At the turn of the last century, some researching anthropologists wanted to do a study on the classic American town. This was at then tail end of the industrial revolution, so the researchers wanted to see how an average American city handled the transition from a farming community to a factory-based community.
They also wanted to observe the American way of life and how it was experienced in a Midwestern town. These studies are known as the Middletown studies and Middletown is, of course, the alias given to Muncie. The researchers chose Muncie as their Middletown because it was average in most ways: size, location, population, demographic grouping and other aspects. In essence, it didn't really matter if Muncie was the most average town in America, because after the study came out it was branded as the most average town in America.
That was 100 years ago. Sometimes, when I'm driving around town, I think about how far the city has come since then. The question that I always inevitably come back to is: If anthropologists did a study of the average American town today, is Muncie still the most average town in America?
When you get down to brass tacks, the makeup of a community is its people. So by calling Muncie the most average town in America, it is a reflection of the people that live in Muncie and call it their home; they are the ones who are considered average. So have the people that make up Muncie's community changed that much in 100 years? Are our citizens still the most middle-of-the-road American citizens? This is a question that's always bothered me.
Earlier this week, I found an answer.
It was 1:30 a.m. on a Monday night, and I was standing in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. I was there because I was picking up some supplies (read: beer).
There is a man in his late 20s standing in front of me in line wearing a Super Mario Brothers T-shirt. He has placed an assortment of items on the checkout counter, and among them is an 18-inch-long machete. He is trying not to arouse suspicion, so he has turned the machete face down on the counter, leaving the cardboard backing turned up. Unfortunately the cardboard backing reads "Eighteen Inch Machete" in what appears to be printed in size 400 font.
I've never really considered a machete an impulse buy, outside of someplace like Nicaragua or Borneo where a machete is needed to stave off the encroaching foliage or guerilla insurgents. I do not know the certain circumstances that lead a man to purchase a large blade in the middle of the night, but I can only assume that it involves a supreme level of desperation. What was even stranger was that this man had his girlfriend with him, and she was completely nonchalant about her boyfriend's purchase - yet there was no possible way her night was going to bode well. I wanted to yell, "Get away! It's the middle of the night and your boyfriend is purchasing an instrument of death! Run, there's still time!"
And in seeing this, I realized that if cultural anthropologists came to Muncie looking for the average American town, all that would be needed to convince them otherwise would be to take them out after midnight. Seeing a man purchase a large machete in order to, I assume, hack someone into tiny pieces is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the crazy crap you see people doing around town.
You just need to take the time to look and you'll see that Muncie, 100 years later, is less like the ordinary Middletown and more like every other bizarre town in this country.
Write to Paul at pjmetz@bsu.edu
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