"Out Here" in D.C.

I have always thought that my credentials as an Ohioan were reasonably good. I taught for fifteen years at a small college in the northeastern part of the state. My wife and I started our family and made our first mortgage payment in Ohio. We learned to appreciate the Western Reserve’s rich inheritance in Greek Revival architecture and the simple pleasures of the Geauga County Fair. Thanks to WCLV and the Cleveland Orchestra, we developed a taste for classical music.

We moved to D.C.—actually, to Alexandria, Virginia—in 1985. Gradually, we put down roots, though we never stopped feeling like transplanted Ohioans, and we never gave up the perverse pleasure of rooting for the Cleveland Indians. And so, when, in the fall of 2008, I opened a Capitol Hill office for the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, it was with the conviction that one can, Thomas Wolfe’s strenuous assertion to the contrary notwithstanding, “go home again.”

We were mistaken. I have learned that from Page Hall one views the world through a distinctive Scarlet and Gray prism in which the various accoutrements of NCAA football—e.g., Brutus Buckeye, Block O, TBDBITL, Coach Hays—loom extra-large. On my occasional visits to campus, someone inevitably will ask, “So how are things going out there?” It seems to me that the expression captures the essence of Columbocentrism. It amazes me that Buckeyes living in the Washington metropolitan area willingly concede the point. “How long have you been out here?” I was recently asked by a Glenn School alumnus who lives in suburban Maryland.

I simply cannot get used to the idea that our Capitol Hill office is “out” anywhere. In colonial and early republican America, everyone understood that it was the “Ohio country” that was “out there” in the transmontane west. And from their perspective, early settlers in the west surely regarded the Atlantic seaboard not as “out there,” but as “back east”—back in terms of both time and space. Californians do the same thing today.

I could understand it if people on the mother ship thought of their satellite as “down there” in the nation’s capital, since Washington lies south of Columbus, both geographically and culturally. I could get used to thinking that we are “down here” in D.C. But “out here,” no.

The reader might ask, “Why does any of this matter?” I would submit that it matters because easterners--never mind their own distorted view of the world, famously captured by the cartoonist Saul Steinberg in his New Yorker cover showing the buildings of 9th Avenue casting their shadows over the Great Plains--are inclined to dismiss midwesterners as provincials. This is one of those brute facts of life that ambitious Glenn Fellows should bear in mind. And that brings us to Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Stay tuned.