He was a mechanic, and his hobby was drawing and painting, so Renaissance paintings recreated with auto mechanics would have been perfect.

Although he’d probably be saying all these guys need a shave and a haircut.

Paul Kix explains the essence of the Midwest — he starts with the inevitable discussion of the movie Fargo, which is how most outsiders are exposed to our exotic inscrutable ways.

What Fargo nails, in other words, is Midwestern Nice, the idiosyncrasies of a steadfast populace that appear banal and maybe even bovine to the uninitiated, but in truth constitute the most sincere, malicious, enriching, and suffocating set of behaviors found in the English-speaking world.

Read the whole thing. I’ve been living here for 15 years now, and I’m only sufficiently familiar with the culture to be simultaneously entranced and horrified. It’s even: I sometimes seem to shock the natives with my blunt and awkward ways, too.

To be fair, though, at least I had a transition. My mother was born in Minnesota, and her family were all tried and true Scandinavian Minnesotans, so I moved here as a sort of mongrel Midwestern/Western hybrid. I also see a lot of my mother in that essay: she’d never say an unkind word about anybody, and tends to be quiet rather than snarky. Not that she’s unaware, though — she always knows exactly what’s going on.

Fox News threw a fit over the fact that Captain America, the comic book character and movie fantasy, was just too darn liberal. In the latest iteration of the character, not only is he black, but his enemies are home-grown American fascists who hate immigrants, which is just cutting a little too close to the Republican bone.

Amanda Marcotte has a good factual rundown of Cap’s genre history, but I have to say my favorite treatment is this work of fiction, told from the point of view of Steve Rogers’ 21st century publicist.

Something else she didn’t see coming: it turned out Captain America was basically a communist.

“More of a socialist, really,” he said, when she tiptoed toward the matter over lunch on Monday. Luckily, there hadn’t been any fallout from his weekend. It wasn’t that the media had suddenly developed a sense of restraint, more that neither protest had been deemed worthy of press coverage in the first place. Of course, if he kept at it, he would become the reason for said coverage.

“Went to meetings sometimes,” he was saying now, “but I worked a lot and I was pretty much always sick so sometimes I couldn’t—” He gestured vaguely with his chopsticks, then indicated the stone bowl in front of him. “This is really good, what is it?”

“Bi bim bop,” she replied, mostly on auto-pilot, still trying to process the way he’d shrugged off the question as if it was about something totally innocuous. Ice cream flavors. Sports teams. Favorite models of car. Steve experimentally added another couple dollops of hot sauce to his rice, and then it hit her: “Oh my god,” she said, “you slept through the fifties.” He looked up from his bowl blankly. She stared at him. “The whole thing. You missed the entire Red Scare—”

It’s a strange historical phenomenon that people came out of the Great Depression appreciating the role of government in providing security, and then went through the 50s and suddenly turned paranoid against the government.