{"id":89201,"date":"2025-07-24T17:40:16","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T17:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/89201\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T17:40:16","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T17:40:16","slug":"the-great-divide-between-chicago-and-the-rest-of-illinois","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/89201\/","title":{"rendered":"The great divide between Chicago and the rest of Illinois"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"aChris Ware created stamp artwork for 250 Years of Delivering, a new pane of 20 interconnected stamps issued this month by the United States Postal Service. USPS art director Antonio Alcal\u00e1 worked with Ware on design. The stamps are available for purchase at the USPS online shop <\/a>. Credit: Chris Ware, courtesy United States Postal Service<\/a><\/p>\n

In retrospect, while driving with my 12-year-old daughter from our home near Chicago to an empty cornfield in southern Illinois to see the 2017 total solar eclipse, I should\u2019ve been a little more alarmed by the number of Confederate flags we counted along the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Four years later, when the pandemic seemed to have eased and we wanted to just go somewhere, anywhere, a day trip through central Illinois took us past not only more Stars and Bars but also \u201cTrump 2024\u201d placards and Trump-as-Rambo banners flapping over apartment balconies, as well as \u201cPiss on Pritzker\u201d lawn signs\u2014all of which seemed a little overdone, given how laughably Trump had emceed the pandemic. (Also nasty, since I\u2019d thought Governor J.B. Pritzker\u2019s daily briefings were a heartwarmingly awkward spectacle of human anxiety and vulnerability, the corn-fed answer to New York governor Andrew Cuomo\u2019s officious, patronizing scolding.)<\/p>\n

Illinois basically has two regions: Chicago and \u201cdownstate.\u201d Dense Chicago is reliably Democratic, whereas downstate skews conservative, but rarely enough to flip the electoral switch. (The last time Illinois voted in the federal elections for a Republican president was in 1988<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

A fragment of a street called Blue Island Avenue still runs southwest from Chicago toward the town of Blue Island (the name apparently inspired by the low moraine<\/a> that early 19th-century travelers could see gently bellying up from what Frederick Law Olmsted called the \u201cflat, miry, and forlorn<\/a>\u201d Illinois landscape), a place that was then a day\u2019s wagon ride to the city, where beleaguered immigrants could stop for a rest and a beer. Overlaid on the scar of a Native American trail, the route endures as a diagonal slice of space-time through the gridlocked blocks of Chicago and its suburbs.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlue island,\u201d however, could just as easily describe our state, bordered to the north by purple Wisconsin and to the east by reliably red Indiana. Illinois has had the highest property taxes<\/a> in the nation in recent years, and my painter and sculptor friends who migrated to Indiana over the past few years didn\u2019t do so because of the weather.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019re losing population at an alarming rate: Between 2010 and 2019, Illinois disgorged more people than any other state<\/a> (and, embarrassingly, many of them were African American<\/a>, in a sort of reverse Great Migration to a more affordable\u2014and less Chicago-level-policed\u2014south).<\/p>\n

Nowadays, my drive to the empty eclipse-viewing cornfield seems ominous. I find myself second-guessing my words, my thoughts self-braking. Did downstaters feel the same way as me hearing about \u201ccancel culture\u201d and \u201cwoke\u201d DEI? How can it be that nearly half of the American population voted for all of this?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m originally from Nebraska, and I love the midwest. The brown-and-gray humility of its homes and streets, its flat talk averaging out from all corners of the world. I realize I live in a blue state, if not a blue island. But how did we all let ourselves get so red with anger at one another?<\/p>\n

Chris Ware is a Riverside-based artist and the author of the 1995 graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth<\/a>. Ware was a cartoonist for the Reader from 2002\u20132006 and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. A traveling retrospective of his work began at the Centre Pompidou in 2022 and concludes this year at the Centre de Cultura Contempor\u00e0nia de Barcelona.<\/p>\n

This column originally appeared in the Nation magazine\u2019s 160th anniversary issue, \u201cThese Dis-United States,\u201d out now and available at thenation.com\/issue<\/a>. Founded by abolitionists in 1865, the Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.<\/p>\n

More Chris Ware . . .<\/p>\n

\ud83e\udee3 Chris Ware reflects on his most nerve-racking Reader cartoon<\/a><\/p>\n

\ud83c\udfed Chris Ware\u2019s buildings\u2014without their stories<\/a><\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcd6 An interview with Chris Ware about his book Monograph<\/a> <\/p>\n

More in COLUMNS & OPINION<\/p>\n

Thoughtful takes from the readers and the writers.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tA meeting of AAN publishers\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tJuly 16, 2025July 16, 2025\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tEditor\u2019s note for the Reader\u2019s June 26, 2025 issue\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tJune 26, 2025June 26, 2025\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tEditor\u2019s note for our Summer Theater and Arts Issue\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tJune 11, 2025June 11, 2025\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tFor decades, Chicago has underinvested in transit, while global cities have moved aggressively toward safer, cleaner, and more efficient transportation systems.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tJune 2, 2025June 2, 2025\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tUniversities are prime sites of dissent, critique, and critical thinking. And this is exactly what the Trump administration doesn\u2019t want.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tJune 2, 2025June 2, 2025\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tTrump and the GOP propose cuts to SNAP to fund tax breaks for the wealthy.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tMay 22, 2025May 22, 2025\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris Ware created stamp artwork for 250 Years of Delivering, a new pane of 20 interconnected stamps issued…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":89202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818,59648,277,59649,49464],"class_list":{"0":"post-89201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois","11":"tag-state-of-affairs","12":"tag-trump","13":"tag-usps","14":"tag-vol-54-no-41"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114909441116275054","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}