Indiana, A Firmly (& Infuriatingly) Conservative State

Yesterday I finished Bill Simmons's painstakingly capacious The Book of Basketball. It chronicles the history of the NBA, for the most part. Simmons frequently lapses into long digressions on any topic (& is prone to romanticizing figures associated with Boston, a city I abhor). I appreciate this, because I'm equally prone to switching subjects frequently. Mostly I vacillate between Sylvester Stallone and Patrick Swayze movies, like Simmons, but I also pontificate dismissively at length about politics, other movies (with and without Hulk Hogan--I've seen No Holds Barred, but also The Dark Knight, if we stick only to Tom Lister, Jr. movies) and music, for the most part. However, one sentence in particular troubled me: "The heart of Indiana doubles as the heart of basketball."

Okay, I, like most everyone else, love Hoosiers and A Christmas Story. I, like (sadly) Boston fans and anyone who, like me, grew up in Indiana, also have a tepid fondness for Larry Bird. There, my association with the state stops. Although I admit that I was glad that Indiana voted for Barack Obama, it still houses many legions of racists, which still shocks me as a viable mindset. It may technically be a blue state now, but most of the votes that changed the political affiliation of it came from urban areas that contain most of the black votes. I watched Brian Williams decree that Indiana was a blue state, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking, with more than a modicum of schadenfreude, about the despicable living room that I spent a night in when I was in high school. These morons used horrible, obsolete barbs that they clearly learned from their equally stupid parents, and I had to bite my tongue. Instead, I listened with a huge awareness of the irony that these idiots clearly had no idea that they displayed.

You see, I grew up in a city just south of Gary, which has an enormous black population. My high school was half black, and I'd never felt a twinge of the deep-seeded racism that they unabashedly displayed. Some members of my family would use certain epithets, so I wasn't wholly ignorant of the existence of racism, but generally I ignored these as blind, "experiential," circumstantial instances of unfortunate, learned thinking.

Gary lies at the northwestern corner of the state, next to Chicago. To boot, it was south of the city limits, so I liked the White Sox and not the Cubs. I still think that you can adequately assess someone's racial attitude based on whether or not they rooted for one or the other. At least, this holds when applied to Indiana denizens. In the city itself, it's a little tougher, but not much. There are hardly any black Cubs fans, for good reason.

Everyone agreed, though, that the Bulls were awesome. More accurately, Michael Jordan was amazing, and Chicago was lucky to have such an iconic player. Even when he was still active, Bulls' fans knew that Michael Jordan stood out among anyone in the NBA. He did things on the basketball court that were inexplicable, and everyone nodded proudly and grinned knowingly when he sank six three-pointers in the first half of Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals and shrugged sheepishly after draining the last of these.

This is only one snippet of Jordan's reel of captivating moments. We all watched when the Bulls played a Finals game, so it perturbed me that latent racism could hypocritically transmute into similarly ignorant cheerleading when they played in June. It was as if someone had pulled blinders over their stupid eyes. Some people deserved a dismissive wave of the hand when they proclaimed their allegiance to the Bulls while wearing a Cubs hat and living in the 219 area code.

I love it that Indiana is a blue state, but we must remember that its two senators are Richard Lugar and Evan Bayh. They belong to both political parties, sure, but neither could be called "liberal." Lugar is a Republican and Bayh is a conservative Democrat, which, as I've said, should make no sense. There's a picture of me standing next to Bayh when he came to break ground for a municipal lakefront project for my town. I take pride in the fact that I'm wearing a Miami Hurricanes t-shirt (not because I liked the team, but because I liked the design).

I was young and easily ambushed. Also, Bayh was then the governor, so he could never have noticed that I dressed inappropriately because I doubt he then had the savvy to inspect every photograph that he was in. However, I'm convinced his shirt and tie obscured his wolf's exterior.

Indiana is "The Crossroads of America," because, as I like to say, everyone walks all over it. Then, they leave, which is a shrewd move.

R