As you read this I should be sitting on the beach interviewing Southern California surfers. I’ve only seen them in the Beach Party movies. I will try to look the part in bib overalls.
I had to get out. The Iowa, Iowa State and Drake men crashed and burned, one and done each of them. The wind howled so bad the dog wouldn’t go outside. The legislature is in session and is nowhere near done with inflicting itself upon us. We knew this would happen but we voted for them anyway.
“Iowa’s sharp right turn: From centrist state to ‘Florida of the North’,” the March 20 headline in the Washington Post declared, several years late.
The story detailed how wacky the Iowa statehouse has become. We import citrus and the Ron DeSantis blueprint — kick around gays and Blacks, slash taxes, arm the teachers and let the chips fall where they may.
DeSantis himself just showed up to declare that culture warriors are winners, and Gov. Kim Reynolds cheered him on.
It’s not just Iowa. That’s what I keep telling myself. And, I remind myself that we have always been proudly backwards. We at least used to be nicer about it. Or more polite. Those days are gone. Terry Branstad was friendly. I still correspond with former State Rep. Sue Mullins, R-Corwith, an old friend of the late Mary Lou Freeman who wonders what happened.
Change happened. Iowans hate change. We stand in place while the world turns faster than we do. Where did this trans thing come from? WHO Radio just told me something weird is being taught in River City. Man your trenches! The 1619 Project is coming to diminish your rights (as if Blacks control the Iowa education narrative) and so on.
Culture wars are useful in turning attention away from real problems, like the fact that the planet is heating to the point where our food supply is in jeopardy. The United Nations reported that climate change already is impacting world food supplies from searing drought in Africa, Latin America and the US Plains.
No question is more important to Iowa than how we will grow corn when the nighttime temperature is so hot south of I-80 that the plant cannot breathe. That’s already happening in the Panhandle. Or, how will Kansas get enough water for cattle? How can we keep enough water for hogs and ethanol?
The legislature is all wrapped up in who is woke. I wish we could go back in time and argue about bingo and long trucks.
So it’s time to take off and see what we can see in Kansas. What does the Colorado River look like? People continue to flock to the desert as Salt Lake turns into a toxic dust pit, and Denver competes for water with Phoenix. I would like to know if the surfer thinks about the price of hamburger like the cattleman does. Where will the beach be in 10 years?
Or just get out of Iowa for a few days to clear the head and see the sun again.
By the time I return Caitlin Clark may have led the Hawkeyes to a national championship. Even a Cyclone fan has to admire that.
Maybe, with prayer this Lent, the Iowa Legislature will cool things down a bit. That is fantastical thinking, but this is spring and Jesus sprang forth from the tomb, as the Bible proclaims. Adjournment is yet a month off. I can’t stay away that long on the beach without the tide or a mudslide washing me away. For a few days you can imagine yourself a cowboy free of Iowa’s stultifying inertia that is its own force of nature, suppressing change wherever it can, or at least pretending to.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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Delightful read. Thank you.
The R’s are in their seventh year of unified government--House, Senate, Executive--enabling excess. For this I blame the D’s, supporting if not actively promoting policies and cultural issues I label “coastal” and way out in front of Iowa voters’ sensibilities. Turn WF Buckley’s maxim to our favor: “Nominate the most LIBERAL candidates that can be elected.”
Let’s get back to divided government which forces compromise and eschews nonsense and I suspect we will find Iowa hasn’t changed all that much. We are a better people than our politics would imply.
Keep up the good fight.
Thanks for this, Art. I hope you get some good time to clear your head and then we need you back here in Iowa.