Roethlisberger: "He was raised with old-fashioned, middle-America values."

I'm using it the same way the columnist used it:

Don't get me wrong, I do feel Roethlisberger should be punished. His accusers have parents too. It's just that Roethlisberger's problems — is it too strong to call it an illness? — are not the result of an unloved upbringing. He was raised with old-fashioned, middle-America values.

Which is why his conduct is so shocking, until you consider all the love, discipline and kindness isn't going bring back his mom.

He pretty clearly takes "values" as a catch-all for at least "morals" and "ethics" - and maybe some other undefinables.

 

I'm from Ben's hometown. (Or is he from mine??)

Old-fashioned, middle-America values = white.

The Mormons are the ones truly raised with old-fashioned, middle-America values. Two athletes just left BYU because one just knocked up the other. THAT'S the Puritan values mistakenly applied to white middle America.

 

Actually I keep my car unlocked in the driveway every night as a way to demonstrate my faith in mankind. Not the new one, the 10-year-old Buick.

 

Did you go anywhere near Holcomb? Meet any people related to the Clutter family? Ever since reading In Cold Blood I'm scared to visit Kansas.

 

I'm tired of Double Down ragging on my Midwest values. I was raised the right way, the kind of way New Yorkers and Californians will never understand.

Now if you'll excuse me, if I have to go peruse the shoulders of roads to find me a dead deer. To clean up our highways, not to fuck. Really.

Seriously, I think midwest values are largely a crock, and for those who espouse them, often disingenuous as these "values" are applied to some and not others. There's a lot of midwesterners I know who aren't exactly going to be cordial about talking about the health care plan, for example.

That said, it's also a totally harmless conceit. Putting on my psychologist's hat, couldn't resistance to the concept be a sort of beneath-the-surface kind of insecuity in one's own region and its supposed values or lack thereof?

Don't know if I'm saying, because I don't know if I believe that myself, but I'm just saying.

 

Being scared to visiting freaking Kansas as just as silly as sheltered midwesterners being afraid to visit NYC.

 

Even at night?

 

Not a light or a newsstand or a deli anywhere.

 

I grew up in rural Northwest Ohio, not far from Roethlisberger's Findlay. I don't think there's any magic set of rules or special values displayed here. I do think people are nice in Ohio. I do think they've traded some luxury and knowledge for comfort and stability. But you can do those things anywhere. There just tend to be more people willing to make that trade-off here.

I will say, having grown up in a community made up of mostly Mennonites, that there was a lack of speed to life that tends to reign elsewhere. But that had more to do with the religion and disposition than geography.

And if there was some special way of living in the Midwest, it was long ago ushered away by economic, social and communication progress. And I'm talking cars and newspapers and radios as much as I am the internet. I'm not convinced Norman Rockwell's world ever actually existed, but if it did it was gone long before Rockwell even made those paintings.

 

I wonder what Asian rice farmers think of good old-fashioned Middle American values.

 

Rice isn't very heavy.

 

A depiction of Big Ben's Midwestern values:

"Well, ah... Let's take a look at some of the homosexual artifacts I dug up to plant at the scene. ... All right. Got an issue of 'Stud Puppy.'"

"Great!"

"Candy dish. Joan Crawford postcard. Let's see, some mascara. All right. And here's the one perfecto thing I picked up. Mineral water."

"Oh, come on, a lot of people drink mineral water, it's come a long way."

"Yeah, but this is Ohio. I mean, if you don't have a brewski in your hand you might as well be wearing a dress."