Well, the whole East Coast thing is a joke anyway, isn't it? The demographics don't lie - Lutheranism is the Flyover Faith. The ginormous percentage chunk of Lutherans living within three hundred miles of Chicago is not only us as we are but us as the rest of the American world sees us. We are the Midwest. Chubbyish, not too talkative - good people, good people. The Missouri Synod people referenced are either profoundly irritating to many, were thrown out/excised, never got in, or (I believe I'm in a category of my own here) were excised and got back in. We're just having fun here.
Will Weedon's mid-level dudgeon is interesting to me - hello Will, did you not graduate from Concordia Bronxville? Are you going the way of Walter Otten? It's not really possible, because what makes certainly Dave Scaer, Herman and Walter and some otheres work so well in the Midwest is that they're so obviously not Midwesterners, they're outlandish Auslanders. What strikes a nerve, I think, is any intimation that somehow alpb or anything East had anything to do with our new Synodical President's ascent. That, in the eyes of those who know out there, only tracks through the Southern Illinois Express, the Train that was On Time, a Midwestern Marvel.
When we meet our Lutheran selves, we are introduced, in the words of Eric Sevareid, to persons possessed of "the matchless pessimism of the Midwestern Lutheran farmer." "Nosir, it's not gonna rain. Never will. But if it does, it's gonna pour buckets. That you can depend on."
Matt J, you are on the money. I'm in the subway, I think the F at Essex, one of those stops where there are long and weird stair patterns (which is 87% of them), and there's a woman in a bhurka with a kid in a stroller at the bottom looking up skatey-eight steps - can't really read the expression behind the bhurka - anyway I take a wheel and say "come on, let's go," when a hand taps me on the shoulder, a guy says "I'll take the other side" and a Hasidic Jewish male full curls and garb and I pull the kid in th estroller up together with the woman in the bhurka. The man had to have violated at least 37 laws there. No peep of complaint or walking by (in other words nothing Pharasaic, which is the definition of a Hasic), just a helping hand to a Muslim woman with a baby. I would have loved a picture of that.
Dave Benke