We have survived the full body slam

Jan 12

What a weird run we’ve been on the past few years with the double-whammy of Covid and Donald Trump.

The aftershocks of deep changes to our lives reverberate still.

The House finally elected a speaker with the 15th ballot on the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection in which Kevin McCarthy himself denied the results of the 2020 presidential election. A government shutdown could result with the lower chamber directed by representatives who voted not to certify President Joe Biden’s election.

Trump had to call in to the House floor on McCarthy’s behalf. Images of Trump standing on the veranda at the White House in an orange glow after his release from the hospital with Covid rose to mind. He just stood there, suggesting invincibility yet looking as if he might fall over.

Storm Lake was getting walloped by the pandemic. People were dying every week. The meatpacking plants were ravaged. Walmart ran out of toilet paper overnight. Newell-Fonda won the girls state tournament again, and then that was all she wrote. Some businesses went under. We nearly did. The government came out with the biggest relief program since the Great Depression. Most of us survived because of it.

During this time Steve King, our congressman for 20 years, was unseated in a Republican primary because of his comments on race and culture. JD Scholten, who nearly beat King in 2018, was forced to stage drive-in campaign events at Frank Starr Park, where he spoke into a microphone and diehards in cars tuned in on FM radio. Scholten got walloped by Randy Feenstra, a more polite version of King.

There were those daily Covid briefings where Trump would contradict the medical experts standing next to him as the president talked up his latest snake-oil cure.

You couldn’t go to church. Catholics yearned for Holy Communion. Who would have thought you could not get communion? Michelle Obama made a brief return as First Lady in the absence of one to counsel the nation on having the Covid blues. Doctors here confirmed that they saw an increase in depression. It is depressing sitting at home looking out the window wishing you were anyplace else, doing something.

Relationships changed, or ended. Zooming became a verb. Remote work became a real thing. I, for one, got used to it. I fancy myself living the writer’s life. That’s been a good thing, sort of a dream come true, really. That, and voters told Trump to take his act back to Mar-a-Lago. They chose Biden and cooperation over Trump and violent treason.

Voters liked the infrastructure bill. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell last week shook hands with President Biden over a new bridge to connect Ohio and Kentucky while the House Republicans fought yesterday’s battles. Sen. Joni Ernst was one of a dozen Republicans to vote for protecting gay and interracial marriages, which drew a rebuke from the Pocahontas County Republican Central Committee. There are signs of moderation that made Ernst feel comfortable enough to be sensible.

At one point oil prices went into negative territory when interest rates were at zero. We worried that we couldn’t get paper to print because of huge supply chain kinks. You couldn’t even think about looking at a new car on a lot because they weren’t there. They still aren’t. Newsprint prices are stabilizing. Oil shot up as the economy came back, along with grocery prices. Then interest rates ratcheted up to combat inflation. Meatpackers raised wages significantly over the past five years — from about $16 per hour to start, to nearly $22 per hour starting wage now, plus with better health care benefits.

Restaurants have come back, but dining in is down nearly 20% from pre-pandemic times. Take-out is way up. Inflation is subsiding. Congress did big bipartisan things, like reshoring computer chip making to the USA from Asia. We are beginning to address climate change. Our saber rattling with China over trade is subsiding, and China has trouble all its own coping with a wave of Covid. The insurrection was driven at least in part by the frustration of the pandemic cast on a motif of fear. Many of the participants are thinking about it from jail. Voters called again for moderation in the November midterm election. Democracy holds on as aimless rebels are shunted aside. Trump’s popularity is waning. Costs are coming down as job creation holds up pretty well.

The sun came out clear on Friday. It seemed like we had been living in a cold gray cloud for so long that 24 degrees felt like May. The brave men and women who defended democracy two years ago embraced President Biden as he gave them medals for their valor. Zealotry is not having its finest hour. Supply is finding demand. Iowa has Covid under control as deaths and hospitalizations decline. You would like to think that the fever has broken.

Art Cullen is 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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