The Hoosier State: wing man for America

Indiana--or, as I sometimes call it, the state where I was born but not the state I'm from--has always felt a keen awareness of its importance in preserving and protecting the American way of life. Others may have doubted it from time to time, but the Hoosier state's confidence in itself has never wavered.

Indiana has always regarded itself on the front lines; even its state seal commemorates its frontier past (including images that are all but impossible to find in the 19th state today: buffalo, trees, and undeveloped hillside real estate).

A famous example of its avant garde status: Many may recall hearing of that classic moment in the late 19th century when the Indiana legislature considered a bill declaring the value of pi (a transcendental, non-resolving number in the neighborhood of 3.1415926) to be, in fact, 3.2. (The rest of the bill, it's not always remembered, included a putative method for squaring the circle, a geometric puzzle long since proven impossible.)

It must have been mixed news for the school children of Indiana; on one hand, of course, the arithmetic in some of their geometry class problems just got a lot easier. But on the other hand, bicycling just got a lot harder.

(Okay, in fairness, that picture has nothing to do with the whole Indiana/pi brouhaha and is, in fact, an ingenious demonstration of a mathematically elegant idea. But the picture was so fabulous I had to include it.

Now, back to business)

Jumping ahead a little over four decades, many Hoosiers shared the conviction that the Crossroads of America represented an important, if insufficiently appreciated front in the war against Nazi Germany.

But those are simply prelude; Indiana--with the help of some of the finest lines at the Department of Homeland Security--has finally secured its place at the forefront of American culture--or what's left of it, anyway:

It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”

But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the federal antiterrorism database.

The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.

As an aside, one wonders if the Times is in for another round of denunciations from the wacko right for revealing such prime targets to Osama bin Ladin (even though, presumably, if we know about it so does he, and, of course, like the SWIFT financial surveillance story the administration made it public first, but let's not go there right now).

But however angry the Bush administration and its supporters may be that the terrorist-target cat is out of the Homeland Security bag, the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel is all but doing the end-zone dance now that they're ranked again, headlining their coverage "First on al-Qaida's List!" (Only stringent editorial standards probably prevented them from adding "Woo-hoo!") Civic pride is a force to be reckoned with, even in the direst of times.

Meanwhile, let's do the math: Indiana covers 36,420 square miles, so with 8,591 potential targets, that's one target per 4.24 square miles.

Alas, the part of the report that lists the specific high-value terror targets in Indiana are not part of the public reportage, but here are 34 items from the list at large (MS Word download).

We can only imagine what the other 8,557 potential terror targets might be. Kurt Vonnegut's high school? Red Skelton's hometown? The sports arena where they filmed the final scenes of the Gene Hackman film "Hoosiers?" Perhaps--talk about thinking the unthinkable--my undergraduate dorm?

But even if we can't know the full reach of the threat, there's more than enough to be worried about in the list we have--especially that "Amish Country Popcorn" one:

According to the Times article:

One business owner who learned from a reporter that a company named Amish Country Popcorn was on the list was at first puzzled. The businessman, Brian Lehman, said he owned the only operation in the country with that name.

"I am out in the middle of nowhere," said Mr. Lehman, whose business in Berne, Ind., has five employees and grows and distributes popcorn. "We are nothing but a bunch of Amish buggies and tractors out here. No one would care."

But on second thought, he came up with an explanation: "Maybe because popcorn explodes?"

Feeling safer? I know I am. (But then, I don't live in Indiana.)