Oh, there’s nothing halfway
About the Iowa way to treat you,
When we treat you
Which we may not do at all.
There’s an Iowa kind of special
Chip-on-the-shoulder attitude.
We’ve never been without.
That we recall.
When Meredith Wilson wrote his musical, The Music Man, he considered it a gift to his native Iowa—“an Iowan’s attempt to pay tribute to his home state.” Beyond the “Iowa Stubborn” lyrics, the musical is rich with Iowa ribbing and caricatures of the severe and moralizing folk who are so zealous to ward off vice (billiards! pool! horserace gambling!) that they fall under the spell of a huckster who sells them visions of River City boys dressed in band uniforms.
Grant Wood, the regionalist painter, gave a similar gift to his home state with “American Gothic,” the much-parodied image of joyless father, daughter, and pitchfork that has become the iconic symbol of the American Midwest. This is Iowa, Wood—who spent periods in Chicago, Paris, and Munich but always returned to Iowa—was saying with a wink.
I’ve also always assumed it’s with a wink that Iowa has life-sized cows sculpted of butter at its state fair.
Being Iowan myself—I haven’t lived there for 12 years, but would never consider myself anything but—I’ve long thought the state’s ability to parody itself (or, really, itself in the guise of the nation’s stereotypes) was one of its nicest traditions. The joke’s not us of course, because we get it.
So then, what to make of the brouhaha that has erupted this week—with exactly the sort of Iowan fury and indignation that the Music Man lampooned—over “Observations from 20 years of Iowa life,” the 5,600-word essay that Stephen Bloom—a journalism professor at the University of Iowa and a New Jersey native—posted last Friday on The Atlantic’s website?
The essay, which I assumed to be less than earnest when I first read it (that clinical title for one), was also less than kind:
Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) 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.”
Iowans did not take kindly to such generalization, and Bloom’s story, which would have otherwise been lost to the Atlantic’s vast trove of online content, quickly became the story. (It is now, a full week later, the most popular story on The Atlantic’s website).
“For squawking at Iowa, University of Iowa Professor now has to duck,” wrote Des Moines Register columnist Kyle Munson. My hometown paper, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, gave the subject two front page stories yesterday and a few more earlier in the week. The Iowa Press-Citizen (Iowa City), The Muscatine Journal, The Daily Freeman Journal (Webster City), and Vinton Today have also all reported—or opined in favor of—the “uproar.” The story crept into the Minnesota press, when a “Hawkeye in Gopher country” criticized Bloom, his former masters advisor, for bad journalism (a number of Bloom’s other students have as well, including Kirsten Scharnberg Hampton in a piece posted by CJR). The din of angry Iowans finally grew loud enough to warrant an AP story yesterday, making it national news.
Bloom, who is lucky to be on leave at the University of Michigan right now, is officially a bad guy in Iowa. (Don’t let those fan letters on Romenesko fool you.) The state’s most outraged have taken to online comment boards calling for Bloom, who they dutifully note earns $105,593 in state taxpayer money as a professor at the University of Iowa, to be fired.
Sally Mason, the president of the University of Iowa, officially disowned Bloom’s article. Iowa politicians have expressed bipartisan disdain for it. And Governor Terry Branstad has stated publicly that it was a “nasty, negative piece.”
As if no one has ever said an unkind word about Iowa before.
Satire is supposed to skirt the border between good humor and nastiness. The more skilled the satirist, the edgier it can get without stepping over the line. It's a bit like bull fighting; painful to watch when done ineptly. American Gothic is such a masterful example of satire, in part because it also conveys affection for its subject. But there is very little humor or affection and a lot of nastiness in writing off a whole population as "waste-oids and meth heads". And it's fine to broach problems that no one wants to talk about, but to point to them as a reason someone's opinions on political matters shouldn't be taken seriously, again, comes across as nasty.
What I find puzzling about the whole thing is that none of the problems he mentions are unique or unusually severe in Iowa. What part of the country doesn't have it's own set of endemic economic and social problems and idiosyncrasies? If anything they make Iowa more representative, not less, and therefore a good place for candidates to see whether they have chance in the wider election. If that had been the punchline of the whole essay than the rest of it would have made much more sense, and worked better as satire. As it is, I cringe to read it, not as an Iowan, but as someone who appreciates good satire.
#1 Posted by Christopher, CJR on Sat 17 Dec 2011 at 11:13 AM
I think the thing that has disturbed Iowans the most about Bloom's "essay" is his total lack of balance as evidenced by his characterization of ALL Mississippi river cities as "skuzzy" and his persistent references to things of years far past as being the status quo. We don't mind being satirized, but we don't really believe that any of this piece was intended to be satire and Bloom has tried to play it both ways. Caricatures are okay, but his descriptions are often just mean spirited. His Iowa time has been spent living in Iowa City, a few miles down the road from here, which is not in any way similar to his essay and everyone in Iowa knows that. I would characterize the reaction as much more of dismay than anger. Bloom can say and write whatever he believes. Iowans can also react in any way they choose and we will mostly just correct the factual misrepresentaions and let others decide whether Bloom's observations are accurate or fair.
#2 Posted by John Titler, CJR on Sat 17 Dec 2011 at 02:41 PM
If the piece is journalism, it fails because of its (not it's, Ms. Fry) inaccuracies. If it's humor, it fails because it's not funny. Either way, it fails because it's not clear WHAT it is.
#3 Posted by Steve Maravetz, CJR on Sat 17 Dec 2011 at 03:48 PM
It's not the first bad thing anyone ever said about Iowa, but I suspect it's the first time a publication like The Atlantic has held a person up as an expert insider and gave him 5,600 words to say bad things about Iowa. The clinical headline doesn't come off as satire to me — it sounds like Bloom & The Atlantic are trying to set his expertise apart from the out-of-towners who usually cover the caucuses. That would be consistent with the story, which assumes the readers are outsiders who need a guide. I think the claim of expertise (and the legitimacy it's given by The Atlantic) is what made people want to nitpick the inaccuracies and also what made them super defensive.
I guess I never saw Iowans as having a great sense of humor about themselves, but I can easily see how they would be less offended by the American Gothic and The Music Man, both created by people who were born and buried in Iowa and considered themselves Iowans. Despite raising his son there, the only family member Bloom identifies as Iowan is the dog, and after 20 years, he still sees Iowans as foreign.
I do agree the reaction has been shrill/giddy and sometimes a little embarrassing to me as an Iowan. But it's not a shock. Iowa is not like Paris or California or other places that people hear and see a lot about. Iowa doesn't get its picture taken very often. So I'm not surprised they're mad when someone Photoshops extra zits and a big butt and then claims it's an untouched image.
#4 Posted by Erin Alberty, CJR on Sat 17 Dec 2011 at 05:40 PM
Huh. You ought to read what they write about MY home state. Us folks in lalaland are a little more laid back about scholarly essays about our fine-but-flawed Golden State. That's because we have better weather.
#5 Posted by James, CJR on Sat 17 Dec 2011 at 10:40 PM
Here is our show about Bloom’s article:
“Yale talks with four native Iowans about the depiction of them and the state they call home in Stephen Bloom’s scathing and controversial article in The Atlantic Monthly, his motives for publishing it, the response its generated across the state, and its national implications with regards to Iowa’s first in the nation voting status.”
http://patv.tv/blog/2011/12/18/talking-with-stephen-blooms-observations-oniowa/
#6 Posted by Yale Cohn, CJR on Sun 18 Dec 2011 at 10:36 AM
This author is utterly clueless.
Bloom presented his article as factual journalism, but it was neither factual nor journalism. Even calling it satire is giving it more credit than it is worth. It is simply trolling a small state in order to impress what Bloom thought would be just his coastal readers. It seems that Bloom thought Iowans were too stupid to read the Atlantic and so was surprised by the blowback. Bloom is simply an attention whore who received more attention than he expected.
How are Iowans being shrill in pointing out the factual errors and bigoted stereotypes? Iowans have a sense of humor and laugh when something is funny (just like people in other states), but there was nothing funny about Bloom's piece. So, attacking people who one thinks can't or won't defend themselves is considered satire these days? That is sad.
#7 Posted by Benjamin David Steele, CJR on Thu 22 Dec 2011 at 06:11 PM
Well-written satire can indeed be an effective mode of journalism and creative writing but Bloom's comments were neither well-written nor satirical. Rather, for whatever inexplicable reason, he chose to literally bite the hand that has been generously feeding him. I can only guess that he was chided by an East Coast airhead asking why he chose to live and work in a vast cornfield. Rather than correct the critic, Bloom decided to bash Iowa and Iowans. "Hack" and "cowardly"
are terms that come to mind when I consider his possible writing and his personality. However Iowa has and will to continue to survive the attacks of Bloom and his ilk.
#8 Posted by Gerald Edgar, CJR on Thu 29 Dec 2011 at 06:28 PM