Iowa Whole Lotta Nothing

On what we are owed and what we have lost

I am in Iowa at the house that Grant Wood painted in American Gothic, my reflection in its windows staring back at me like a guest at my own funeral as an elderly man offers me a pitchfork —

I am in Iowa finding Keokuk geodes, the most Midwestern of minerals, bland and brown on the outside and crystal chaos within, visible only to patient hunters who don’t take the world at face value —

I am in Iowa at America’s oldest mosque, the imam showering my children with Ramadan candy as I read an article from the 1936 Cedar Rapids Gazette about two local boys done good by mastering the Qur’an —

I am in Iowa eating a very large pork tenderloin on a very tiny bun, the surest sign you have entered the Midwest, as a volunteer from the headquarters of a doomed presidential candidate says, “Welcome to Waterloo!” —

I am in Iowa in a field of boomers weeping for Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, whose plane crashed here in 1959, the Day the Music Died —

— And that haunting resonance follows you through Iowa’s hills and prairies, that sweet smell of fall that still spells death, those Iowa fields of dreams from the time people still had dreams, before a combine harvester reaped America’s soul.

I am in Iowa but there is no way I’ll cover the caucuses. I don’t care who wins.

I already know who lost, and it’s me. And you. And the rest of us.

Iowa borders the most boring part of my state. I shouldn’t say that — in the 1830s, Iowa and Missouri fought something called “The Honey War” where men clobbered each other with swords and sausage makers until the Supreme Court weighed in on proper beehive locations — but it’s true. Northern Missouri is flat and farmable, while southern Missouri offers up ancient rock piles with names like “The Devil’s Honeycomb.”

Iowa is not boring, though. It is full of mystery. It is a geode unto its own.

Pundits and politicians like to go to Iowa to “take America’s pulse”. Iowa likes them to visit so it can take their money. Then Iowa wants everyone to leave, because Iowa is inscrutable.

Iowa’s most famous painter, the mischievous and multifaceted Grant Wood, made paintings about Iowan inscrutability that outsiders did not understand, rendering them even more inscrutable by accident, and thus proving his point.

Iowa is an inside game, but not for DC — for Iowans.

Why are we still having caucuses in Iowa and pretending it says something definitive about Iowa, much less America? Why is a heavily white and rural state believed to be best for an election kickoff?

Those are the questions Americans used to ask, before the attempted coup and repeated unpunished threats by candidates to assassinate public officials.

Now we ask things like “Why is the US the first country to let an indicted seditionist run for president again? If you don’t punish an attempted coup, what stops there from being another one? Who is protecting my vote? Why is treason no longer a crime? Why are my choices between a genocide aficionado and a career criminal who has proclaimed his intent to be dictator? Why did Biden enact Trump’s platform? Why are they pretending to be rivals when they are two sides of the same counterfeit coin?”

*          *          *

I remember waiting for the Iowa Caucus results in 2016 and 2020. They seemed important then.

I spent early 2016 warning that Trump was a mafioso who would rule like a Central Asian kleptocrat and was mocked for saying so. When Ted Cruz won the Iowa Caucus, I felt hope that the Trump train may be derailed, even though what would defeat Trump was Cruz, and what would defeat Cruz was Clinton, and none of that was good.

But at the time, Trump was a unique threat.

Now he is a ubiquitous threat even when absent. He has spawned boring clones, a chain of dolls cut from tracing paper, flat pale demagogue ghosts. The fringes were pulled to the center, the center was pulled to the right, and every politician sounds like Trump because they think his impunity is contagious. They think it’s something you can catch, like covid, only instead of killing you, it kills the rest of the country, so there is more left for you to steal.

Accountability has vanished: a choice made by the institutions that pretend to fight Trump while abetting him.

I don’t think accountability was ever truly there, but it had a more convincing facade. People noticed its absence instead of being shocked by its presence. More saw lack of accountability for what it is: a betrayal of the American people, a conspiracy against the public good.

Now lack of accountability for criminal elites is marketed as “just the way things are”. Those who demand better are denigrated for refusing to accept mafia state rule.

By the 2020 Iowa Caucuses, fewer powerbrokers were laughing at the thought of Trump as an autocrat. Most admitted he was a criminal, though journalists would not explain why they refused to emphasize his criminal history to the public when it had been documented since the DOJ first investigated him in 1973.

What the pundits remained reluctant to discuss was the threat of a coup, even though Trump’s plot was announced on the internet and was the same as Roger Stone’s “bloodbath” backup plan for 2016.

Officials publicly ignored the planned coup like they did the strange new virus from China, the one that made me nervous when I saw voters gathered in small caucus spaces.

In 2020, there was some mess with tallying the Iowa votes that suggested shenanigans, and the punditry got wound up on that. But it was the plague and the coup they should have been watching. I cut them slack: it’s not their fault they had entered a crossover of The Dead Zone and The Stand and did not know it.

2024 is our first post-coup (which never ended), post-covid (which never ended), post-truth (which never ended, because I’m still telling it to you whether you want to hear it or not) election.

*          *          *

I could drive to Iowa easy. It’s only three hours north. I could meet in real life the jerks who once filled my television screen, back before I gave up on television.

I could feel a cold more brutal than the Arctic freeze, the cold of a dead political planet. It is inhabited by phantoms of democracy who go through the motions, knowing full well that this is all wrong, this is unprecedented, this is unpunished and undeserved. This is reality show representation that reneges on what we are owed.

Truth. Rights. No man above the law.

The 2024 election is a pale horse race for the American political apocalypse. You cannot run against an existential threat three times. The third time you are just living inside one and not admitting it.

Everyone is running — from death, from despair, for president.

Running down dead-ends paths in a corn maze of hollowed husks. Every Midwestern corn maze has a raised platform for the people who get lost, so they can pinpoint where they went wrong and walk back and fix it. I’ve stood on that platform for nine years, telling folks how to turn around, but they keep meeting the same dead ends.

Because after a while, the maze gets comfortable. The maze becomes home. They get tired trying to navigate an exit, and settle for being the hollow men, the stuffed men. A scarecrow with a straw poll, looking for a brain.

If you leave the maze, there is a field of possibilities. This is Iowa: if you build it, they will come. But no one powerful seems to want to build good things anymore. They want to raze and kill and steal.

I’ll find out who wins, I suppose, and it won’t matter to me much. There is a bigger picture to look it, and it’s by Grant Wood. Not a famous picture, not American Gothic or his many tributes to hot farmers tilling the soil, but a quiet meditation.

The painting is called The Usual Place. He painted it in 1919, which means he painted it during a pandemic. It is of a wooden house and a barn in fall, everything drenched in reds and browns.

With one exception. In the background, in the center of the painting, is a lone white cross. It looks like a grave. It makes me wonder, given the timing, if this is a picture of a home that lost someone.

I do not know much more about Wood’s painting than this. It is in the art museum in Davenport, and I reckon I could learn more about it there. Maybe I will visit Iowa after all.

But I will go for something worth my time, something American in a way I recognize. Scenes from an ordinary life rendered extraordinary by those who live it: sad and sweet and true.

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The Usual Place

The American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa. Photographed October 2022.

America’s oldest mosque, photographed June 2018

Plane crash site in Clear Lake, Iowa. Photographed July 2019