Snapshots from criss-crossing Middle America while fearful it is coming apart at the seams | August 9, 2025
Text & Photos by Douglas John Imbrogno | August 9, 2025
1.
Mona Lisa eyes me sideways up an alley in Columbus, Ohio. She’s really, really big, unlike Leonardo Da Vinci’s famously small 16th century oil painting of a Florentine woman thought to be Lisa Gherardini, an artwork tourists routinely selfie-mob at the Louvre in Paris. I encounter Big Lisa while parking my car in the alley lot of my AirBnB for the night.
Pondering this brobdingnagian slice of public art, the perspective only makes visual sense if you imagine that Lisa and you just woke up together in bed, facing each other in the morning sunlight. (Half her face is sort of sunbeam yellow.) The effect is ruined a moment later since a door in the building wall upon which she is painted interrupts her forehead with the message: ‘DOOR NOT ACCESSIBLE. NOT AN ENTRANCE.’ It was good while it lasted, my dear Mona.
2.
It is noteworthy that at lunch the next day at Agave & Rye in the Short North neighborhood I encounter another large woman with a captivating stare, who eyeballs visitors from behind a battery of gin, whiskey and rye. I take her to be Lucille Ball—or she is at least Lucille Ball-esque, which is a good thing to be. I recommend the restaurant if you visit Ohio’s capital, not just for its scrumptious avante-garde tacos and visionary mocktail lineup (for those of us hopping onto, off, and back onto the wagon), but for the bodacious mural work by Giovanni Santiago’s Blank Walls ‘R Gross outfit of which Lucy is one small part.
3.
4.
I head farther north through small-town western Ohio, passing through alternating local Main Streets, then out into big-bale hayfields and the many sprawling duchys and dukedoms of green-growing corn. I am pleased with some of my shots and it is good to be out on America’s backroads. To preserve in photographic amber a blue-sky day over someone’s high school reunion town. To watch a graffiti art show as a long train stops you cold somewhere between hither and yon. To ponder an abandoned house on a curve to nowhere, whose porch was full of neighbors sipping lemonade in another century.
Yet in the troubling year of 2025 you can’t go long without being pulled up short by a pummeling hailstorm of hellish news. What good is a fine snapshot of the Ohio outback at its loveliest or most evocative set against an exemplary, yet terrifying Pro Publica report titled “We’ll Smash the Fucking Window Out and Drag Him Out,” whose martial drumbeat of details might as well be playing ‘Taps’ for the rule of law in Trump’s America:
‘ICE says its officers “use only the level of force that is objectively reasonable.” Across America, what’s ‘reasonable’ has changed … In Baltimore, agents break a window and grab a man by the neck, pulling him out of his car … In Los Angeles, a terrified immigrant sits inside a truck as a masked man swings a baton, shattering his window …‘
It’s worth dipping deeper into the story for the reality of what is happening elsewhere on America’s blue-sky days:
… On the predawn streets of suburban Maryland, a high-ranking ICE official stood alongside a Mazda sedan that his officers had just stopped. The official told a local TV reporter at the scene what was about to happen. “He can either give us a license,” he said, “or we’ll smash the fucking window out and drag him out.” Then, as the driver refused to exit the car, officers broke the glass.
It was one of nearly 50 documented instances of immigration agents breaking vehicle windows that ProPublica has identified from social media, local news accounts, lawsuits and interviews since President Donald Trump took office six months ago. Using the same methods, we found just eight in the previous decade …
Use-of-force experts and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement insiders say the tactic was rarely used during previous administrations. They say there is no known policy change greenlighting agents’ smashing of windows. Rather, it’s a part of a broader shattering of norms … Officers who break glass aren’t being disciplined — they’re being promoted.’ | READ ON
5.
Are you still with me? Are you a new subscriber who came to WestVirginiaVille at someone’s else’s suggestion or for my semi-literary posturings and earnest photo and video chops, but are out the door when it looks like I am going to go all 24/7 political dystopia on you? I hope not—and do not intend to. (But be well, happy and peaceful if the door is closing behind your butt as I write this.)
Here’s the thing, though. I am not at all certain what a small-bore words-and-media guy with a thousand substack subscribers should be posting, especially with state-backed thugs routinely yanking terrified people out smashed car windows in broad daylight. All my artful stuff? All political commentary? Both tacks seem inadequate. Incessant artfulness in a time of constitutional havoc seems misguided, uncaring, self-deluded. Yet doomscrolling and round-the-clock despair feel unhealthy, unwise, and counterproductive, too, for the huge issues at hand in this land. We have still to lift up the light—the light that will finally outlast the darkness, as it ever has throughout history.
So, I have decided—consider this an official pronouncement of a shift in WestVirginiaVille’s mission statement begun already in recent posts—to do both and often at the same time. Stick with me as I continue to share memoir-style writing and essays, plus artful, aesthetic, sometimes documentary iPhoneography and idiosyncratic videography. At the same time and often in the same post (like this one), I’ll drop in what I feel to be essential news and commentary on the political, cultural, and social battles being fought for the soul of this country, as seen from my porch and out my window while criss-crossing the middle and the margins of America.
We have still to lift up the light—the light that will finally outlast the darkness, as it ever has throughout history.
For it is no less than that, isn’t it? I will admit that my offerings feel like weak sauce on the worst of days in a flood of bad-news days. Yet we do what we can with the skills we have to offer, right? I hope that we are in this together, dear Unknown Reader, along with supportive friends and fellow travelers, whomever you may be and wherever you may be sitting, driving, laboring, loving, and surviving.
6.
As in my last post, I end with a view from Sandusky, Ohio, a small, stylish, lakeside town that delighted me with its sweetness and charm, at least from a short, two-day stopover. We need lots of sweetness to counter the bitter taste of the news so that our spirits don’t give in, retreat or give up. Also, we require regular reminders that the larger population in America is not cheerleading the brutes, bullies, and abominables currently misguiding and malforming the United States government into a banana republic or worse.
In conclusion, all I have to say is what so many people said to those of us watching scores of folks cycle, pedal, swoosh, run and glide by one day along Sandusky’s version of Main Street, a thing the town apparently does on the same day every week in early evening. So, even if it’s another day entirely when you read this:
‘Happy Thursday!’
CLICK TO VIEW VIDEO or watch at YouTube
P.S. | LINKS WORTH READING
VIDEO: Trump’s Bluffing Because He’s Losing Control | A heartening talk by the essential Heather Cox Richardson. | July 31, 2025
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL: Take a doomscroll hiatus and visit this publication founded by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne: ‘We tell stories that reveal that there are, in fact, a surprising number of reasons to feel cheerful.’
BRUCEPOWER: ‘Bruce Springsteen’s European stadium concerts harness rock’s ‘righteous power’ in ‘dangerous times’ | Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2025.
WHAT ICE CAN (AND CAN’T) DO IF THEY SHOW UP AT YOUR BUSINESS: ‘Concerned about a potential ICE raid at your company? Here’s how to be prepared.’ | INC., June 26, 2025
RIDE WITH WESTVIRGINIAVILLE
If you like what you see here in WestVirginiaVille support this work via my Buy Me a Cup of Coffee page. Use the QR code below or click to: coff.ee/douglasjohnimbrogno
FREE SUBSCRIBE to WestVirginiaVille’s e-mail newsletter:
WestVirginiaVille.substack.com
A view of life based in the hills of West Virginia, yet often ranging well beyond its borders in space and in time. | A multimedia web-magazine edited by DOUGLAS JOHN IMBROGNO with guest contributors.
