again, and whether, according to cat expert Mikel Delgado, there was any chance Rita remembered.

I’m writing this on election. By the time you’re reading this, you might know who the next president will be. You might be disappointed. You might be relieved.

Either way, now might be a good time to turn your mind to more local, and personal, questions. So we’re bringing you a story we aired a while back. It’s called The Third Time Rita Left. The story takes place in the fall of 2016. Another election season. (You might remember.) That’s in the background, though. In foreground is my friend Kayte, and her cat Rita. It’s got panic-inducing loss, friends coming to help, monarch butterflies, and more. It’s four chapters, which we’ll release over the next four Wednesdays. This is Chapter 1: Losing Rita.

Election day is around the corner. We’re going to be choosing candidates for offices from the president to the county coroner. And a lot of those offices are going to be sitting uncontested on the ballots. Only one person running. So many of those. And, interestingly, the races that aren’t being contested – they’re not split evenly between the parties. In 2022, Republicans let 14.5 percent of races go unopposed. Democrats? 51 percent. There were so many more Republicans running unchallenged than Dems. 

In this election cycle, here in Indiana, people have been trying to change that. That means Democrats running in solidly Republican districts. A lot of them rural. 

It seems like for most of those rural Democrats, getting into office is going to be a heavy lift. And I wanted to know what would motivate people when the odds are so stacked against them. Luckily, just down the hall, there were a couple of reporters who’d been looking into it. Clayton Baumgarth is our rural affairs reporter; he’s got a good perspective on rural life in Indiana. And Ethan Sandweiss recently did some reporting on all this. (You can read the article he wrote about it here.)

So I brought them into the studio to ask them a question: Why would you try to run for office in rural Indiana as a Democrat in 2024? That’s what we try to answer in this episode.

I don’t know how to be cool. Which is fine. I’m cool with it, at this point. I feel like coolness is largely the arena of youth. In my case, I wasn’t cool then, either. Once, when I was 15, I was hanging out with some friends, and I don’t know what prompted it, but one of them told me I was already basically 30. She might have meant it as a dig, but I took it as an observation of basic fact. I took life pretty seriously. Good student, all that. I couldn’t figure out how to dress in interesting ways, which at the time I was disappointed by but also decided to refuse to care about. Jeans and blank t-shirts for me. I’ve been 30 ever since. Well, at least until I was 40. I think I caught up around then. Now I’m 45. Still don’t know how to be cool. But, as I said, I’m okay with that. Mostly.

I’ve been thinking about it because a couple weeks ago I talked with someone who is definitely cool. I talked to her because I wanted to understand how punk scenes in the suburban Midwest are distinct from coastal cities. There are some pretty cool theories. But the conversation went beyond geography.

Raechel Anne Jolie is a writer, scholar, teacher, and a queer femme who found her people at punk house shows as a teen in the early 2000s. Her memoir, Rust Belt Femme, came out in 2020, and was an NPR Favorite Book that year. She’s written academic articles and essays and reporting in magazines like Teen Vogue and The Baffler, about class, queerness, pop culture, radical social movements, and more.

We talked about how the built environment of the Midwest shaped the experience of punk music and house shows. We also talked about the general appeal, and complications, of coming of age in a punk scene in the early 2000s.

Credits

Thanks as always to the Inner States brain trust - Jillian Blackburn, Dom Heyob, and Natalie Ingalls - for crucial editorial guidance.

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producers are Dom Heyob and Karl Templeton. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

Mary Hunter runs the Materials for the Arts program at the Monroe County Waste Reduction District here in Bloomington. We know it as the recycling center. To find her, you walk past the Trading Post, where you can trade household goods, and open the door to the Materials for the Arts office. It’s maybe a 12x12 room, and it’s chock full of stuff. The walls are covered with handmade objects, made from bottle lids, cardboard, old silverware. There’s a dress made out of soda can tabs, jewelry made of old glass bottles. It’s kind of an art museum. And it’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Mary accomplishes. The goal is to “divert reusable materials from the waste stream.” Mary has arrangements with companies like Cook and Baxter – both of them make medical equipment – and they send bins and bins of objects they don’t need. Small bottles, tiny plyers, rubber stoppers. She takes paper. Cardboard. Sheets. Then she connects with nonprofits, churches, schools, and artists working on community projects who need materials.

When someone gets in touch and asks for something, Mary’s coworkers join in. Once, they collected tons of milk jugs for an igloo-building project a school was doing.

Which brings us to a bigger question. When I heard about that project, I wondered what happened to the milk jugs after the school was finished with them. I didn’t get a clear answer. Odds are, they did end up in recycling or a landfill. But here’s the thing. It took them longer to get there. That's not nothing. Mary helped me think about materials differently, how we can reuse them, and how that reuse is also a way of caring for people.

If you’re wondering which house in Terre Haute, Indiana has the most followers on Twitter, I think it’s safe to say it’s the one on N. 8th Street, surrounded by Indiana State University parking lots, just south of the marching band’s practice fields.  It’s the Eugene V. Debs museum. Long before it was a museum, it was the home of Eugene V. and Kate Debs.

A hundred years ago, Eugene Debs was the most famous socialist in the U.S. He was the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party’s first five attempts, which suggests how well he did on that front. The last time he ran, he was in prison. He got 6 percent of the vote. At the time, it seemed not bad for a convict.

Now it’s a museum, dedicated to the memory of the most popular American socialists before Bernie Sanders, and, along with Larry Bird, who got his start playing basketball for ISU, one of Terre Haute’s most famous sons.

The museum is run, as it should be, by one of Debs’s biggest fans. Allison Duerk started giving tours of the house in college, and, just as she was graduating and looking for her first job, the Debs Museum opened up a search for a new director. She’s been there ever since.

This episode is about Eugene Debs and Allison Duerk. They’ve got some parallels. It’s also about what makes a person devote their career to a house, and a man who died almost a century ago.