Notwithstanding John Mellencamp's paeans to its small-towns, Indiana's reputation as a rural state just isn't that well supported by its demographics. For instance, although Illinois has a population of 13 million people, to Indiana's six, the vast majority of the Illini population is concentrated in the immediate area of Chicago.

Take out Chicago, Aurora, Elgin, Joliet and Waukegan and Illinois' population drops to 5 million people. Take out Indianapolis and its surrounding cities, and the population of Indiana drops only to four-and-a-half million, just half a million less than Illinois.

Now factor back in the greater land area of Illinois (53,000 square miles (again, removing Chicago and its environs from the calculation)) versus that of Indiana (33,000 square miles (not counting Indianapolis or its satellites)) and you get a population density of 95 people per square mile for Illinois versus 136 for Indiana.

You wouldn't know it from the propaganda emanating from the Statehouse, but things are bad in Indiana. Like real bad. Indiana is among the top-tier states in both mortgage delinquency and mortgage foreclosure rates (a strong indicator of economic distress) and is absolutely hemorrhaging jobs. As Morton Marcus pointed out in his column today, in 2008 and 2009 Indiana lost over a quarter of a million jobs -- the third worst percentage decline in the nation.

But the governor seems to be either (blissfully?) unaware of the state's true situation, or he's purposefully ignoring it. Listening to his state-of-the-state speech, I couldn't help but feel I'd been transported to an Orwellian neverland, where bad is good and good is all around.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels said I-69 is on the fast track to be completed by 2012.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels says the first three sections will be completed three years ahead of schedule.

The governor says all of this could be done within the interstate's $700 million budget. -- Evansville's WFIE, Channel 14. Oct. 23, 2009

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Mitch Daniels has a problem. A big problem. His dream of a well-funded patronage machine, in the form of the I-69 extension from Evansville to Crane, is in trouble.

It's apocryphal, but the urban legend goes that Albert Einstein was once asked for his opinion of mankind's greatest invention, to which he curtly replied "compound interest." Compound interest, the underpinning of economic exponential growth and an utterly necessary device for the proper functioning of any economy hardwired for exponential growth, the simultaneously simple and devilishly complicated instrument that is the beating heart of the industrialized world.

Every economic transaction we make is colored by compound interest. We borrow a couple hundred grand to buy a house, make a two grand a month payment on it, yet still owe more than a two grand difference between this and the last payment. Why?

Compound interest.

In 1964 (the year I was born, coincidentally), Richard Hofstadter published, in Harper's Magazine, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." It opened like this:

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."

If it sounds familiar, that's because it is. But more on that later.

I've written about this before, and it's time to write again. As predicted, the state (as in Indiana) has decided to petulantly go forward with officially punishing Bloomington and Monroe County for being anything but grease on the I-69 skids.

But first, a quick redux. There exists something called a Metropolitan Planning Organization, or MPO. There exists also something called the Indiana Department of Transportation, or INDOT. And there exist local, state and federal governments.

Some time ago, the federal government decided that it wasn't going to give out money to the states, for road projects, unless it could be assured that it would be money well spent. Toward that goal the feds wanted to make sure that the money was needed, that it was wanted, and that it would be spent efficiently and effectively.

I gotta admit that I cringed when I pulled up the last issue of The Bloomington Alternative and saw editor Steve's piece on the new county Comprehensive Plan.

And I cringed even more as I read the piece, choc-a-bloc as it was full of assurances from my friend and County Commissioner Mark Stoops that this time the community was going to be able to get a hold of its destiny.

More than a decade's worth of involvement in land-use issues -- including the epiphany that almost the entirety of local government's existential purpose is not to provide police and fire protection, or the justice system, or anything else other than to arbitrate land use -- had left me rather cynical about the topic.

At first, I was horrified to learn that Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences had gone ahead this year and awarded a prize in Economics. That horror abated some when I learned it had been awarded, for the first time ever, to a woman. And it abated more when I understood that she was a faculty member here at Indiana University, a fact that replaced much of the horror with pride.

But what really turned things for me, what allowed that final sigh of total relief, was the revelation that the prize for Economics hadn't gone to an economist at all. IU's Elinor Ostrom is a political scientist.

Why was that important? Because the state of the dismal science is dismal. It's more than dismal, it's dreadful. It's embarrassing.

I went to a party a couple of weeks ago, at a farm wedged somewhere between the retail slums of Whitehall Crossing and Ellettsville. It was an absolutely gorgeous day and an even more gorgeous setting of gently rolling terrain of alternating fields and forest.

The kind of place that rejuvenates the soul. The kind of place that's becoming increasingly rare in Monroe County.

The farm lies smack in the middle of a vast arc, stretching from southeast of the airport, through the airport itself, and then swooping northeastward to State Road 37; an arc envisioned someday as the home of Bloomington's ring road, a mini I-465, and through other land held by an elite cadre of speculators enabled by the civic rhetoric of the growth machine.

Ted Kennedy saved my life, at least according to my mother. It was sometime in the mid 1960s, and she and I were walking down Boston's Beacon Hill when I broke away and began running toward a busy intersection. Just as I arrived at the end of the curve, a figure rounded the corner and, with an outstretched arm, whisked me from almost certain automotive death.

That figure was none other than Ted Kennedy. At least according to my mom. And, also according to her, after saving my life he carried my mother's groceries home for her.

Apocryphal or not, I've always admired the Kennedys as the standard bearers and most public repositories of the canon of liberal Democratic social values. Each impossibly and tragically flawed in character, nevertheless they carried a vision of the world not as it was, but what it could and should be, while relentlessly asking the question of why it wasn't so.

I remembered that question, when Ted Kennedy passed away last month, and I remembered its most succinct expression as I first learned it from Kennedy's eulogy to his brother, Robert. A eulogy devastating in its emotional impact on anyone who can bear to listen to it and made ever more so by the fact that it was a eulogy largely written by Robert Kennedy himself, from a speech in Cape Town delivered in 1966.