Couldabeen, usetabe, gonnabe

Not 100 miles from Walt's hibiscus-surrounded cottage lies one of the five poorest cities in the USA. The Interstate goes around it, but not many drivers exit. There are no Fortune 500 companies there. It has a couple of major league sports teams but they never win anything much.

This city's downtown core is shabby and decayed. One (1) newish building dominates, built a couple of decades ago by a foreign bank for reasons known only to it. The suburbs aren't much better. It's like Des Moines, which Bill Bryson called "a good place to come from".

Back in the 19th century, the city was bigger and full of promise. Local boosters, and they were numerous, saw it as a great future centre of industry and commerce. Like Chicago. Except it never became Chicago. Businesses stopped moving goods by canal. Railroads passed it by. The excitement and enthusiasm of the "frontier" waned. Today it just sits there, dead but not quite lying down.

The city is a "couldabeen". As in "If only thus and so had happened, it couldabeen really somethin'."

A few hundred miles to the south lies a "usetabe", a city that produced the vast majority of a certain commodity that was critical to American manufacturing in the 20th century. That commodity is still used -- it has yet to be totally supplanted by plastic -- but instead of buying American, we get it now from places like Korea. Because it's cheaper.

So the city has died. Efforts have been made to bring it back to life, and its major league teams tend to do a little better than the other place's, but it's still a shadow of its former self. And you do hear people say "I can remember when this usetabe..."

Too many American cities are "couldabeens" and "usetabes". In the south and west there's the odd "gonnabe", as in "This is gonnabe a great city once they get it finished." But you can see people crossing their fingers even as they utter those words, for faith in the future of the city implies faith in the future of the country, and that's something we're not quite sure about any more.

More on this subject anon...