It's the Taste That Finally Matters

Some number of years ago I heard a lecture by Jeremiah Wright, a now-retired African-American scholar and minister from Chicago who had the misfortune of being the pastor to a future President, and the impertinence to read scripture in general and the Hebrew prophets in particular under the delusion that the words might actually have some relevance beyond the ancient Hebrews -- maybe even for Americans, an unforgivable sin that challenged our sacrosanct notions of exceptionalism.  But that's another story. 

The lecture I heard, titled "Different, Not Deficient", described the physiological, evolutionary, linguistic and cultural particularities of people from African descent.  It was a fascinating study, but what has stuck with me in the ensuing years is his observation that insiders can be critical of the "family", but outsiders had better steer clear.  It's funny, he noted, when Eddie Murphy tells jokes about black people -- even employing with impunity words long-since scratched from the pages of decency dictionaries -- while the same jokes told by a white comedian would sound hurtful and racist.  The same is true of deprecating Jewish humor voiced by Jewish comedians like Jackie Mason or Henny Youngman.  Told from the inside, it's funny; from the outside, it is offensive. 

That important pivot came to mind this morning as I finally got around to reading Stephen Bloom's "Observations from 20 Years of Iowa Life" published earlier this month in The Atlantic Magazine.  Bloom, a Professor of Journalism at the University of Iowa for the past two decades, has the advantage or the misfortune of being just such an outsider.  Little wonder, then, that his observations have intruded on Iowans' own sense of exceptionalism; vilified in the state, as a result, because of his characterizations of the towns and traditions and demographics situated between, as he refers to them, the once-great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.  Indeed, an article in today's Des Moines Register reports that Bloom, on leave this year and teaching in Michigan, has essentially gone into hiding for the holidays because of the hate mail he has received. 

Like Bloom I, too, am a transplant, having moved to Iowa about the same time just short of 20 years ago.  My relocation brought me from the "mother of all" exceptionalists -- the great nation of Texas -- where I had been born and reared, and I'll admit that I unpacked with some sense of disoriented trepidation.  Yards were small, houses had a conspicuous absence of brick, overages were stored in basements instead of attics, there seemed to be a notable shortage of jewelry, women's hairstyles were small -- even demur, and of course there was snow.  But life as I have experienced  it in this foreign land has been blessed and good.  There have been opportunities along the way to move, but I have stayed -- not long enough to become an actual "Iowan", of course, but long enough to feel gratefully at home and appreciative of the people and places and sensibilities that surround me.  I like it here.  In fact, I have just sunk an even deeper set of roots here with the purchase of an acreage and a home "on the land."

All that said -- or perhaps because of those details -- I read Bloom's observations a good bit more charitably than most apparently have.  As far as I can tell, he has his facts straight, and of the data essentially speaks the truth.  We may not like having all these dingier details spotlighted for the world to see, but it is hard to argue with the assessment that they are, in fact, our details.  Indeed, I have heard much the same data named and lamented in public and casual conversations as long as I have lived here -- the drying up of small rural towns, the forced consolidation of declining school districts, the declining population, the "brain-drain" that is the departure of our young for "sexier" locales, the deterioration of infrastructures, the departure of manufacturing jobs for cheaper labor south of the border, and of course an often-forbidding climate.  Did Bloom write anything that even the governor himself has not decried, or for that matter virtually every mayor in the state?  Not that I saw.

Bloom, I think, got the facts straight; it is the spirit -- the ethos and the pathos -- he got wrong.  Iowans would contend, I suspect, that they are less defined or described by the data of our circumstances than by the essence of our community.  Frankly, I'm not sure that's different from any other city or state.  We are certainly not less than our demographics or economies or climates, but we are just as certainly more.  Except for the most parochially delusional, Iowans look out across the landscape of their lives and see the same realities as those listed by Professor Bloom, but simply don't recognize themselves in his characterization.  The two dimensions of his altogether dispassionate observation are, I would argue, unassailably accurate; they simply overlook the more revelatory third dimension of social and cultural intercourse that colors and animates the living of a people's life together.  In culinary terms, Bloom accurately listed the ingredients of our cultural recipe; he simply botched the way the finished dish actually tastes. 

The ingredients, to be sure, aren't unimportant; but it is, after all, the taste that one finally remembers.