I M ONE and Darn Proud of It

I don’t know when exactly it was that I first began to notice how much Midwest-bashing there is in American pop culture.

How much fun is poked at the way Midwesterners supposedly think, dress and talk.

How many insults are made about “Middle America” and how square and unsophisticated the people there must be.

How many references there are to the “Heartland,” and how anybody who lives there wouldn’t be able to grasp or appreciate anything that’s a little unusual.

How many times somebody alludes to “how it will play in Peoria,” as if the citizens of Beverly Hills or Brooklyn speak the English language while the people of Peoria speak only in Peorian.

They are the Hix from the Stix who won’t get the Pix.

Everybody from Iowa’s a farmer.

Every mention of Wisconsin in print includes the word “dairy.”

If you’re from Indiana, you must be into basketball.

Stereotypes R Us.

You’ve seen the way ethnic groups get grouped, the way gays get portrayed? Welcome to my new club, the International Midwesterner Order for National Equality.

Or I M ONE.

Send me your monthly dues right away. Since I’m originally from the Midwest myself, naturally this means you can pay me off in pigs or chickens.

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Now I finally know how Southerners must feel.

They’re a lot of slow-talkin’, g-droppin’, thick-drawled Gomers, if you watch the movies and TV programs Hollywood puts out.

(You can usually tell a Southern character who’s been written by somebody from someplace else. He or she will say “y’all” to a second person, when anybody from the South can tell you that “y’all” is plural.)

The president of the United States is born William Jefferson Blythe Clinton IV, is educated at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale, but he hails from Arkansas, so his nickname naturally becomes “Bubba.”

The actor Tommy Lee Jones once said that in every interview he gives, somebody invariably asks how a guy from central Texas ended up going to Harvard.

Jones occasionally would respond, “On an airplane.”

I used to sympathize with Southerners when I’d hear actors or actresses use exactly the same accent, whether their characters came from Carolina, Louisiana or Oklahoma. Ever been to Florida? Half the people there have no accent.

But it wasn’t until recently that I began to be more aware of Midwesterners becoming the new rubes and boobs.

We come from that “Heartland” I mentioned before, which apparently extends from Ohio to Idaho. We are plain, plain-spoken plainsmen who won’t get art films issued in “limited release.” We come from indistinguishable states, unique only for whatever attribute is engraved on the license plates.

I still recall the 1993 film “Sleepless in Seattle,” with a character’s confusion between Michigan and Wisconsin--

whichever one has the cows, she says--and a young boy, asked if he knows where Oklahoma is, replying: “In the middle?”

Then there was 1996’s “Fargo,” of course, with its “you betcha” lingo and American Gothic faces. But since it was all in good, clean (bloody) fun, and the filmmakers were from that neck of the woods themselves, what the heck. Have a sense of humor.

At times, however, it’s as if the Midwest isn’t even there.

You’ll hear gags in TV shows about places that don’t even exist in certain parts of the country. Jack-in-the-Box. Pep Boys. Bloomingdale’s. A joke in Bette Midler’s new sitcom had her hoping that Popeye’s was still open. Half of America must have thought she wanted a can of spinach.

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Then there’s this “Welcome to New York” series on CBS, in which the entire premise is that a guy upon arrival from Indiana is greeted as though he’s from Indonesia. His background and manner (polite) mystifies the New Yorkers. One of them even speaks . . . slowly . . . so . . . you’ll . . . understand.

Yes, pretty drab folks Indiana turns out. James Dean. Cole Porter. Kurt Vonnegut. What a nowhere state.

I recently told a native New Yorker that I’d once lived in Michigan, and she said: “So, at least you got out, huh?” I said yeah--Eminem, Madonna, Aretha, nobody cool ever comes from Michigan.

I’m getting defensive, I admit it.

Magazines based in New York but sold nationwide run pictures of “celebrities” such as Ivana Trump and Marla Maples, as if Midwesterners would have cause to recognize either one. (But we do, because for some reason we’re supposed to care who Donald Trump is.)

From our I M ONE headquarters, I’ll be monitoring American pop culture in months to come, to see how many slurs are made against our unfairly maligned minority group, Midwestern Americans.

By the way, did you ever hear the one about how many New Yorkers and Californians it takes to change a light bulb?

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com