Fw: Iowa: What a bummer
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Fog set thick outside while serotonin ran thin inside on this early March morning of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in Iowa. If I had the gumption I would go jump in the lake. It only gets worse with the legislature in session. We try to look away and think of the Storm Lake boys dunking their way to State, or Ben McCollum waving his arms like a madman at Carver Hawkeye. Audi Crooks pouring in 30 keeps our spirits at nearly an even keel in between the chemical ads that remind us of our nation-leading cancer rates. Art Cullen’s Notebook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Reality bites around the rotunda in Des Moines. They’re banning books and denying civil rights. They’re hassling immigrants. Starving schools. Shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the working stiff. Shielding chemical companies from cancer claims. One bad idea after another. On one foggy morning we learned that they want to eliminate public notices from newspapers, which could come close to killing us if we don’t just give up and run away from home. We could wish that they would just go home and stay there. Quit doing harm. They won’t. “If the bills coming out of the Iowa Legislature are any indication, I’m pretty sure Iowa is a shoo-in to top the next list of the Worst States for Black Americans,” wrote Black Iowa News Editor Dana James. That is saying something, neighbors. We used to be known as a leader in civil rights. Time to get our bearings. We need some good old divided government, where we are forced to speak with each other and not past each other. One-party government has taken Iowa back light years. One-party rule cleared the way for Donald Trump to wage war by fiat, ignore Congress and thumb his nose at the courts. This is how Stalin and Mao rolled. There is virtually no chance that Democrats could win either chamber of the Iowa legislature. The surest first step in stopping the madness is electing a Democratic governor to counterbalance a Republican legislature that is killing us not-so-softly. State Auditor Rob Sand could win. The Republican legislature is so afraid of it that they are trying to write laws to rein in the governor’s authority pre-emptively. Sand says the two-party system is unrepresentative. He sounds a lot like James Taralico, who just won the Democratic nomination for US Senate from Texas attracting disaffected Democrats and independents. They are soliciting people disgusted by our dysfunctional politics. “Our economy is broken. Our politics are broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken,” Talarico said last week. “The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and power. So their cable news networks and their social media algorithms tear us apart.” As do political parties, Sand would argue. Sand appeals to independents who are tired of the partisanship by openly wishing he were one. A Democratic governor would break the fever that is taking Iowa backwards at light speed. Know-Nothings could not summarily assault us in our bedrooms and classrooms. Sand will douse the culture wars. He will run the Iowa Department of Natural Resources as if natural resources are involved. He will defend, not defund, education. A ray of hope that the US Senate could flip to blue and put a check on Trump’s ambitions helps to keep us out of the icy drink. A strong majority of Americans hate the secret police swarming in masks on the Twin Cities. They also hate setting the Middle East on fire. The high cost of living just keeps getting higher (thanks in large part to Iowa’s increasingly regressive tax system). Gasoline prices shot up 50 cents in a week of bombing Tehran. Despite killing a bunch of terrorists posing as Muslims, there are plenty more where the Ayatollah came from. You can’t kill them off. Buy them off. Holy wars are not our thing. We simply want their agnostic oil. Checks and balances are the prescription. Something to hold us back from our worst impulses. We don’t ask for the legislature to ram laws predicated on religious persecution, but that’s what politicians are delivering in order to divide us by race and creed. In fact, voters rejected the Bible-thumping Moms for Liberty in school board races statewide. We need a Congress that serves as a check on the White House and defunds goon squads. Somebody has to protect our food and water. They are three years late on a farm bill under GOP unified rule. Bird flu just hit BV County. Where? State secret. They laid off the USDA bird flu workers among 24,000 in the department. It’s all part of the fog. Our religion says thou shalt not mess with agribusiness. Citizens should fix their attention on the tube and the Randy Feenstra ads calling Sand a left-wing radical to know that everything is up-to-date in the Worst State in America for Blacks, Polluted Surface Water, Cancer and Declining Rural Population. Surely it can’t get more dire under a two-party system. Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. His latest book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World, is available from Ice Cube Press. 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. The Iowa Writers’ CollaborativeHave you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? 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