I returned to my hometown this week for the first time in over a year and only the second time since 2003. As I was making the final hundred miles on the Indiana Tollroad and the Ohio Turnpike, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA was playing on my ipod. It struck me as I listened that that album came out the last summer I spent any substantial time in Archbold–1984.

As I drove, and then on my return journey when I took a more “scenic” route, the landscape seemed full of decrepit barns and houses. Small town streets were lined with houses that had for-sale signs in front of them. There were empty factories everywhere. It was ironic listening to Springsteen sing in the ’80s about an industrial America that had seen better “glory” days, home towns that had fallen on hard times, futures that looked bleak. He wasn’t prophesying by any means, but it seems that the economic development that took place in the twenty-five years since that album was nothing more than pretty facades and empty bubbles.

I’m neither an economist nor a political scientist, but I do fancy myself something of an amateur sociologist. During my stay in Ohio, I spent time with aging relatives, aunts and uncles, most of whom are concerned first and foremost with their health. But occasionally conversation shifts to other topics, to the economy and to the fact that jobs that are gone will never be back.

I’m struck by the parallels with the South where I lived for sixteen years. In both Tennessee and South Carolina, the textile industry hemorrhaged jobs in the ’90s and after 2000. Those jobs will never come back and the economy of the upstate of South Carolina seemed dependent on coaxing new industry to relocate by bribing with tax breaks and infrastructure improvements, and attracting retirees with promises of low taxes. It seemed like a race to the bottom.

In some ways, the towns of the Midwest are looking more and more like the small towns of the south, full of empty storefronts, dollar stores, and despair. I remember remarking once that the lovely County Courthouse Square in Winchester, TN seemed to be lined with bail bondsmen and pool halls.

When politicians and the media talk about “Main Street” is that what they have in mind?