This week WCPN listeners got a chance to sound off about their overwhelming — and I mean overwhelming — dislike of the term “Rust Belt.”
So has “Rust Belt” outlived its usefulness? Well, that depends on what you want to use it for. “Rust Belt” was never meant as a marketing slogan, but rather to describe a region suffering from a period of economic decline.
There are three ways people use the term “Rust Belt”:
- As an impartial, shorthand reference to the region that was once America’s manufacturing belt;
- As a pejorative reference to that same region, suggestive of stagnation and decay;
- As a defiant badge of pride, much like “Dixie”
What do I think? Although I have less interest in imposing a positive or negative interpretation on the term, I’ll admit to using “Rust Belt” to describe my own geographic heritage (as opposed to “Midwestern” or “Ohioan.”) I suspect that liking or disliking it is often a generational issue: people who remember gleaming steel think of Rust as a bad thing, but those of us who don’t remember anything else and like it here…well, Rust is just our culture. There is a passage in American Rust where young Billy Poe contemplates the broken-down, overgrown landscape that used to be the thriving steel mill town of Buell, Pennsylvania. To the older residents of Buell, the ruins represent failure. But Billy associates them with the happy moments in his childhood, when he roamed the landscape learning about trees and animals. To Billy, these ruins are beautiful because they’re all he’s ever known.
The Rust Belt question always brings to mind a story from an old episode of This American Life, where a Brooklyn musician transforms his Hasidic friend Chaim into an underground rock star. They decide to call him Curly Oxide, owing to Chaim’s rust-colored payots, and because oxidation (i.e., rust) represents one thing changing into another thing.
In other words, Rust doesn’t have to symbolize decay. It can symbolize metamorphosis.
Rust Belt Reader 