Midwestern Nice vs. Midwestern Mean?

One thing that has been more than a little sad is watching how both Michigan and Wisconsin have gone from basically moderate "purple" states to being dominated by fairly rabid right wing politics at least in their state legislatures (even if they manage to elect Democrats for governor).  I suppose it is the toxic impact of gerrymandering.  Minnesota seems to have largely escaped this.  Indiana and Ohio tilted pretty far right even when I was growing up, and I never thought of them as "Midwestern nice."

At any rate, I have been thinking on this a lot lately, as I have been frankly appalled at watching what the GOP has become, even in Michigan and Wisconsin.  It really was better 20 or 30 years ago (and I am glad to have gotten out).  

One of the better observers of Midwest mores, with a strong focus on lower middle class foibles, was Richard Guindon.  He started in Minnesota, moved to New York in the 60s and published in various magazines including The Nation and The Realist.  Then in the late 60s or early 70s, he returned to Minnesota and joined the Minneapolis Tribune.  He was syndicated throughout the Midwest.  In 1981, he moved to Detroit and was published in the Detroit Free Press.  He was still being syndicated in various Michigan papers throughout the 90s, which is when I encountered his work.  He retired in 2005.  

This page has some discussion of his work.  It isn't entirely clear to me why he was so obsessed with carp.  Maybe because it wasn't a particular desirable fish but it was well established in the Great Lakes (and this was before the more recent fears of Asian carp invading the Great Lakes).  It may not be a surprise that Guindon sort of plays on fears of Asian dominance but Japan is seen as the threat not China.  This is pretty much how one felt in Michigan in the 80s.

One of my favorite strips isn't particularly topical.  It most likely ran over the summer between 1987-90 (when I would have read it while back home from college).

A few months back I decided I would indulge in some nostalgia, and I ordered a couple of Guindon collections - Cartoons by Guindon and Together Again.  The dates didn't match up, and not surprisingly this cartoon wasn't included.  Then I went ahead and ordered The World According to Carp (maybe his single strongest collection) and the weirdly over-sized Michigan So Far. 

Given that the "novel" cartoon isn't in these books either, it doesn't look like it was ever collected, but fortunately I did hang onto it in a scrapbook.  That's the thing about growing up before the internet is that some things truly are lost down the memory hole (and not preserved forever in the "Wayback Machine").