The Big Nap: Indianapolis as City of the Future
Levy, Andrew
On the corner of 17th and Broadway, in an African-American section of Indianapolis, there is a vacant space comprising two unused lots, sections of two parking lots, and the edge of a small...
...Chief among these factors was the merger of the city with surrounding middle-class Marion County in the mid-1970s, a deft civic gesture that overnight created every big-city mayor's dream, a diversified tax base...
...Within walking distance of these neighborhoods, however, are the neighborhoods where white families drive out black families (and vice versa), and the neighborhoods that seem more despondent than ever: the poverty rate in Indiana rose from 9 percent to 15.7 percent between 1980 and 1992...
...When a Valparaiso student asked FALL • 1994 • 491 him what the government would be doing for starving inner-city children, Kennedy responded, "Why don't we do something about it...
...As a referendum on the progress of race in America since the 1960s, however, Indianapolis offers drastically divergent evidence...
...No one sees them any more...
...It is only one-and-a-half car widths across but bears two-way traffic...
...On May 14, 1994, at 10:30 in the morning, President Bill Clinton, Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, Senators Edward Kennedy and Richard Lugar, and a list of guests including Dexter Scott King and Martin Luther King, III, Ethel Kennedy, and the prime minister of Ireland, attended a groundbreaking ceremony at the corner of 17th and Broadway for a joint memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy...
...There are five Gap stores (you can calculate the population of any city by counting the number of Gaps and multiplying by 250,000), and one J. Crew...
...Gardeners and government personnel had combed the area for days, trimming grass from curbsides and verifying security...
...An open space...
...At the same time, however, to call Indianapolis so All-American as to be nondescript is a strange interpretation of what the city means, and of what it means to be American...
...If a car approaches from the opposite direction, pull over and allow it to pass...
...If the future of American cities is to be found in the suburban housing developments, office parks, and shopping malls that ring increasingly barren inner cities, if the business of Washington, D.C...
...She salutes the Civil War dead, and the Spanish-American War dead as well, as an afterthought...
...What can be said about this occasion...
...It is a testament, rather, to the intransigence of the issues that compelled his speech on April 4 in the first place, and that continue to haunt the efforts of American politicians to build the consensus necessary to make the city of the twenty-first century a coherent place to live...
...a quote from the Indianapolis speech is etched on his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery...
...We've had difficult times in the past...
...Was it enough...
...The streets of Indianapolis follow a straightforward numbered grid system, which suggests a Midwestern ethic of simplicity and openness...
...Stand at the spot where Kennedy stood, and ask: did activist government try and fail...
...In these neighborhoods, blacks and whites live side by side...
...That what actually emerges is a more complex, more vulnerable kind of myth is no condemnation of Kennedy's political skills or the common sense of his Hoosier audience...
...and although there were riots in 110 cities that night, Indianapolis remained calm...
...Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians will increase in population until they outnumber (and presumably threaten) whites...
...And in a state that was 9 percent black, where the Klan controlled the statehouse well into the 1920s, he chose race and class fairness as his issues...
...History revolves all around you...
...There is a vacant lot on one side, small, littered, and unmaintained...
...This will lead to ever larger multinational corporations, panoptic police states, innovative forms of civil unrest...
...With solvency assured, Indianapolis developed under the aegis of progressive Republican mayors such as William Hudnut and Stephen Goldsmith, who pursued policies that mediated their stated goal of transforming Indianapolis into a "world-class" city with the suspicion that most voting Hoosiers bear toward activist government and conscious urbanity...
...of Los Angeles...
...Or was activist government a success, but inadequate against the entropic forces that have afflicted neighborhoods across the country in the last twenty years...
...One goes to the corner of 17th and Broadway for communion with an uncommemorated moment in American history, and finds instead a communion with the unanswered questions of the civil rights movement and the welfare state in America...
...The section of the city where 17th and Broadway is situated is especially tangled...
...It does not take much time in Indianapolis to appreciate how unusual, even anachronistic, was the circumstance that placed Robert Kennedy, the iconic ruthless liberal of the 1960s, stumping Indiana voters for the crucial primary victory of his presidential campaign...
...the importance of bipartisan political dialogue...
...He ended the campaign with a scheduled five-hour motorcade through the northern counties that stretched into ten...
...to a group of serenely conservative medical students at Indiana University when they asked him where the money for his social programs would come from, and joked darkly with them afterward that he would lift the medical deferment on the Vietnam draft...
...Downtown Indianapolis is perhaps ten blocks square...
...If the corner of 17th and Broadway was a premeditated monument, we might say that its designers chose its array of empty spaces, its solitary yet central location, and its lack of a formal marker as a symbolic commemoration of the people and events we can't see, placed in the middle of a city we don't see: a memorial to turning away, an unmemorial...
...By local accounts, Kennedy disdained the caution of the police chief, traveled to a neighborhood so threatening (at least for that one night) that the police escort refused to follow him, and delivered his remarks...
...We have bad neighborhoods, but they are not as bad as yours (of the fifty-two largest cities in America, Indianapolis has the fifth lowest crime rate...
...He stumbles across Aeschylus, and throws the poet's name into the Indiana night on a gamble...
...it is a response to trauma, a sudden synapse failure in the body politic...
...For these reasons, it is appealing to believe that Robert Kennedy's brief presence here somehow made coherence out of these mixed feelings and divergent evidence—that his victory in the Indiana primary constituted a rare and educational moment of consensus across the political spectrum...
...The corner itself remains uncommemorated...
...Approximately 5,000 people passed through a Secret Service checkpoint from 7:30 A.M...
...the chaotic but vital Upper Midwest economy of the last decade, which displaced millions of rust industry workers into unemployment or new downsized professicns...
...496 • DISSENT...
...The poverty rate in the surrounding census tract stands at 44 percent, doubled from 1970...
...There are whole neighborhoods of moderately sized, affordable homes, some aging slightly, some brand new developments (called soybean subdivisions, because they usually displace soybean fields) wrapped around underfilled artificial lakes...
...Claudia Polley, chair of the Indiana AfricanAmerican Landmarks Committee, has noted (in phrasing so astute as to be almost poetic) that Indianapolis is "a northern city in a southern state, and a southern city in a northern state...
...People say, in dystopic visions, that the future of America will look like Los Angeles, New York, or Miami, The future will look like the movie Bladerunner, or like William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer: hightechnology intermingled with widespread urban and social decay, large semitotalitarian multinational corporations, aggressive and addicting forms of entertainment...
...Remarkably, he seemed to have uncovered both sides of Indiana's soul...
...He repeats phrases, searching for the right combination of words...
...It was, after all, still vacant after twenty-five years: if Kennedy's speech had been truly uncommemorated, there might have been some kind of construction there, or the corner at least might have retained the important-sounding name (Broadway Center) that the Indiana media called it in their reports on April 5, 1968...
...Edward Kennedy read a poem...
...Stand at the spot where Kennedy stood, in the middle of a city that prides itself on being a model for the twenty-first century, and it will feel like no time has passed since Kennedy FALL • 1994 • 495 stood there and tried to find the words that would make the sorrow of one race comprehensible to another...
...Indiana," favorite-son Governor Branigin as a courtly host, and Kennedy as a debauched dinner guest with his hand planted on the state's left breast...
...Similarly, while building a strong middle class by annexing the neighboring county served the city well for two decades, Indianapolis's new suburbs are flooding with wealthy emigres from the city, concerned about their taxes and their safety, or perhaps caught in the ideological centrifuge that draws Americans further away from each other in permanent pursuit of a larger yard and a neighborless horizon...
...it is bordered by that lurching chain link fence, entangled on this side with a live oak tree...
...The language, he seems to say, isn't ready yet...
...Diane Simon, a local political activist (whose husband owns the team), asked the audience to say a prayer for this nation, for the Kennedys, for the Kings, and say a prayer for Bill and Hillary Clinton...
...Similarly, conversation about information overload and the hyper real becomes curiously difficult to sustain after more than one week in a city like Indianapolis, which, as I have mentioned earlier, is not really a small place, only a flat, inconspicuous one...
...Commemorated sites mark places where history coalesces...
...Park...
...There is a measure of joy in this anecdote...
...The grass is still trimmed from the curbsides...
...He shouted "From you...
...On the corner of 17th and Broadway, in an African-American section of Indianapolis, there is a vacant space comprising two unused lots, sections of two parking lots, and the edge of a small park...
...But this persistent vacancy was something more—it was a kind of monument to the dead ends of history, when our alternative selves present themselves in such a way that the loss of them cannot be officially honored, but can be mourned quietly, sullenly...
...and the Indiana Pacers basketball team, who were competing in a playoff game that afternoon, and who had offered to sponsor a national design contest for the memorial...
...q The author wishes to acknowledge the help of the staff of the Indianapolis Recorder...
...Early polling evidence, for example, suggests that Kennedy gained little statistical support for his candidacy while touring Indiana...
...It absolutely made my day...
...The city is split in two on the North-South axis by Meridian Street, which was placed on one of the Earth's meridians...
...many in the crowd of a thousand do not hear him properly, however, which leaves him with the disconcerting task of addressing a crowd half of whom are stunned into silence and half of whom are cheering innocently his reverent descriptions of King...
...In other parts of the country, our greatest public sites of commemoration both mimic and speak for the emotions we bear upon remembrance of the events they honor: the Vietnam War Memorial forces its visitors underground in an unambivalent mourning ritual, but cannot control the strange communion they often experience there...
...the twenty-first century, one thinks, is going to feel like starting over...
...In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God, America is as large or as small as we choose to make it...
...In this context, it seems that good municipal government is a matter of building a plausible myth of civic unity...
...Graham Toft, president, Indiana Economic Development Council, Inc...
...It made my day...
...One wonders what his audience thought of that confessional moment submerged in tortured syntax, John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination suddenly becoming a footnote (and not, as his brother acknowledges, a particularly illustrative one) in history, not a primal scene...
...he merely fought off challenges and solidified his initial level of support...
...It is split on the East-West axis by Market Street...
...I know they stand for change but do they still stand for white supremacy, is what I'd like to know...
...at the center of the circle stands a Beaux Arts obelisk with catacombs inside and a draped, attentive female silhouette at the top...
...Ultimately, however, Indianapolis is a story about how slowly change comes, not how it sometimes comes too strong...
...Like Washington, D.C., Indianapolis seems to have woven the unspontaneous nature of its origin into its character: it feels like an abstract construct, not like the spontaneous aggregation of individuals that form the haphazard community of other cities...
...The oxymoron of Indianapolis is that these two forces should, in theory, also work to inhibit each other in the long term, and that instead they seem to live in a placid and mournful spirit of co-existence that only begins to tell the American story...
...Epilogue This essay was begun in late 1993...
...One week later, there is a shallow hole in the ground at the corner of 17th and Broadway...
...Robert Kennedy, speaking at a party breakfast in Terre Haute in April 1968: They are hidden in our society...
...and quoted Camus to unexpectedly thunderous applause...
...When the myth of the man and the myth of Indianapolis intersect, what seems to emerge is a moment where entitled but enlightened East Coast liberalism and complacent but Christian Midwestern conservatism brought out the best in one another...
...Reading those words, one can almost sense the satisfaction of those early founders who wanted Indianapolis to be the center of something, and who hired an apprentice from the District of Columbia project to make their wish good...
...Kennedy was just beginning his campaign in the Indiana presidential primary, running against a local candidate (Roger Branigin, the governor), a state Democratic machine that opposed him, and a newspaper chain (the Pulliam Star-News Newspapers) that openly fought his candidacy...
...Because he never ran another campaign, we associate him with issues of class and race, forgetting that after the King riots, those were the issues that constituted a substantial part of virtually every candidate's stump speeches (though Kennedy was considered first on the issue, just as McCarthy was first on the war), including Richard Nixon's...
...It is impossible to re-read the one-sentence statement in which Robert Kennedy reminds his audience that he knows what it feels like to have a family member murdered (the only time in a public venue when he would discuss his brother's death) without thinking of Senator Albert Gore's invocation of his son's near-death at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, a mini-speech somehow both moving and distasteful...
...In short, it was great, anarchic, political fun...
...to 8:45 A.M., and were placed facing a large stage on which were draped large black-and-white photographs of Kennedy and King against a navy blue backdrop...
...The crowd, which buzzed and chattered even when the president spoke, stood silently when excerpts from Kennedy's April 4 speech and King's "Mountaintop" speech were broadcast on a large video screen...
...And everyone has convenient shopping...
...There is a public building on each side of the corner: the Citizen's Ambulatory Health Center on the east, and Citizen's Multi-Service Center on the west...
...And, if you could, maybe say just a little prayer for the Pacers this afternoon...
...After backing out, make a right turn, then another, then another, onto 17th Street...
...The top three employers in Indianapolis are, in order, the federal government, the state government, and the city government...
...On the east side of this space, there is a parking lot for a senior citizens home...
...It took no more than an hour...
...But nobody left...
...Despite the fact that the cul-de-sac is oval, cars 494 • DISSENT are parked in neat rows on either side...
...Mount Rushmore challenges its visitors to contrast the grandeur of our most regal presidents carved into the side of a mountain in the middle of the most holy land of the devastated Sioux...
...This vision of the future has been so prevalent in mainstream culture, so difficult to avoid at the movie theater or watching MTV, that one almost worries about the consequences of so much bad faith going public all at once...
...The best restaurants are in strip malls...
...If Kennedy adopted the Indiana primary as a test of his own synchronicity with the American spirit, he seemed to spend the month testing the extent to which he needed to compromise, and the extent to which the American spirit, as he perceived it, needed to compromise...
...Similarly, since the 490 • DISSENT details of the murder are still hazy, Kennedy is forced to build his rhetoric around conditional clauses—"considering the evidence there evidently . . . were white people who were responsible" —that disrupt his cadence...
...There is no one in the park...
...In the middle of the oval stands the burnt chassis of a late model Japanese compact...
...There are the calm, interracial neighborhoods, whose existence can be taken as evidence of Great Society reforms, but whose muted and suburban character also reflects a distinctly Republican social consensus that must be considered Ronald Reagan's (or more likely, Indiana's own) success story as much as Lyndon Johnson's...
...It is so cleansed, and safe, and the streets are so wide (and generally empty), that one almost imagines that it is a faux downtown, a Chamber of Commerce construct, perhaps the "Downtownland" section of Disneyland...
...The language is still not ready...
...On the evening of April 4, 1968, hours after Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed in Memphis, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., climbed up on the back of a truck parked on a basketball court at this corner and delivered an ex tempore speech that was broadcast on local television and radio...
...It is for this reason that Kennedy's visit to Indiana in 1968 seems particularly relevant to an exploration of what, exactly, the future of American cities might be...
...because he won the Democratic primary in Indiana, we forget that winning the Democratic primary in a largely Republican state does not constitute a real referendum from the Heartland...
...For those of us seeking historical lessons from his visit to Indiana, however, it scarcely constitutes a program...
...This included people from the East Coast and people from Indianapolis, so the feeling appeared pretty general...
...We have a proper downtown to show to visitors, but only 12,000 people live there...
...A sign on that side of the street reads "Martin Luther King, Jr...
...In many ways, Robert Kennedy's remarks on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination did not make a great speech...
...They did neither...
...But the road ends suddenly, in a cul-de-sac bordered by a decrepit chain link fence...
...This is a Hoosierism...
...And it can be said with certainty that Kennedy lost nothing by standing his ground, which is no small victory...
...exhausted but exhilarated, he spent the evening in the bar in the Indianapolis Airport Holiday Inn, telling a pair of weary reporters how fair the people in Indiana were, and how they had listened to him...
...Although detailing 492 • DISSENT the rise or fall of any city is no easy task, local developers attribute the progress of Indianapolis during the last two decades to several interlocking factors...
...Surrounding that circle stands a skyline dominated by tall buildings built since 1980, a domed stadium, a sports arena shaped like a giant white cricket, and the spires of churches, grain silos, and new construction...
...a larger measure still, to think of the ironic symmetry of Kennedy crouched on the back of a flatbed in the middle of a cornbelt slum, while James Brown played "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose" back in his hometown, both keeping the peace, both political visionaries for a weekend...
...Nevertheless, he won the primary...
...Rather, Kennedy's Indiana campaign was a haphazard affair...
...They move slowly across the landscape, or sit waiting in cars...
...Was it never attempted with the necessary vigor, or the necessary spirit, or the necessary patience...
...he asks Fred Dutton, his aide, minutes prior to its delivery...
...Single-story developments rise on both sides of the cul-de-sac, in the same neat rows...
...It is a quilt of empty spaces...
...It is Indianapolis's genius of place to mold its diffuse neighborhoods, and the diffuse arguments over their origins, into a frictionless, assimilated whole that almost, but never entirely, allows a resident to forget that the Civil War is still alive here, and that the verdict on how to solve America's race problem remains unsettled...
...First, there is the matter of the speech itself, which does for us the unfortunate service of measuring the precise distance between how we define an act of political courage in 1994, and how we might have defined it...
...If I lose," he said, finding Indiana's compass, "then, well, I'm just out of tune with the rest of the country...
...I just shook the president's hand," she said, holding up her own hand...
...While not shedding its reputation as "The Big Nap," a nondescript, backward, corn-fed Heartland capital, Indianapolis now appears to be something of a precursor as well, of what Joel Garreau called "edge cities," the middle-class, mall-laden, placidly multiracial suburban population centers that are altering urban demographics at the close of this century...
...Two months later he was dead...
...It is unbelievably quiet...
...In a northside neighborhood officially called Hooverwood and unofficially called the Gilded Ghetto, you can still see small groups of Orthodox Jews walking to temple across FALL • 1994 • 489 well-trimmed lawns at twilight...
...Driving past restored and decaying Victorian homes (including one that is freshly painted but completely hollowed out by arson), following alongside railroad tracks, maneuvering oneway streets, you will eventually find 16th Street and Broadway, and make a left turn, expecting that 17th Street is directly ahead...
...If Indianapolis is All-American, it is because it challenges homogeneity as it embraces it: because sameness and difference, left and right, paranoia and trust, are one Mobius strip...
...They're invisible...
...After the ceremony, an elderly black woman stood beaming in a nearby drugstore...
...A sudden hard rain began to fall at 10:45, which fouled media and Secret Service communications, opened umbrellas, and twisted speeches into improvised forms...
...He saved his most passionate discourse for question-andanswer sessions, and he was particularly enthralled by contrary but engaged audiences...
...Kennedy went on to win the primary, his first victory in that presidential campaign...
...He chided a lunchtime audience in Vincennes when they laughed when he told them there were more rats than people in the city of New York: "You can smile," he said, staring into the heart of a state that wore its complacency proudly...
...What do you think I should say...
...Still, immediately surrounding that vacancy at the center resides a series of public structures that seem a tribute to Kennedy's vision of an activist government providing support to innercity communities...
...We will have difficult times...
...It seems churlish to add that, if you lift your eyes further, you find that surrounding that circle of public buildings lies a census tract where the promise activist government extends to blasted neighborhoods has taken, at best, a tentative foothold, and where those impressive public buildings are as anomalous as they seem necessary...
...Richard Lugar, Indiana's current senior senator and the mayor of Indianapolis who declined to provide police protection for Robert Kennedy, tried to consider what the April 4 speech meant locally: His [Kennedy's] words were heard around the world, but they were given here first, they were heard by us first, at 17th and Broadway . . . the life of our city, in my judgment, was changed forever by his witness...
...It is almost perfectly square: like the Navaho rugs whose creators deliberately weaved in a single imperfection so as not to rival God, Indianapolis bears a slight ripple in its perfect squareness near the northeastern corner...
...In fact, streets terminate suddenly, sidle alongside slender canals and rivers, change directions, or bear the same names as streets in other sections of the city...
...A persistently vacant space was something more...
...As exhilarating as FALL • 1994 • 493 aspects of his campaign may have been, however, what appears to have ultimately occurred was a dubious electoral victory that tempers any mythologization of that month in Indiana...
...and Carey Harmon for his essay, "Ideas on Indianapolis...
...unmarked monuments mark the places where history dissolves...
...Noting that the majority of the new poor are children, one can seek explanation among the litany of increases in divorce, illegitimacy, and drug use during this period...
...Defining itself against the cosmopolitan spirit that defines East and West Coast cities (at least in their myths of self), Indianapolis's capital improvements were grandiose, but relentlessly sensible, egalitarian, and family-oriented: fresh pavement, a new zoo, professional sports teams, a children's museum scaled to a city three times the size...
...It's true...
...The corner of 17th and Broadway is a T-shaped intersection...
...One wonders what Kennedy must have thought as he said that sentence, "I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man...
...Don't move to Indianapolis...
...We will have difficult times in the future...
...Its rear wheels are propped up on cinderblocks...
...It is impossible to read where Kennedy quotes Aeschylus ("My favorite poet was Aeschylus," he says flatly, pausing between paragraphs) without feeling an intense sense of dislocation: what American politician in 1992 would have quoted a Greek poet, let alone to an inner-city crowd, let alone ex tempore...
...There is logic in this...
...It is impossible to picture Robert Kennedy on that truck (or James Brown onstage) without recalling the failure of political will that followed the Rodney King riots of 1992, when public officials on almost every level of government absented themselves from the streets...
...That evening, videotape showing Clinton, Edward and Ethel Kennedy, and Martin Luther and Dexter Scott King shoveling loose earth and smiling appeared on CNN...
...What emerges from Kennedy's Indiana campaign is a series of authentic moments of confrontation and communion between politician and electorate amid the ennui of a standard, often halfhearted campaign that little altered the presidential race...
...moves to Alexandria and the middle class of Philadelphia moves to King Of Prussia, then the people of Indianapolis might say, with justification, we've been living like this all along...
...And so, it seems barely dissonant when elderly men talk benignly of the Ku Klux Klan in a Jewish deli that they have frequented since they were children...
...This vacant space was a brilliant anomaly...
...The fourth largest employer is a drug company...
...But history is made in either place...
...Let's Go: USA, in its 1992 edition, labels Indianapolis as "All-American to the point of being nondescript...
...Opposite this lot sits another vacant lot, grassy and freshly mown, but suggesting no civic purpose...
...At other times, he seemed clearly bored...
...At least briefly...
...It was a portal...
...Although funding and design plans are hazy—it is believed that Clinton's plan to visit Indianapolis for a fund-raising luncheon and a round of golf with the governor rushed and even inspired the announcement of the memorial —sponsors envision a construction completion date within two years...
...It is reasonable, for instance, to predict that Los Angeles or Miami will look like extrapolations of their current selves in forty years (demographic predictions support this: the increase of Hispanics, Asians, and blacks as a percentage of the national population will be concentrated in Sunbelt states, leaving the rest of the country relatively static...
...Both buildings look new, and their parking lots are full...
...Perhaps ambiguous and ambivalent political moments deserve ambiguous and ambivalent monuments...
...There are churches with grounds that cover acres, and churches in garages with Mass times spray-painted on the door...
...There are neighborhoods where residents sit on their porches in the evening and listen for the sound of automatic weapons fire in the distance...
...As powerful as these versions of the future (and the present) may be, however, they are not conclusive: they may simply be the most photogenic, the most cathartic, the most reflective of the wary paranoia that has constituted one of America's growth industries of the last decade...
...One can look at these neighborhoods and numbers and find many potential reasons for their existence: the Reagan administration, which slashed most forms of federal aid to cities during the early 1980s...
...I moved to Indianapolis in the summer of 1992...
...The memorial, "The Landmark for Peace," is to be constructed from melted-down weaponry gathered from community gun buyback programs...
...Kennedy begins by announcing to his listeners the news that King has been murdered...
...He met cool Republican audiences, stared down signs that read "You punk," and fought a newspaper publisher who committed his chain to a virtual blackout of Kennedy's events, while running campaign coverage of questionable objectivity and front-page editorial cartoons of startlingly bad taste: one portrayed Indiana as "Mrs...
...He often told conservative white audiences what they wanted to hear, and altered his speeches for minority audiences...
...Here, then, is one vision of America's future...
...As soon as I heard about the corner of 17th and Broadway, I wanted to see it...
...In retrospect, it seems like a verbal turn tested, then abandoned: my sorrow, he seems to be saying, may feel like yours, but maybe not...
...In Indianapolis, though, the story of April 4 reads like some uncomfortable memorial to abandonment...
...We pay all these taxes and pass all these programs to help them, and yet the programs don't reach them and the taxes go for other things, and every year their lives are more helpless than ever and yet we wonder what's wrong with them, after all we did for them...
...Hearing this story told, however sketchily, one wishes there was a way to avoid it, or leaven it...
...It is situated in the exact geographic center of the state...
...There are identically named towns throughout the state: four Buena Vistas, four Millersburgs, three Mechanicsburgs, two Pumpkin Centers, and so on...
...the recent South African elections...
...There is, I believe, no city as large as Indy anywhere on this continent that has somehow managed to remain this invisible...
...When I told people that I moved from Philadelphia (not exactly a glamour capital itself) to Indianapolis, they often asked, "Why...
...on the west side, three full-length, well-kept basketball courts (a basketball court is well kept if there are nets on the hoops), and a children's playground...
...You will see clean, formidable buildings devoted to health care and education, a senior citizens home, and a well-nurtured park named for the man Kennedy memorialized, a man whose mission was ultimately more essential to the lives of the people that reside in the neighborhood...
...At the center of the downtown there is a traffic circle...
...Other speeches made repeated references to the late Larry Conrad, the Indiana secretary of state who had first proposed that the site be commemorated...
...The scene suggests a ghostly drama, or the opportunity for a kind of interactive, voyeuristic tourism: stand at the spot where Kennedy stood, and turn in every direction...
...Bill Clinton worked the crowd...
...At the center of the city, which misses by two blocks also being the center of the state, stands the downtown circle...
...he performed anyway, the show was broadcast locally, and Boston too remained 488 • DISSENT calm...
...It is hard to imagine that Kennedy would not be pleased...
...Philosophers and cultural critics have written on the symptoms of the "postmodern condition": information overload, paralyzing selfconsciousness and pessimism, and the embrace of what Jean Baudrillard calls the "hyperreal," mediated experience that seems (or is) more authentic than the original from which it has been generated...
...To get to the corner of 17th and Broadway, use these directions...
...And Kennedy remained relentlessly Ivy League throughout...
...In Indianapolis, people either know this story by heart or do not know it at all...
...On the south side, in an old delicatessen called Shapiro's, you can hear elderly gentile men discuss the Ku Klux Klan the way most Americans discuss the Democratic and Republican parties, with phrases like, "What confuses me is their agenda...
...It is a description accepted by Robert Kennedy, who chose Indiana as his standard for whether "the country" would sanction him (as West Virginia had sanctioned his brother in 1960 and turned him into a national candidate), and accepted also by NBC News, which in March 1993 chose Indianapolis as its "typical American city" for a series of feature reports exploring the effects of federal economic policies on average Americans, In the encyclopedia of American cities, Indianapolis is the Platonic center (though it has competition from Columbus, Ohio, where fast food companies, enamored of that city's perfectly average demographics, test-market new food lines), a circumstance that has less to do with its actual demographics than with its myth of itself, a myth that exchanges the right to be called an exciting place to live for the right to be called a sensible one...
...The Indianapolis Star, in fact, ran a front-page feature claiming that Kennedy had viciously "inject[ed] racism" into the otherwise pure world of "Hoosier politics...
...We don't see them...
...A small minority in a rich country...
...Searching for a focus for his campaign after Lyndon Johnson's March 31 withdrawal from the presidential race, Kennedy used Indiana to test out new themes, new speeches, new Kennedyisms...
...This is, one supposes, exactly what a young politician in the early stages of his first national campaign must do...
...Observing the persistence of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers (who clashed twice on the statehouse steps during the winter of 1993-1994), one finds graphic evidence that even government intervention on the scale projected by 1960s liberalism was inadequate to the heavy task of eliminating poverty and racism in a nation as enormous and inchoate as ours...
...He reminds his audience that King was murdered, until he is sure everyone has gotten the message...
...It is, in many ways, not a political speech at all...
...Otherwise, it is difficult to make predictions about what the future will look like without reckoning with any one of the cities to which people are actually moving: cities like Orlando, Raleigh, Sacramento, Jacksonville...
...It is because Kennedy died that June that his myth froze into its current form: because he was murdered before the Democratic convention, we conveniently forget that he was already losing the nomination to Hubert Humphrey, and that Eugene McCarthy divided the support of American liberals...
...Lacking HUD grants (which were cut during the first Reagan administration) and possessing no consensus for raising taxes, Indianapolis's municipal governments struggled to fund their education and law systems, but constructed public-private partnerships to fund capital improvements, and cultivated such a high degree of cooperation between business and government that the city is now considered a national exemplar of privatization...
...Which didn't explain why people were pouring into the place (its population expanded from 700,000 to 1.3 million in the period from 1975 to 1990), or why any one person in the economically languishing America of 1992 would actually ask someone else why he or she had moved suddenly to an unexpected location: I went because there was good work for me there...
...There are few people around...
...Similarly, quotes from the Kennedy campaign indicate that they sought to gain 50 percent of the vote in Indiana, and to knock Eugene McCarthy from the presidential race...
...While his older brother John has been the subject of all the diverse elements of the mythmaking machine of mass culture, Robert Kennedy has been mythologized more narrowly, as the martyred spirit of tough-minded white liberalism, particularly on issues of class and race...
...In unscripted, combative situations, he shone...
...He seems struck by the word "difficult," and repeats it, mantra-like, amid pleas for understanding and compassion: "We can do well in this country...
...According to John Hatfield, special assistant for policy development in the mayor's office, city officials are considering a new slogan for Indianapolis: "A Model for the Twenty-First Century City...
...His voice cracked imperceptibly as he said "us...
...In Boston the following night, soul star James Brown was discouraged from performing...
...Yet I am stunned by the lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them and their problems...
...Or was it inadequate to the endemic mistrust that stands between separate races, and separate classes...
...And while biographers of Robert Kennedy generally give his speech the credit for forestalling violence in Indianapolis in April 1968, it is far more likely that Indianapolis remained calm because, alone among American cities, it possessed a strong and complacent black middle class (a local reporter described them to me as "black Amish") and a thriving Klan: two forces which, for completely different reasons, would tend to inhibit black unrest in the short term...
...Like Washington, D.C., Indianapolis was a planned city designed (in 1825) to be a capital, and its location was chosen as a manifestation of a political and philosophical idea, rather than for reasons of geography or transport...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
