My hometown has always had certain areas, certain blocks, we just didn’t traverse, didn’t approach. The whole West Side, practically, falls under this category, and lots of other parts too, including even a cluster of streets very close to the well-heeled Catholic university.
Eventually, I guess, in an environment like this, you just get used to not really being on the same page as other people, you learn to just go about your business and make the best of your situation.
Traditionally, there’s a pretty decent culture around town, although recently, it seems that the decisions informing this sort of thing have fallen into the hands of ignorant people. It’s possible that certain people choose to be ignorant, as a way of embodying a more pleasant mind state. For instance, city officials in recent years have infused the downtown area with a gaggle of new bars and restaurants, places which are generally pretty fancy and not really affordable for members of the working or lower classes. (On a perhaps related note, a whole litany of old, storied establishments of business have boarded up in the last 10 years, to a disproportionate extent, perhaps.)
Still, a strong upper class remains around town, with a bulbous population of doctors and lawyers inhabiting the area. Corresponding to this, the community seems to have a strange fixation on musicals, with this event proliferating greatly in the primary performance hall, The Morris Performing Arts Center, as well as the newly erected South Bend Civic Theatre, which sits about two blocks to the north of the Morris.
Especially strange, of course, is that this auxiliary, less seasoned event center would take the same funny fixation on staging musicals. I’m not aware of too many of the events that have been staged here but I remember one containing the term “invalid” in the title, in the noun sense of the term (IN-val-id), meaning, apparently, a person of limited or no functional ability or general merit.
Now, this is not a term that I generally hear employed, about anybody, in the community. I think the reasons are obvious: it’s a very pejorative, antipathetic concept, to infuse somebody with a sort of inherent inability to assimilate, inability to function and to learn basic concepts. Perhaps this bent toward phantom degradation of the proleteriat, or other members of the community, is a tool used by those in power to justify the strong socioeconomic gap plaguing the local environs. If the people struggling, that is, were just naturally incapable of succeeding for reasons having to do with their genetics or their mental capabilities, then it’s through no fault of the privileged class, or the ruling politicians, that so many social problems and humanitarian atrocities abound, in the community. For whatever reason, anyway, this “invalid” concept is a motif still alive and thriving in the local arts, which are, more than ever, the spoils of a class not only “elite” in buying power but “elitist,” apparently, in terminology and objectives.
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