Latest news with #Midwesterner
New York Post
27-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- New York Post
I live in the desert on the edge of Las Vegas — here's what life in the Mojave is really like
The idea of living on the edge of Las Vegas, with the unforgiving Mojave Desert in your backyard, has lately captivated social media, inspiring dozens of TikTok videos; but for Crystal Wojtowich, it's just her everyday life. Wojtowich is one of many Sin City residents sharing videos of breathtaking desert views. Advertisement The hospitality industry worker, who has racked up 5.6 million views on her video alone, tells what it's like living on the periphery of a bustling city, with her porch overlooking a stark, lunar-esque landscape that is far removed from the neon-lit frenzy of downtown Vegas. 'Sometimes, I do look out at the desert and realize that it is pretty barren, but also realize that with my personality, that peace and quiet is definitely something I wish for in every home that I live in,' Wojtowich says. Wojtowich grew up in a small town in South Dakota and moved to Vegas five years ago. For the past three years, she has lived in a home located in a community called Mountain's Edge tucked away in the southwestern corner of Las Vegas Valley. Advertisement There are about 25 homes in the neighborhood but only three on Wojtowich's street. She explains that she was immediately drawn to the area because it offered her privacy, while at the same time being within a short driving distance from grocery stores and parks. 'The home was a perfect fit for my needs, so the thought of the dark, open desert beside me was not an issue,' she said, adding that she does not feel isolated at all and can still hear the typical noises you would have in any normal neighborhood: cars driving by, kids playing, and dogs barking. 'I actually really love where I live,' Wojtowich insists. 'I'm still perfectly close to everything that I need, while still having that privacy.' How to get used to living in a desert Advertisement But acclimatizing to Vegas' notoriously scorching climate took some time for the former Midwesterner, who was far more used to blizzards than heat waves. 'Your body definitely learns to adapt, but that doesn't mean you still aren't going to sweat,' Wojtowich admits. 3 TikTok user Crystal Wojtowich documents her life on the edge of Las Vegas near the Mojave desert. TikTok/yourfaveazn Living in Las Vegas, where summer temperatures routinely climb into the triple digits, and especially steps away from North America's driest desert, Wojtowich says she quickly learned the importance of staying hydrated, cranking up the AC early, keeping the window shades down, and having her car windows tinted. Advertisement Wojtowich says her daily lifestyle is most noticeably impacted by the desert environment during the blisteringly hot summer months. 'Living an active lifestyle and wanting to be outside, the desert can be brutal,' she admits. 'I love to hike and take my dog places, but it definitely is hard to do that when it's 115+ degrees outside and the pavement is even hotter.' So Wojtowich has adapted, opting to go on hikes and walks during the cooler early morning hours, and investing in a set of doggy shoes to keep her pet's paws from being seared by the sizzling-hot pavement. 3 Wojtowich said she enjoys the privacy she has living by the desert. TikTok/yourfaveazn The pros and cons of living on Vegas' edge Another downside to living in the desert-adjacent neighborhood is the commute to downtown Vegas, roughly 15 miles to the north. 'While I do love where I live most days, there are some days where I could be running late, there's heavy traffic or construction, and my commute takes double the time,' explains Wojtowich. 'Most of my commute to work is just driving to the freeway!' But being a homeowner in an arid landscape off the beaten path has plenty of upsides, according to Wojtowich. For starters, landscaping is a breeze, because there is no grass to water — but there are still shrubs and trees to liven up the backyard. Advertisement The biggest perk for Wojtowich is the location itself, which she says strikes the perfect balance between privacy and community. Start and end your day informed with our newsletters Morning Report and Evening Update: Your source for today's top stories Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters 'I get a mix of both lives!' she gushes. 'I have awesome neighbors, my neighborhood is clean, and I love being close to parks so I can attend farmers markets, food events, and even just getting outside.' Wojtowich notes that the relatively isolated location of her neighborhood does tends to attract some rowdy outsiders, who can be heard some nights riding dirtbikes, setting off fireworks in the desert, and even firing guns uncomfortably close to people's homes. Advertisement 'There are a lot of animals and kids nearby, so it does get scary sometimes when you're not expecting it,' she concedes. 3 A residential neighborhood bordering the desert in Northwest Las Vegas. trekandphoto – Asked about her interactions with the desert's wildlife, Wojtowich recounts spine-tingling moments of discovering a variety of 'creepy crawlers,' including scorpions, ants, cockroaches, and stink bugs, in dark closets and under appliances. 'It is so very important to have pest control in the edge homes of Las Vegas because the desert is their home, and they are just a foot away,' Wojtowich advises. 'With just a wall in between our home and theirs, they are bound to get inside at some point!' Advertisement It's also not uncommon to hear piercing coyote yelps echoing in the open desert in the middle of the night, she says. What appears to capture the imagination of social media users flocking to these videos is the otherworldly emptiness of the desert— just a stone's throw from people's homes on the edge of Sin City. 'I think most people would be surprised to learn that while living on the edge might seem unnatural and dystopian, it really is no different than any other neighborhood,' concludes Wojtowich.
NDTV
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NDTV
Cult Of Regular American Guy Has A New Figurehead In Pope Leo XIV
Washington: By the middle of last week, it became clear that something odd was happening. It was about the time that the fake video started circulating about the woman purporting to recount the "situationship" she'd had with Robert Prevost, the new American pope, decades ago when he was just another guy from Chicago. We'd already seen Topps, the baseball-card company, issue a new card of Pope Leo XIV that was all over eBay. We'd heard about his affinity for the White Sox and seen a glimpse of him in the crowd at the 2005 World Series. And in the wake of online speculation over whether he favored the Chicago beef sandwich or Chicago-style hot dogs, we'd seen Portillo's, a local eatery, name a sandwich after him - ""a divinely seasoned Italian beef, baptized in gravy and finished with the holy trinity of peppers." Then there was the Instagram video featuring two guys outlining the ways the new pontiff was a product of his upbringing: "The pope's a Midwesterner. Bread and wine is now cheese and beer," says one. Retorts the other: "The pope's a Midwesterner. Collection baskets now accept Kohl's cash." Popes: They're just like us? Not exactly. The former Bob Prevost is hardly just another guy from Chicago. But you wouldn't know that by the burst of American fanfare surrounding the newly minted Pope Leo XIV. He has been called out for his eating proclivities (Jimmy Fallon: "deep-dish communion wafers?"), for his sports affiliations, for his lively sibling relationships and more. Fake videos of him weighing in on basketball and Donald Trump in classic Midwestern ways are proliferating. Why are we so focused on making sure the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church is also a regular guy from the Midwest? Some of it is pride, you betcha. But another answer lies in Americans' peculiar and complex relationship with fame and power that goes way back to the founding of the nation itself. American 'regular guy-ism' began with the nation itself When the United States became the United States in 1776, it rejected King George III, the crown's taxes and the ornate accoutrements and sensibilities that surrounded royalty. In its place grew democracy, effectively the cult of the regular guy. As the decades passed, the sensibility of "effete" royalty from back east - whether "back east" was England or, ultimately, Washington - became scorned. By the time Andrew Jackson's form of populism began to flourish in the 1830s, the "regular guy" in the rising democratic republic became a revered trope. Thus the tales of Abraham Lincoln growing up in a log cabin and splitting rails just like the rest of us - or, at least, the 19th-century rural American "rest of us." "Our culture is one that is based on the rejection of monarchy and class distinctions and yet is fascinated by monarchies and those who we see as set above and apart," says David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. "We want these figures to look up to but also to sit down with." And it has stayed that way, politically and culturally, right up until today. Think about how the ideal presidential candidate has evolved from the time of, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an effete Easterner who favored a long cigarette holder, to today. Ronald Reagan talked in the homespun language of hearth and home. Bill Clinton played a sax and answered the time-honored question of "boxers or briefs." George Bush, now a nondrinker, became "a guy you'd want to have a beer with." (Jon Stewart famously shot that down by saying: "I want my president to be the designated driver.") This down-to-Earth sensibility was evident in the press conference that American cardinals held after Leo was elevated. No intense church music accompanied their entrance; instead, it was "American Pie" and Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" - foundational pillars of popular culture, with an emphasis on "popular." The message: This is not a "back east" pope. "Popes have always been alien - strangers," says John Baick, an American historian at Western New England University. "We like and trust that he is one of us. The Midwest is the place of hard work, the place of decency, the place of listening, the place of manners. This is the person you want to sit on the other side of that diner on a Sunday morning." He places Leo's ascension as a bookend to John F. Kennedy's election in 1960 - a resounding signal, this time globally, that Catholicism is compatible with Americanism. But as for the "he's one of us" approach, that says more about the people watching Leo than about the actual pope. "He has done none of this himself," Baick says. "The connections are things that we have desperately created. We are so desperate for normalcy, for a regular guy." This guy is far more than the pope next door And yet ... Americans famously adored Princess Diana, "the people's princess." People like the Kennedys and Grace Kelly - before she became an actual princess - were referred to as "American royalty." And even though we're a long way from the days of Bogie, Bacall and Greta Garbo - a generation into the "Stars: They're Just Like Us" era - Americans still love to put people on pedestals and bring them back down, sometimes at the same time. The latest iteration of this is tied to reality TV, which took regular people and turned them into personalities, figures, commodities. "This country is positioned as a place where anybody can succeed. It plays directly into that - the regular person who succeeds on a large scale," says Danielle Lindemann, author of "True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us." "We're kind of obsessed with this everyday Joe who is plucked from obscurity and becomes famous. In the United States, that's a salient and dominant narrative," says Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. "We almost feel like we have relationships with these people. We're getting so much personal information about him, and it facilitates that sense of closeness." Prevost, of course, is not your average Midwesterner. His Spanish, among other tongues, is fluent. He spent two decades in Peru, where he also holds citizenship (and where, it must be said, there is footage of him singing "Feliz Navidad" into a microphone at a Christmas party). And there's that small matter that he is now the head of a global church of 1.4 billion souls. So a new era begins for both the United States and the Catholic Church - an age-old hierarchy and a society that demands egalitarianism, or the appearance of it, from the people it looks up to. And at the intersection of those two principles sits Robert Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, an accomplished man in his own right but also an empty vessel into which broad swaths of humanity will pour their expectations - be they about eternity or simply the South Side of Chicago. "Popes want to connect with people, and the church wants that as well. But the peril is that such familiarity breeds not so much contempt as disobedience," Gibson says. "The pope is not your friend. He is not going to sit down and have a beer with you," he says. "If you think the pope is your pal, will you feel betrayed when he reminds you of your religious and moral duties, and chides you for failing to follow them?" (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
There's an American pope, and he's just like us. At least, we really, really want him to be
WASHINGTON (AP) — By the middle of last week, it became clear that something odd was happening. It was about the time that the fake video started circulating about the woman purporting to recount the 'situationship' she'd had with Robert Prevost, the new American pope, decades ago when he was just another guy from Chicago. We'd already seen Topps, the baseball-card company, issue a new card of Pope Leo XIV that was all over eBay. We'd heard about his affinity for the White Sox and seen a glimpse of him in the crowd at the 2005 World Series. And in the wake of online speculation over whether he favored the Chicago beef sandwich or Chicago-style hot dogs, we'd seen Portillo's, a local eatery, name a sandwich after him — ""a divinely seasoned Italian beef, baptized in gravy and finished with the holy trinity of peppers." Then there was the Instagram video featuring two guys outlining the ways the new pontiff was a product of his upbringing: 'The pope's a Midwesterner. Bread and wine is now cheese and beer," says one. Retorts the other: 'The pope's a Midwesterner. Collection baskets now accept Kohl's cash.' Popes: They're just like us? Not exactly. The former Bob Prevost is hardly just another guy from Chicago. But you wouldn't know that by the burst of American fanfare surrounding the newly minted Pope Leo XIV. He has been called out for his eating proclivities (Jimmy Fallon: 'deep-dish communion wafers?'), for his sports affiliations, for his lively sibling relationships and more. Fake videos of him weighing in on basketball and Donald Trump in classic Midwestern ways are proliferating. Why are we so focused on making sure the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church is also a regular guy from the Midwest? Some of it is pride, you betcha. But another answer lies in Americans' peculiar and complex relationship with fame and power that goes way back to the founding of the nation itself. American 'regular guy-ism' began with the nation itself When the United States became the United States in 1776, it rejected King George III, the crown's taxes and the ornate accoutrements and sensibilities that surrounded royalty. In its place grew democracy, effectively the cult of the regular guy. As the decades passed, the sensibility of 'effete' royalty from back east — whether 'back east' was England or, ultimately, Washington — became scorned. By the time Andrew Jackson's form of populism began to flourish in the 1830s, the 'regular guy' in the rising democratic republic became a revered trope. Thus the tales of Abraham Lincoln growing up in a log cabin and splitting rails just like the rest of us — or, at least, the 19th-century rural American 'rest of us.' 'Our culture is one that is based on the rejection of monarchy and class distinctions and yet is fascinated by monarchies and those who we see as set above and apart,' says David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. "We want these figure to look up to but also to sit down with." And it has stayed that way, politically and culturally, right up until today. Think about how the ideal presidential candidate has evolved from the time of, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an effete Easterner who favored a long cigarette holder, to today. Ronald Reagan talked in the homespun language of hearth and home. Bill Clinton played a sax and answered the time-honored question of 'boxers or briefs.' George Bush, now a nondrinker, became 'a guy you'd want to have a beer with.' (Jon Stewart famously shot that down by saying: "I want my president to be the designated driver.') This down-to-Earth sensibility was evident in the press conference that American cardinals held after Leo was elevated. No intense church music accompanied their entrance; instead, it was 'American Pie' and Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' — foundational pillars of popular culture, with an emphasis on 'popular.' The message: This is not a 'back east' pope. 'Popes have always been alien — strangers," says John Baick, an American historian at Western New England University. "We like and trust that he is one of us. The Midwest is the place of hard work, the place of decency, the place of listening, the place of manners. This is the person you want to sit on the other side of that diner on a Sunday morning.' He places Leo's ascension as a bookend to John F. Kennedy's election in 1960 — a resounding signal, this time globally, that Catholicism is compatible with Americanism. But as for the 'he's one of us' approach, that says more about the people watching Leo than about the actual pope. 'He has done none of this himself," Baick says. "The connections are things that we have desperately created. We are so desperate for normalcy, for a regular guy.' This guy is far more than the pope next door And yet ... Americans famously adored Princess Diana, 'the people's princess.' People like the Kennedys and Grace Kelly — before she became an actual princess — were referred to as 'American royalty.' And even though we're a long way from the days of Bogie, Bacall and Greta Garbo — a generation into the 'Stars: They're Just Like Us' era — Americans still love to put people on pedestals and bring them back down, sometimes at the same time. The latest iteration of this is tied to reality TV, which took regular people and turned them into personalities, figures, commodities. 'This country is positioned as a place where anybody can succeed. It plays directly into that — the regular person who succeeds on a large scale,' says Danielle Lindemann, author of 'True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.' 'We're kind of obsessed with this everyday Joe who is plucked from obscurity and becomes famous. In the United States, that's a salient and dominant narrative,' says Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. 'We almost feel like we have relationships with these people. We're getting so much personal information about him, and it facilitates that sense of closeness.' Prevost, of course, is not your average Midwesterner. His Spanish, among other tongues, is fluent. He spent two decades in Peru, where he also holds citizenship (and where, it must be said, there is footage of him singing 'Feliz Navidad' into a microphone at a Christmas party). And there's that small matter that he is now the head of a global church of 1.4 billion souls. So a new era begins for both the United States and the Catholic Church — an age-old hierarchy and a society that demands egalitarianism, or the appearance of it, from the people it looks up to. And at the intersection of those two principles sits Robert Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, an accomplished man in his own right but also an empty vessel into which broad swaths of humanity will pour their expectations — be they about eternity or simply the South Side of Chicago. 'Popes want to connect with people, and the church wants that as well. But the peril is that such familiarity breeds not so much contempt as disobedience,' Gibson says. 'The pope is not your friend. He is not going to sit down and have a beer with you,' he says. 'If you think the pope is your pal, will you feel betrayed when he reminds you of your religious and moral duties, and chides you for failing to follow them?' ___ Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Hamilton Spectator
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
There's an American pope, and he's just like us. At least, we really, really want him to be
WASHINGTON (AP) — By the middle of last week, it became clear that something odd was happening. It was about the time that the fake video started circulating about the woman purporting to recount the 'situationship' she'd had with Robert Prevost, the new American pope, decades ago when he was just another guy from Chicago. We'd already seen Topps, the baseball-card company, issue a new card of Pope Leo XIV that was all over eBay. We'd heard about his affinity for the White Sox and seen a glimpse of him in the crowd at the 2005 World Series. And in the wake of online speculation over whether he favored the Chicago beef sandwich or Chicago-style hot dogs, we'd seen Portillo's, a local eatery, name a sandwich after him — ''a divinely seasoned Italian beef, baptized in gravy and finished with the holy trinity of peppers.' Then there was the Instagram video featuring two guys outlining the ways the new pontiff was a product of his upbringing: 'The pope's a Midwesterner. Bread and wine is now cheese and beer,' says one. Retorts the other: 'The pope's a Midwesterner. Collection baskets now accept Kohl's cash.' Popes: They're just like us? Not exactly. The former Bob Prevost is hardly just another guy from Chicago. But you wouldn't know that by the burst of American fanfare surrounding the newly minted Pope Leo XIV. He has been called out for his eating proclivities (Jimmy Fallon: 'deep-dish communion wafers?'), for his sports affiliations, for his lively sibling relationships and more. Fake videos of him weighing in on basketball and Donald Trump in classic Midwestern ways are proliferating. Why are we so focused on making sure the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church is also a regular guy from the Midwest? Some of it is pride, you betcha. But another answer lies in Americans' peculiar and complex relationship with fame and power that goes way back to the founding of the nation itself. American 'regular guy-ism' began with the nation itself When the United States became the United States in 1776, it rejected King George III, the crown's taxes and the ornate accoutrements and sensibilities that surrounded royalty. In its place grew democracy, effectively the cult of the regular guy. As the decades passed, the sensibility of 'effete' royalty from back east — whether 'back east' was England or, ultimately, Washington — became scorned. By the time Andrew Jackson's form of populism began to flourish in the 1830s, the 'regular guy' in the rising democratic republic became a revered trope. Thus the tales of Abraham Lincoln growing up in a log cabin and splitting rails just like the rest of us — or, at least, the 19th-century rural American 'rest of us.' 'Our culture is one that is based on the rejection of monarchy and class distinctions and yet is fascinated by monarchies and those who we see as set above and apart,' says David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. 'We want these figure to look up to but also to sit down with.' And it has stayed that way, politically and culturally, right up until today. Think about how the ideal presidential candidate has evolved from the time of, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an effete Easterner who favored a long cigarette holder, to today. Ronald Reagan talked in the homespun language of hearth and home. Bill Clinton played a sax and answered the time-honored question of 'boxers or briefs.' George Bush, now a nondrinker, became 'a guy you'd want to have a beer with.' (Jon Stewart famously shot that down by saying: 'I want my president to be the designated driver.') This down-to-Earth sensibility was evident in the press conference that American cardinals held after Leo was elevated. No intense church music accompanied their entrance; instead, it was 'American Pie' and Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' — foundational pillars of popular culture, with an emphasis on 'popular.' The message: This is not a 'back east' pope. 'Popes have always been alien — strangers,' says John Baick, an American historian at Western New England University. 'We like and trust that he is one of us. The Midwest is the place of hard work, the place of decency, the place of listening, the place of manners. This is the person you want to sit on the other side of that diner on a Sunday morning.' He places Leo's ascension as a bookend to John F. Kennedy's election in 1960 — a resounding signal, this time globally, that Catholicism is compatible with Americanism. But as for the 'he's one of us' approach, that says more about the people watching Leo than about the actual pope. 'He has done none of this himself,' Baick says. 'The connections are things that we have desperately created. We are so desperate for normalcy, for a regular guy.' This guy is far more than the pope next door And yet ... Americans famously adored Princess Diana, 'the people's princess.' People like the Kennedys and Grace Kelly — before she became an actual princess — were referred to as 'American royalty.' And even though we're a long way from the days of Bogie, Bacall and Greta Garbo — a generation into the 'Stars: They're Just Like Us' era — Americans still love to put people on pedestals and bring them back down, sometimes at the same time. The latest iteration of this is tied to reality TV, which took regular people and turned them into personalities, figures, commodities. 'This country is positioned as a place where anybody can succeed. It plays directly into that — the regular person who succeeds on a large scale,' says Danielle Lindemann, author of 'True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.' 'We're kind of obsessed with this everyday Joe who is plucked from obscurity and becomes famous. In the United States, that's a salient and dominant narrative,' says Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. 'We almost feel like we have relationships with these people. We're getting so much personal information about him, and it facilitates that sense of closeness.' Prevost, of course, is not your average Midwesterner. His Spanish, among other tongues, is fluent. He spent two decades in Peru, where he also holds citizenship (and where, it must be said, there is footage of him singing 'Feliz Navidad' into a microphone at a Christmas party). And there's that small matter that he is now the head of a global church of 1.4 billion souls. So a new era begins for both the United States and the Catholic Church — an age-old hierarchy and a society that demands egalitarianism, or the appearance of it, from the people it looks up to. And at the intersection of those two principles sits Robert Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, an accomplished man in his own right but also an empty vessel into which broad swaths of humanity will pour their expectations — be they about eternity or simply the South Side of Chicago. 'Popes want to connect with people, and the church wants that as well. But the peril is that such familiarity breeds not so much contempt as disobedience,' Gibson says. 'The pope is not your friend. He is not going to sit down and have a beer with you,' he says. 'If you think the pope is your pal, will you feel betrayed when he reminds you of your religious and moral duties, and chides you for failing to follow them?' ___ Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
The Hill
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hill
There's an American pope, and he's just like us. At least, we really, really want him to be
WASHINGTON (AP) — By the middle of last week, it became clear that something odd was happening. It was about the time that the fake video started circulating about the woman purporting to recount the 'situationship' she'd had with Robert Prevost, the new American pope, decades ago when he was just another guy from Chicago. We'd already seen Topps, the baseball-card company, issue a new card of Pope Leo XIV that was all over eBay. We'd heard about his affinity for the White Sox and seen a glimpse of him in the crowd at the 2005 World Series. And in the wake of online speculation over whether he favored the Chicago beef sandwich or Chicago-style hot dogs, we'd seen Portillo's, a local eatery, name a sandwich after him — ''a divinely seasoned Italian beef, baptized in gravy and finished with the holy trinity of peppers.' Then there was the Instagram video featuring two guys outlining the ways the new pontiff was a product of his upbringing: 'The pope's a Midwesterner. Bread and wine is now cheese and beer,' says one. Retorts the other: 'The pope's a Midwesterner. Collection baskets now accept Kohl's cash.' Popes: They're just like us? Not exactly. The former Bob Prevost is hardly just another guy from Chicago. But you wouldn't know that by the burst of American fanfare surrounding the newly minted Pope Leo XIV. He has been called out for his eating proclivities (Jimmy Fallon: 'deep-dish communion wafers?'), for his sports affiliations, for his lively sibling relationships and more. Fake videos of him weighing in on basketball and Donald Trump in classic Midwestern ways are proliferating. Why are we so focused on making sure the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church is also a regular guy from the Midwest? Some of it is pride, you betcha. But another answer lies in Americans' peculiar and complex relationship with fame and power that goes way back to the founding of the nation itself. When the United States became the United States in 1776, it rejected King George III, the crown's taxes and the ornate accoutrements and sensibilities that surrounded royalty. In its place grew democracy, effectively the cult of the regular guy. As the decades passed, the sensibility of 'effete' royalty from back east — whether 'back east' was England or, ultimately, Washington — became scorned. By the time Andrew Jackson's form of populism began to flourish in the 1830s, the 'regular guy' in the rising democratic republic became a revered trope. Thus the tales of Abraham Lincoln growing up in a log cabin and splitting rails just like the rest of us — or, at least, the 19th-century rural American 'rest of us.' 'Our culture is one that is based on the rejection of monarchy and class distinctions and yet is fascinated by monarchies and those who we see as set above and apart,' says David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. 'We want these figure to look up to but also to sit down with.' And it has stayed that way, politically and culturally, right up until today. Think about how the ideal presidential candidate has evolved from the time of, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an effete Easterner who favored a long cigarette holder, to today. Ronald Reagan talked in the homespun language of hearth and home. Bill Clinton played a sax and answered the time-honored question of 'boxers or briefs.' George Bush, now a nondrinker, became 'a guy you'd want to have a beer with.' (Jon Stewart famously shot that down by saying: 'I want my president to be the designated driver.') This down-to-Earth sensibility was evident in the press conference that American cardinals held after Leo was elevated. No intense church music accompanied their entrance; instead, it was 'American Pie' and Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' — foundational pillars of popular culture, with an emphasis on 'popular.' The message: This is not a 'back east' pope. 'Popes have always been alien — strangers,' says John Baick, an American historian at Western New England University. 'We like and trust that he is one of us. The Midwest is the place of hard work, the place of decency, the place of listening, the place of manners. This is the person you want to sit on the other side of that diner on a Sunday morning.' He places Leo's ascension as a bookend to John F. Kennedy's election in 1960 — a resounding signal, this time globally, that Catholicism is compatible with Americanism. But as for the 'he's one of us' approach, that says more about the people watching Leo than about the actual pope. 'He has done none of this himself,' Baick says. 'The connections are things that we have desperately created. We are so desperate for normalcy, for a regular guy.' And yet … Americans famously adored Princess Diana, 'the people's princess.' People like the Kennedys and Grace Kelly — before she became an actual princess — were referred to as 'American royalty.' And even though we're a long way from the days of Bogie, Bacall and Greta Garbo — a generation into the 'Stars: They're Just Like Us' era — Americans still love to put people on pedestals and bring them back down, sometimes at the same time. The latest iteration of this is tied to reality TV, which took regular people and turned them into personalities, figures, commodities. 'This country is positioned as a place where anybody can succeed. It plays directly into that — the regular person who succeeds on a large scale,' says Danielle Lindemann, author of 'True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.' 'We're kind of obsessed with this everyday Joe who is plucked from obscurity and becomes famous. In the United States, that's a salient and dominant narrative,' says Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. 'We almost feel like we have relationships with these people. We're getting so much personal information about him, and it facilitates that sense of closeness.' Prevost, of course, is not your average Midwesterner. His Spanish, among other tongues, is fluent. He spent two decades in Peru, where he also holds citizenship (and where, it must be said, there is footage of him singing 'Feliz Navidad' into a microphone at a Christmas party). And there's that small matter that he is now the head of a global church of 1.4 billion souls. So a new era begins for both the United States and the Catholic Church — an age-old hierarchy and a society that demands egalitarianism, or the appearance of it, from the people it looks up to. And at the intersection of those two principles sits Robert Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, an accomplished man in his own right but also an empty vessel into which broad swaths of humanity will pour their expectations — be they about eternity or simply the South Side of Chicago. 'Popes want to connect with people, and the church wants that as well. But the peril is that such familiarity breeds not so much contempt as disobedience,' Gibson says. 'The pope is not your friend. He is not going to sit down and have a beer with you,' he says. 'If you think the pope is your pal, will you feel betrayed when he reminds you of your religious and moral duties, and chides you for failing to follow them?' ___ Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. 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