What’s that smell in the spring air?

You could fertilize a fine field of corn with the analysis spread around on what animates rural White voters.

Why did Iowa flip from Obama to Trump? Is Ohio indelibly red? Why does Joe Six Pack of Busch Light feel threatened by a trans “social influencer”? Does he really think anyone is being influenced down at Mo’s Tap?

I was born 66 years ago and reared along Northwest Iowa’s gravel roads, where a county Democratic convention could be held in a phone booth if you could find one. Here, Farm Bureau is a mainline religion right up there with Calvinism, Methodism and Missouri Synod Lutheranism (Catholics without a pope). I know the territory.

We’re so abandoned you can’t even catch a Greyhound bus to get out of town. There used to be a union here in Storm Lake, a meatpacking town at the center of Hog Central. There used to be independent producers tending their own sows, too.

God gave us Roundup and atrazine so that we might conquer weeds and all we survey, and Wall Street gave us consolidation that busted the union and the farrowing house.

Now we have Walmart and Dollar General, half as many farmers and a working wage half what it was from 1975 in real terms, and you could shoot a canon down Main Street Rural America without hitting anyone.

Resentments? Who? Us? Nah.

Then comes a recording of unwitting Oklahoma county officials down there along the Texas border. The sheriff, a jailer and a county commissioner, among others, discuss in the aftermath of a board meeting how it would be nice if we could lynch Blacks again or bury a couple reporters from the local McCurtain Gazette-News, which planted the recorder. Instead of killing them, the sheriff publicly announced that he was launching a criminal investigation into what he considers a protected conversation among White folks. They think Blacks have more rights than Whites these days, even if an Oklahoma sheriff could probably shoot a Black teen on Main Street without losing the luster on his badge.

Socialism! That’s the problem! It justifies the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol — at least, Trump’s brand of ad hoc tyranny is not as bad as Biden Socialism, according to the Appalachian echo chambers.

Socialism is when you nationalize industries. Republicans led the charge with Biden to order certain manufacturing, like semi-conductors, to be done in the US of A. President Trump ordered the meatpackers to work at the height of the pandemic through the Defense Authorization Act. What socialism is it that endangers freedom? National health care? Not.

“Americans who see a threat from Biden and his party aren’t taken very seriously in the mainstream media,” former West Virginia GOP elite Gary Abernathy wrote in The Washington Post, the very exemplar of mainstream media. “But many of us believe that the Democratic Party’s socialist-style tilt is arguably a more enduring danger than the Republican Party’s shift, even considering the disgraceful events of Jan. 6 and the foolishness of election deniers.”

Take that in: You are better off in Iowa banning books about Black history authored by Waterloo West High School graduate Nikole Hannah-Jones than you are with Joe Biden as president. You are better off with someone who would order your neighbor to scale the Capitol walls and maim police, and who would try to pressure Georgia officials into fabricating 11,000 votes, than you are with an administration that would allow health care for children of undocumented immigrants. Because, immigrants are the problem. It must have been the Mexicans who broke the union, not President Reagan. It must have been the Socialists arguing for free trade with China, and not former Gov. Terry Branstad and Sen. Chuck Grassley and the soybean growers and the corn growers and the consolidated pork complex. They’re not the ones, according to the likes of Fox News, who sucked the prosperity out of Appalachia or the Great Plains. It must be the drag queens who changed everything.

You can smell it when they spread that stuff with the spring dew.

Every once in a while the truth breaks through in the land time forgot since the Dust Bowl, of yearning for the days when you could hang a Black person down by the river or bury a reporter where nobody will know. Give me a little of that Socialism, then, as I already have one foot in the grave next to that stinking corn field.

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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Art Cullen, Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake

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Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County

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Dana James: New Black Iowa, Des Moines

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Tar Macias, Hola Iowa, Iowa

Kurt Meyer, Showing Up

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Macey Spensley: The Midwest Creative

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Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices

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