Geographically, Chicago is right in the middle of the Midwest. But maps can be deceiving. Financially, intellectually, and politically, Chicago is Eastern—much more similar to New York or Boston than truly Midwestern cities like Indianapolis or Des Moines. Certain aspects of this are obvious—Chicago shares liberal politics, artistic communities, and elite universities with the cities of the eastern seaboard. But, even the social dynamic of Chicago is entirely different from the social dynamic that characterizes the rest of the Midwest. Chicago’s large ethnic and gay populations would be feared and met with hostility if transplanted to Omaha or Kansas City.

Nothing reveals the Chicago-Midwest dichotomy as clearly as a drive down the freeway. Last March, I hopped on I-80 in Joliet, Ill., and drove to West Lafayette, Ind., the home of Purdue University to see John Mellencamp in concert. Chicago is thriving by any of the usual measures and so is Joliet, along with similar suburbs (Will County, which includes Joliet, is the fastest-growing county in the state). But once past the Chicago suburbs of northwest Indiana, a different reality becomes startlingly evident. Throughout Indiana, small towns stacked upon each other, which at one time proudly displayed the American entrepreneurial spirit, are dying. First, the family farms went out of business, and then the manufacturing jobs were lost when countless factories moved to Mexico or China. The last blow was delivered by Wal-Mart, Target, and Applebee’s, when they moved into town and forced almost every small business owner to board up their windows. The people who inhabit these desolate villages have been stripped of their source of income, community, and identification. This is why super-patriotism and mad Christianity have become so important—they filled the void.

Ten months after that concert, Mellencamp released Freedom’s Road, which contains a song called “Ghost Towns along the Highway.”

Ghost towns along the highway
Guess no one wants to live around here any more
Ghost towns along the highway
Listen to the wind blow through the
Cracks on the boarded-up doors

Mellencamp lives in Bloomington, Ind., close to Seymour, Ind., where he grew up, the subject of his 1985 hit “Small Town,” an ode to life in the rural Midwest. That same year he released another single, “Rain on a Scarecrow,” which described a new form of rural poverty taking hold of family farmers devastated by corporate farming. He was moved by what he saw to also found Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young. People at the time were obviously aware the region was in trouble, but surely they didn’t foresee the way outsourcing would deprive families of their main source of income or the way behemoth corporate chains would suck up all the revenue that provided the backbone for small town America.

The twenty-two years that have passed between “Small Town” and “Ghost Towns along the Highway” have borne witness to a vanishing America. Being from the Midwest now just means you’re close to a Borders, Best Buy, and Chili’s, like anywhere else in the country. These chains continue their march onward and have begun to dominate the economy and landscape of Chicago’s suburbs, which have also been greatly harmed by the loss of manufacturing. Small towns of Chicago suburbia like Harvey and Dolton, which were dependent on the automotive and steel industries, lost their major sources of revenue when factories downsized in the 1960s and eventually shut down, and because the Midwest tends to be a racist place, have shown the state just how fast white flight can get off the ground. It started in the city. Then a lot of white folk began hopping from suburb to suburb, using their savings to stay one step away from black folk and ahead of dreaded plummeting real estate values. The black families do the best they can, but with a lack of jobs and a failing education system, they face formidable obstacles just to maintain steady incomes and keep their children off the streets.

Of course, the situation is not entirely bleak—the suburbs to the North, West, and Southwest of Chicago are doing very well. But the cost of living in those areas continues to rise, making it ever more difficult for people from the struggling part of the state to relocate there. If these people decide instead to move to another Midwestern state, they better not hope to work in agriculture or to join a labor union. Farming, as it was formerly understood, is pretty much gone as a full-time occupation and only 12 percent of employees nationwide are unionized anymore, according to the Department of Labor. If they decide to look for one of the new “high tech” jobs that policymakers boast about, they best keep in mind that 750,000 of those jobs have been outsourced.

This year, for the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. This means we are, in effect, moving as a race out of the countryside and into the vast outlying regions of the metropolises of the world. As the Guardian puts it, paraphrasing UN bureaucratize: “The urban slum is becoming the primary habitat of mankind.”

Although their conditions vary, along with the nature and severity of their struggles, Kenyans outside Nairobi and Indians outside Mumbai have something distinctly in common with Midwesterners now. They find themselves drawn to urban centers that are surrounded by a strange new world of shantytowns or suburb-slums ringed round by enormously vast stretches of peopleless countryside.

Considering that Chicago was never really the Midwest, it’s an odd twist of fate that it may take on Augustinian “City of God”-like proportions for Midwesterners, because it will be the only dependable source of jobs. But since its housing costs are astronomical, the slums will continue to expand, and the rural Midwest will continue to become more abandoned, isolated, and empty.

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David Masciotra sent this dispatch, the first of a series for Pop and Politics, from Joliet, Ill., a once-industrial small city in the deep-southwest corner of greater Chicagoland, where he’s a senior at the University of St Francis. Images from south Chicagoland and Cedar Lake, Ind., Rich McQuail.

Tags: hillary clinton, illinois, mellencamp