Heartland Smirk
by Jeffrey Folks

In a recent book, LaPorte, Indiana, Jason Bitner has assembled an impressive collection of portrait photographs from the heartland of the 1950s and 1960s. In these portraits from a half century ago, men and women stand straight and tall, neighbors look one another in the eye, and children are allowed to be children, not made up as adults. Heads held high, they are people who aspire to a better life. Supported by faith, they pursue the long-held dream of decent and hard-working folk everywhere to live a rewarding life and to leave the world a better place.

Bitner’s collection, the work of studio photographer Fred Pease, captures the spirit of America’s heartland culture at a pivotal moment before the cultural revolution of the 1960s that would tear the nation from its innocent roots and cast it into painful self-consciousness and self-doubt. In the images of these plain, levelheaded Midwesterners, as reviewer Kent Owen writes, there is “nothing edgy, smirking or brash. But much that is earnest, benign and hopeful.”

Unfortunately, the Midwest, like the rest of the country, has become alienated from its traditional values of faith, family, and hard work. If Fred Pease set up his portrait studio today, the images of the plain folk of LaPorte would be much changed. Though it remains more conservative than the East and West Coasts, the heartland is no longer just the land of honest toil, life-long marriages, and Wednesday night church suppers. Columbine and Red Lake have been the sites of the nation’s most deadly school shootings, and the nation’s meth epidemic is most pronounced in the small towns of Oregon and in rural Tennessee. Like the rest of America, the heartland is adrift, undermined and confused by a godless media, an amoral social culture, and a deep uncertainty concerning its core values, and its public face has changed in ways that reflect this estrangement. The straightforward, untroubled expression of the past has given way to a wary, cynical coolness.

We have became so accustomed, it seems, to the atmosphere of suspicion as hardly to notice the change, yet this condition of cultural exile entails its own mark of Cain. The smirk is now this mark, as characteristically American as the loud, easygoing neighborliness of our countrymen was in the past. It is the trademark of a coddled cohort now in their twenties and thirties, the first generation with no direct memory of an earlier time of striving and sacrifice that characterized America from its founding until the 1960s. Those earlier generations dreamed of securing a decent job and of working to establish a comfortable home. By all reports, today’s worker begins with the expectation of a high salary and a cushy, undemanding assignment. Both the quality and quantity of work performed has declined amid universal insistence on a shorter work week, flex time, and a casual workplace.

The smirk exudes disdain and with it indifference, and it reflects not just indifference but hostility. In February 2006, after nine Alabama churches were burned, one of three college students who confessed involvement in the crimes indicated that the arson began as a joke. Clearly, however, it was something more than that. The destruction of church buildings betrays an utter disdain for religion that these young men share with many of their peers. The very assertion that it was a joke implies a chilling dismissal of the reality of spiritual life in others: a dismissal, in other words, of the very humanity of others, but also an admission of self-contempt.

The unwillingness to take life seriously is, after all, at the very heart of what the smirk represents. Its dark secret is the cruelty that rises out of despair—a despair that is fostered by boredom and self-loathing. In his poem “Au Lecteur,” Charles Baudelaire, who understood the evil of boredom better than anyone, personified it as a creature who “would willingly make a shambles of the earth/ And in a yawn would swallow the world.”

This Baudelairean fantasy of destructive power leads to a striking disengagement from reality and, with it, a drift toward overt forms of violence. Perhaps its most disturbing recent manifestation is the spread of what is called “happy slapping”: random assaults on innocent victims that are recorded on cell phone cameras and then messaged to friends or broadcast on the internet. According to The Guardian, the craze has become “a nationwide phenomenon” in Britain, and the craze is spreading to America. Like all bullying, happy slapping hints at insecurity and self-contempt in the bully himself, but unlike the age-old schoolyard variety, the current wave of violence involves a bold contempt for authority and an enjoyment of causing pain to those who are weak or vulnerable. To punch an unsuspecting elderly woman in the face and capture the gleeful moment on one’s cell phone is the essence of happy slapping.

It is not just the young, however, who are participating in this rebellion against authority and tradition. In too many cases, their elders have prepared the way with an attitude of contempt for inherited values and beliefs. Unfortunately, within an indolent society in which one’s basic needs are essentially guaranteed, it is all the more difficult to earn self-respect. For the slackers among us, the smirk and the sneer conceal an embarrassing lack of effort and accomplishment. For this reason, if for no other, the smirk and the sneer are not going away anytime soon.

Still, there are signs of hope. Tired of the reflexive carping of the mainstream news anchors, millions are turning to Fox News. Weary of constraints on faith in the public arena, millions have embraced evangelical religion, and with it discovered a new respect for traditional values. Sheltered and naïve as they have been, some among the “echo” generation now in their teens possess an idealism that hints of a willingness to seek out challenges rather than to evade them. In May 2006, denied the opportunity for religious expression by the interference of the ACLU, 284 seniors at Munford High School in Tennessee rose in unison and recited the Lord’s Prayer at their commencement service. Their act of defiance was reportedly met  with “wild cheering” from the audience. Perhaps even now, the smirk has begun to pass from our lips, to be replaced by a new seriousness and an expression of self-worth, strength, and courage.