I still remember the characterization.
Living out of state at the time, I had been contacted about considering a vocational opportunity in Des Moines. I knew nothing about Iowa, and even had to consult a map to situate it in my cosmos. A friend who had until recently lived in Iowa called to check in on my consideration, and to counter any apprehensions I might have about living here.
“Yes, they are all driving tractors,” she reported, “but they are listening to NPR inside the cab.”
Of course, even then it was hyperbole. Iowa’s farmer-driven identity has steadily given way to inexorable urbanization – a transformation already well underway by the time the movers unpacked our boxes in the winter of 1993. But if there were fewer tractors than my friend had led me to believe, she was right about NPR. Iowans, I would soon discover, were sharp, intelligent and actively aware citizens who eschewed easy labels. Slightly right of the political center, Iowa had nonetheless a reputation for independent thought.
Before the rest of the country deigned to recognize indigenous peoples as “human,” the Iowa Legislature bucked the prevailing federal statutes and sold – with title – land back to the Meskwaki tribe – implicitly if not officially acknowledging personhood. It wouldn’t be the last time Iowa would lead the way with imagination. In 1873 the University of Iowa Law School became the first in the nation to graduate a woman. Iowans may not have invented the community college system, which was trialed in Illinois in 1901, but we quickly recognized the merits of the idea, establishing the first of our campuses in 1918. Decades later, Republican Robert Ray was conspicuously alone among his gubernatorial peers in the country in responding to President Carter’s plea to states to receive refugees, welcoming desperate refugees from Southeast Asia and establishing a state office of Immigration. Decades later, Iowa broke new ground again by dismantling the legal obstacles to same-sex marriages. When I moved to town, and for years to come, we were a pragmatically “purple” body politic, with a U.S. Senator from each major party, a divided statehouse, and Governors both Republican and Democrat.
Public education was a high value statewide, with a passionately defended preference for local control; insisting that the best decisions for our kids are made by those closest to them.
And then we began to change. I’m not enough of a social scientist to pinpoint a date or a cause – perhaps we simply succumbed to the same debilitating infection of ideological certitude that has swept so much of the country. All I know is that my beloved adopted home – thoughtful, independent, common-sensible Iowa – has become sedimented into a dry, crusted and lifeless ideological aridity. Suddenly the “state knows best”, wrenching local control away from communities and school districts. At a time when our leaders are fecklessly flailing with managing a localized global pandemic, the State Legislature is meanwhile debating a “bathroom bill”, reverting public consciousness to a fixation on genitalia at the expense of human beings; proposing a return to the non-efficacious barbarism of capital punishment, stripping professors at state universities of tenure, enshrining gun rights in the state constitution, and strangling women’s right to an abortion.
Meanwhile, when the nation’s Capital was invaded in January with insurrectionists destroying and defacing “the People’s House” and threatening assassination – a crisis I would like to think superseded bathroom talk - what did we hear from our leaders?
Crickets.
Nothing.
I wrote our two U.S. Senators at the time to solicit their views, and eventually received nothing more than boilerplate drivel by way of response.
In the end, it wasn’t complete silence. In response to a New York Times reporter’s question about the Impeachment Trial of the ex-President that grew out of the Capital invasion, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst described it as “a total shit show”.
Oh my. We seem stuck in the bathroom.
I don’t know what has happened. We Iowans used to be so reasonable, intelligent, and articulate. In place of all those our intelligence, our morality, our compassion and our acute perceptiveness have, in recent years, fossilized into ideological stone. And it isn’t pretty.
What will loosen the sedimentation? I can’t help but believe that it will start by talking less and listening more; preaching less and discussing more; honoring the voices of each other. There will necessarily be required an excavation of the kind of humility that begins with the presumption that we have more to learn, more to understand than we have heretofore comprehended. Change occurs best, it will be good to remember, in the midst of genuine community where minds are moved by the winsomeness of our arguments, not constrained by the forcefulness of our office.
And failing all that, perhaps it means climbing up for a long tractor ride and tuning the radio dial back to NPR.
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