“Here’s another argument against living in a cultural wasteland,” said my wife. She was reading a review in The New Yorker about “The Modesty of Icebergs,” a dance piece by Daniel Leveille, playing at St. Mark’s in the Bowery. “The four men in the hour-long work wear no clothes. But their dance is not erotic. In their methodical balances and jumps, they resemble gymnasts, not strippers. And when they squat, backs to their audience, or lie supine and spread-legged, they radiate a sober detachment. A naked woman who enters the mix is treated no differently and a Chopin piano accompaniment lends the work a wistful tinge.”

It would be futile to argue with my wife. We’re missing out on a great many jumps and squats and wistful tinges on account of living in rural isolation on a gravel road outside Baldwin City in flatland Kansas. A New Yorker would laugh at the notion of Baldwin as a city. The new promotional slogan for our backwater state is laughable — “Kansas: As big as you think.” And as empty, desolate and deprived of intellectual stimulation was the retort of one irreverent Kansan.

Yet, I contend that Kansas is not an utter sinkhole. Culture and sophistication can be found if you look hard enough. I remember a performance art piece in Kansas City some years ago featuring nine naked women in diverse poses wearing rose-colored glasses. They too radiated a sober detachment, I’m almost sure. Only a philistine would fail to suspect the profundity of that work.

Then there was a Kansas University production in which the performer (dressed as Alice in Wonderland) pretended to urinate into a teacup. I rest my case. The cutting edge is not so far from Kansas as the intolerant snobs of New York City might suppose.

Nor is Baldwin a stranger to the arts. A banner across the door of the old Ives Hartley lumberyard proclaims: Lumberyard Arts Center Under Construction. As for avant-garde theater, there’s the annual production of “The Ballad of Black Jack.” True, it may be some time before we see naked farmers dancing in a production of “The Modesty of Hay Bales.” How many of us hog farmers would have guessed that icebergs might be modest? Based upon my first sighting of an iceberg several years ago in Newfoundland, I would have come up with something obvious, banal and stupid, such as “The Frigidity of Icebergs.”

But the description of people paying to watch four naked men squatting or lying supine reminded me of something Midwestern. It was the performance of “The Royal Nonesuch” by the king and the duke in “Huckleberry Finn.” When the curtain rises on this paragon of thespian art, the audience is treated to the spectacle of the king, “a-prancing out on all fours, naked … painted all over, ring-streaked and striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rainbow.” When the curtain falls, the spectators are furious. They realize they’ve been duped. But instead of seeking revenge upon the king and the duke at once, they conspire to tout the show so that the other townsfolk will get suckered too.

On the evening of the third performance, the king and the duke make their escape before the entire population can pelt them with rotten eggs and dead cats. From the safety of the river, the duke scorns them: “Greenhorns!” “Flatheads!” But later, Huck and Jim come upon the two scalawags, tarred and feathered, run out of another town where news of their scam had preceded them. No doubt that if they’d been performing in New York, they’d have gotten a standing ovation, or at least polite applause.

A recent New York Times feature identified the 1970s as New York’s golden age. The city was “dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund,” according to one observer. “It was a wreck; it was going bankrupt,” another fondly remembered. “And it was pretty lawless. Everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced.” It was a “dark ages.” Everyone was broke. But, “There was great music.”

One called it “a time of costume and excitement, a time of youth and great energy.” Another complained about former Mayor Guiliani’s campaign to reintroduce law and order to the city. New York has been “sterilized,” he said. “Like a troublesome child taking Ritalin, New York may be more manageable now, but it has also sacrificed its personality.”

What would he think of Baldwin’s personality? Those who are entrusted with Baldwin’s future ought to consider what a little more crime and social chaos might do for its image. There are glimmers of sophistication. I note that the town has not one, but two espresso shops. But you can’t even hope to have your pocket picked on Ames Street. Baldwin has a long way to go.

In nearby Kansas City, football fans flock to Arrowhead Stadium dressed in red to scream for the Chiefs and do the “tomahawk chop.” This is not what the New Yorker had in mind when speaking of “a time of costume and excitement.” Nor is watching noisy cars go round and round the new NASCAR track in Kansas City, Kan., a cosmopolitan thing to do. Ditto for coon hunting, cock fighting, tractor pulls, demolition derbies and the all the other diversions we Midwesterners favor. Greenhorns! Flatheads!

We might be tempted to console ourselves with the thought that a New Yorker wouldn’t know how ring a chicken’s neck or repair a broken combine in the field. But that line of argument will only perpetuate our provinciality. “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” As long as that adage remains true, we will be condemned as hicks and remain stuck in our boorish ruts.

— George Gurley, a resident of rural Baldwin, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.