We gathered last week for the Okoboji Writer’s Retreat to talk about writing, but the conversation kept turning to politics — specifically, what the hell happened to Iowa?
The retreat on the shores of Miller’s Bay at the Iowa Lakeside Lab was organized by Julie Gammack and husband Richard Gilbert, and grew to 250 participants in its third year. Gammack is a former columnist for The Des Moines Register and talker on WHO Radio. Gilbert was a newspaper publisher and press secretary to Gov. Bob Ray.
They attract a crowd that leans mature, moderate and female upper middle class. As it grows, the retreat is getting younger and more diverse. At each of my panel discussions the topic inevitably turned to Iowa’s slide into the ditch.
A woman who describes herself as “purple” from the western Chicago suburbs told her friends she was going to the retreat. “Iowa? Why would you ever go to Iowa?” they asked. Well, yeah, the place has gone a little crazy but they still have a reputation for fostering writers, she explained. And you never go away hungry.
We got a bad rap going on.
People from Spirit Lake were there, where the school board tried to arm the staff with guns. I had the pleasure of meeting a descendant of Ambrose A. Call, who happened across Algona with his brother Asa on their westward ho and decided to stay. A Call married a Cowles and begat a media empire from Des Moines. It’s as Iowa as you can get.
All of them are avid readers with a keen interest in public affairs. Despite their privilege, if you will, the women in particular were bewildered and frustrated by our state of affairs. They feel they have no voice or are even intimidated in the civic square. They are women with resources and connections.
“How do you talk to these people?” she asked.
Sister, if that ain’t the $64,000 question.
First, try to fit on their shoes and look through your neighbor’s glasses. Real manufacturing wages in Iowa, subtracting for inflation, are half what they were 50 years ago. John Deere tractor cabs are made in Mexico. So are toy tractors that used to be made in Dyersville.
How do you get from tractors to banning books? It is well-proven that the mere mention of sex can distract us from our work. If you can make people believe that sex in the school books is a problem, you can make people forget that what we used to make is now made in Mexico and that Waterloo got the shaft.
The questioners are desperately seeking moderation. That’s not what they’re getting from our politics.
Although the group is not necessarily representative of the body politic, it is not healthy to have a bunch of multi-generational Iowans wondering how the cyclone dropped them down at Topeka.
You get a sense that things could turn. In red Warren County, an appointed auditor who posted election denial conspiracies was ousted in a special election. Prominent Iowa Republicans are attempting to keep an arm’s length from Donald Trump. The more that likely caucus goers hear Ron DeSantis snarl, the less they like him. There is at least that.
As it turned out, groups organized against arming school staff in Spirit Lake and Cherokee, not exactly liberal bastions. Storm Lake so far has seen no books that need to be banned in its public schools. Local people are moderating at the local level despite the rot that the statehouse attempts to impose.
There were 577,000 active registered Iowa Republicans on Sept. 1. There were 467,000 Democrats and 413,000 no-party voters. Get this: There are 721,714 registered but inactive voters — plugged in to the system but turned off.
The cure would seem to lie with those independent and inactive voters. A system that alienates that many people is not well-served by either party. If someone could speak to those people we could find our center again. It starts with John Deere tractors getting built in Mexico, seems to me, and why Iowa has more deficient bridges than anyplace in America, or why our surface water is toxic. They want us to argue about underwear and bathrooms. We should be arguing for lower tuition at community colleges and universities. Someone smart will recognize it and seize a ripe moment.
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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hahahaha. Good one Art. Your reference to sex reminded me of a fellow that used to sit across the aisle from me and my dad at Sunday Mass at St. Joe's in downtown Waterloo. We had a pretty conservative padre and one Sunday we were coming out, and our friend across the aisle said to us, summarizing the content of the reverend's homily, "Now, DON'T THINK ABOUT SEX! DON'T THINK ABOUT IT! JUST PUT IT OUT OF YOUR MIND!" Maybe there's some parallels there to our current state of affairs.
Another personally endearing favorite subject of the good padre was "the horrible beating Our Holy Father has been taking in the press." He was referring to Pope John Paul II, Really? I was in the middle of that quarter million people at Living History Farms in 1979. JPII was a rock star!
I have to add a bit of clarification on Deere: Deere's current contract with the United Auto Workers, and predecessor ones, contains language about bringing "oursourced' work back into the plants. Yes, they did send some assembly lines out of town here to Europe but that was to make room for new lines, including this self driving "autonomous" tractor they're trying to get off the ground and is out in test markets. Of course they ARE sending some work out of the country; and they do have a plant in Torreon, Mexico. Nothing new. I did hear a story I actually got confirmed and reported on in 1998 when they received seven semi loads of foundry castings here from Texas and/or Mexico -- infested with black widow spiders. They had to call in a local pest control company to get rid of them.
A bigger issue has been hiring. Deere had four or five hiring fairs here in a year in 2021 -- the first ones I can rembember in the 35 years I'd been covering Deere for the Courier -- and I don't know if they filled all those spots. The filled enough. And then came the strike and things buttoned up a bit.
What's the absolute worst is when the "insourcing" affects smaller local job shops around here that do work for Deere. In 1996, Deere pulled a contract from Casting Services Inc. a local UAW-represented shop that did chipping and grinding of castings; one of the company co-owners happened to be a well respected Black businessman in town who previously worked at Deere. First-shift workers were told on their morning break they no longer had jobs; they all went down the union hall, still grimy from work, looking for help from the UAW, sending the community services reprsentative scrambling, Seventy to 80 people were out of work. The company went bankrupt with very little assets, workers were stiffed for back wages, a local economci development group was stiffed on a loan -- and the Black co-owner passed away six months later; I was later told by his partner the stress killed him.
Needless to say, smaller shops around here who receive subcontract work try not to pull all their eggs out of the same basket.;