Iowa Hate: Quick Meme Stephen Bloom

Also, for an extra dose of funny, Raygun does it again.

UPDATE 3:15 p.m. 12/14/11: Same pic, different meme; even better.

Iowa Hate: Professor Stephen Bloom edition

UPDATE 3:30 p.m. 12/13/11: Hey, quit picking on poor Stephen Bloom! He doesn't like all the mean emails calling him names. He wouldn't do that to yoooouuuu.

Also, Raygun continues to be awesome.

Also, check out the Combat Blog, as Dan Brooks says it better than I can. #thnx

Original post:
This one is so hateful, even the Des Moines Register noticed.

When Obama spoke of those clinging to guns and religion, he was talking about the Iowa hamlets that will shape the contours of the GOP contest

Oh. Well. I didn't know we were fightin' dirty right off the bat.

*takes out switchblade*

OK. I'm ready.

The offender: Stephen G. Bloom (oh please, using your middle initial is like putting "esquire" after your name), a professor at the University of Iowa who has been here for 20 years. As any good Iowan knows, not being raised up here makes you an outsider, no matter how many years you've been here.

Wanna know how we came up with that logic? Because, no matter how many years you're here, you're still likely, at any time, to spew horse manure the likes of what you'll see from Bloom.

The offense: The entire article linked above. Really, if you wanna go read the whole bloated, rambling piece of what passes for "commentary" over at The (We Should Really Know Better) Atlantic, bastion of East Coast snobbery, and you've got about 20 minutes and a desire to be filled with rage and SMH giggle fits, be my guest. It's hideous. A snippet:

Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated[sic]) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that "The sun'll come out tomorrow."

It's no surprise then, really, that the most popular place for suicide in America isn't New York or Los Angeles, but the rural Middle, where guns, unemployment, alcoholism and machismo reign. 

Ho. Lee. Mackrel.

I mean, where to start, Prof. Bloom? In an article that, according to your wording, attempts to "explain to the geographically challenged a little about Iowa" (which, by the way, even geography nerds might not know about the geopolitical* challenges), you instead choose to cut down, rearrange and conveniently stereotype every part of your "adopted state."

*(word choice you actually meant)

The giggle fits come when he talks about things that, actually (OK, I've pointed out before that I am not a farmer,) can't really be true. When you walk by corn fields, you hear popping? Can anyone else verify this? (UPDATE: Corn does not pop.) Or was this just BB guns aimed at the holier-than-thou Bloom, who also claims that everyone asks if his dog (presumably, a lab) is a good hunting dog. Which, fair question, Bloom. Is he? Because if he is, he'd probably be happier running around sniffing out pheasants than locked up in your Iowa City abode all day listening to the Brahms you left on for him while you're teaching your courses.

What, I'm being unfair? I don't even know the dude? OK. But it's pretty clear he doesn't know me, either. More than once, he calls out my own damn hometown -- once as a "scuzzy river town" and another time, oddly, to make fun of its name. Its damn NAME. So, yeah. Gloves off.

Reached for response by the Register, Bloom is unapologetic.

For his part, Bloom, a visiting professor this fall at the University of Michigan, said that he’s merely engaged in unflinching journalism with foresight, similar to his 2000 book, “Postville.”

“I mention some uncomfortable truths in the story, some unconventional truths,” he said. “Maybe people are not accustomed to reading those kinds of things.”

Maybe Bloom is unaccustomed to having the entire populace of a state he's just unabashedly bashed ream him out. Did he not think we would? Cause we're all just a bunch of elderly, methed-out farmers who aren't actually representative of America?

Or maybe, Professor Bloom, it's because when people read lies, they want to call the person who is spreading such lies out. Lies like "Iowa sucks super hard, who wants to go there/let them pick a president in the caucuses/have anything to do with them? Amirite?" Because that's all East Coasters need, is another reason not to care/invest in us/move here. And that's all former Iowans need, is a reason to convince themselves not to come back here/bring their families back here.

And that's all we Iowans need, is yet another doucher telling us who we are, why we can't achieve and how depressing that all is.

I especially like blogger Rebecca McKanna's take on it:

Does my state have problems? Yes, it does. It has serious economic issues that need to be addressed and which your article suggests no solutions for. Does my state include some red necks and uber-Christians and people who think Michele Bachmann is swell? Yes. But my state also includes millionaires, Pulitzer prize winning authors, social activists, feminists, drag queens and many other types of people.

But hey, why bother with nuance? The Atlantic pays the same for slipshod journalism.

Iowa Hate: "Aren't Iowans cute!" edition

It's pretty easy to spot Iowa Hate a mile away. You're not from here, so you bash us, or you are from here, and you bash us anyway (MINOs, psh, amirite?).

Iowa Hate masquerading as a glowing portrait of our state isn't as easy.

But you can spot the code words: "humble" (they never do anything worth talking about), "quaint" (old-fashioned, behind-the-times) and "polite" (you can walk all over 'em). Armed with those, plus a nice little tone of "oh, we're just beginning to make our home here for a temporary time/maybe permanently, just moved from the Big City, oh aren't these mums so BIG and BEAUTIFUL, we could NEVER grow these in our rooftop garden plot in Brooklyn, could we, darling?" -- and you've got yourselves some patronizing Iowa hatin'.

The offense: The entire article at The Rumpus, a literary online magazine for the literary minded who like literary things and live or are familiar with San Francisco, the better to get the myriad inside jokes the publication posts regularly. (Dear Sugar really is their saving grace, but.)

Here's the lovely introduction, from an article on the Occupy movement coming to DSM:

Des Moines isn’t known as a hotbed of activism. It’s not known as a hotbed of anything really — except perhaps butter cows and caucusing on presidential election years. Iowans practice a fierce moderation in all things, particularly their daily lives: an exciting Saturday starts with a trip to the Farmer’s Market, and if you’re not there by 9:00 a.m., you’ve missed the good stuff (so I hear). The major industry is insurance, which has kept the local economy from feeling most of the effects of the recent downturn, and the real estate bubble never really inflated here. Politically, Des Moines is almost the anti-Austin: Austin, Texas is a blue city in a state of red; Des Moines resides in the most Republican county in the state–but is represented in Congress by a conservative Democrat.

The offenders: Amy Letter and Brian Spears, presumably a couple, who -- I'm quoting from the bottom of the article -- say they "moved to Des Moines this past summer" and "are preparing for their first real winter." (DISCLAIMER: One time, hoping for some freelance work, I emailed Spears [then-poetry editor there, and maybe he still is] and asked about the pay for reviewing poetry books, which they had advertised -- after he said it was precisely nothing, I politely declined. And that is the entirety of our "relationship.")

I assume Spears and Letter really do mean to showcase the ol' Occupy movement. But ugh-ugh-ugh, the patronizing is patronizing, and I gotta

Break it down:

"Des Moines isn't known as a hotbed of activism" -- OK, Letter/Spears, again, I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt (and assume you didn't much research this assumption) because you're not "from here," but let me just tell you that, yes, actually, Des Moines and lots of other towns around it in Iowa have, indeed, been sort of hot-bed-y. For a long time, actually.

Off the top of my head, I can think of Muscatine's Alexander Clark, who won the right for his daughter to go to her neighborhood school 100 years before Brown v. Board; or Iowa being only the third (and first Midwestern) state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law (that's whites and blacks marrying) in 1851. It was among the first to allow women to own property and was the first state (that's out of the whole United States, bt-dubs) to admit a woman to the bar to practice law. (ooh, we let the womenfolk be activists, too?)

Oh, and there's that whole gay marriage thing. Wonder how that came about. Surely not because of activism, and even if it was, it definitely didn't have anything to do with Des Moines.

So if that's "fierce moderation," then right about now I'm practicing fierce apathy. Moving on.

"Has kept the local economy from feeling most of the effects of the recent downturn" -- don't make me recap this for you. Moving on.

"Politically, Des Moines is almost the anti-Austin" -- what? Are you trying to say that Des Moines is a red city in a state of blue? First of all, most political folks see Iowa as a swing state, going from blue to red and back again as the wind blows. While Eastern Iowa is more blue, Western Iowa is very red. Central Iowa, where Des Moines is located, is really the swing factor. Secondly, Iowa's "blue territory" is concentrated in -- surprise, surprise -- its urban population centers: Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids/Iowa City, Waterloo/Cedar Falls and - weird - Des Moines, where the city tends Democratic.

But beyond the incorrect line, what Letter/Spears are really trying to say is that Austin -- imperceptibly cool, live-music friendly, hipster paradise Austin -- is exactly what Des Moines is not. Where Austin attracts a liberal crowd to a conservative state, Des Moines is supposed to be a conservative hotbed? In a liberal state? I think you're thinking of San Diego.

In reality, Des Moines is politically complicated, and -- just like the rest of Iowa -- not only capable of thinking through the issues and deciding based on the evidence (the markers of a good swing state), but of making decisions before the rest of the country because it's the right thing to do. Which doesn't make Des Moines the moderate anti-Austin, or whatever. It does make them activists, in the truest sense of the word.

Occupy Des Moines? I'm surprised we didn't think of it first.