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Iowa Capital Dispatch

It’s been a while since I attended an Iowa caucus cattle call. After spending most of Saturday at Sen. Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride event at the Iowa State fairgrounds, featuring eight GOP presidential candidates, I was most surprised by how little things change.

In a lot of ways, it could have been the summer of 2015. Just like this year, the rhetoric from Republican candidates running for the 2016 caucuses was heavy on immigration and government overspending, energy costs, crime at home and dangers abroad.

The national media, this year as in 2015, were obsessed with the wonder of retail politics and wrote very little about what candidates actually said. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis brought his kids and a bouncy house, gave away ice cream and managed to have a few conversations with voters that weren’t painfully awkward. Sen. Chuck Grassley wore socks given to him by Sen. Tim Scott. (Is that some kind of new endorsement by footwear?)

Sue and I were in Washington, Iowa, last month. The purpose for our trip was a high school graduation.

It was a special occasion because the people we joined with in honoring young Cameron, the newly minted Washington High School grad, have been our friends for almost 44 years.

It is important to know that while family and friends gathered to celebrate this milestone in the young man’s life, there was one noteworthy person close to the family’s heart who was there in spirit, because he truly made this wonderful day possible.

That person was the late Robert Ray, Iowa’s former governor, who died in 2018. He is a revered figure in the lives of Cameron’s extended family and in the lives of thousands of immigrant families.

by Art Cullen, Iowa Capital Dispatch
May 30, 2023

Ron DeSantis was railing on about illegal immigration while grilling pork chops at the annual picnic May 13 in deep-red Sioux Center hosted by Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Hull. The crowd cheered him on, knowing full well that immigrants cut the chops and work the dairy barns around Northwest Iowa.

It’s an open secret that the livestock economy vitally depends on immigrants, mainly from Latin America, to put cheap pork on your grill and cheese in your larder. Everybody knows we couldn’t get by without them. Yet we cheer on the most strident anti-immigrant outrage.

What gives? Do they resent that corporations have taken over pork and dairy production? Because they scarcely could exist without immigrants. Help-wanted signs are everywhere. You hear it all the time: We just can’t find help. The Legislature wants you to prove work for welfare with a 2.8% state unemployment rate. It just loosened up child labor laws, too.

In rural food processing hubs like Sioux Center or Storm Lake, it takes someone bent on the American Dream to scoop manure or work in the blood-drying room. Tyson pays $21.50 to start at the Storm Lake pork plant and cannot keep the roster full. How would you like to load turkeys on a truck at 2 a.m. when the sleet whips sideways and that squawking feathery rage is coming right at you?

Yet we clap when someone talks about keeping Venezuelans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Hondurans and Mexicans out.

Donald Trump made fear-mongering over foreigners his theme, and won Iowa handily despite the fact that it is a land full of folks descended from Germans, Dutch, Norwegians and Swedes.

If I hold to be true that absurdity determines my relationship with life, if I become thoroughly imbued with that sentiment that seizes me in the face of the world’s scenes, with that lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of science, I must sacrifice everything to these certainties and I must see them squarely to be able to maintain them. Above all, I must adapt my behavior to them and pursue them in all their consequences. I am speaking here of decency. But I want to know beforehand if thought can live in those deserts. – French/Algerian writer and philosopher Albert Camus

In geology, ‘drift’ refers to all the debris transported and deposited by glaciers or their meltwater, and this glacial garbage in Iowa can be as much as 500 feet thick. Glaciers spread it across the landscape like peanut butter on an English muffin, masking surface roughness and leaving much of the landscape approximately level.

In this part of the North America, little was left untouched by glaciers save a roughly oval piece of plain muffin we call ‘The Driftless’ that covers 20-70 miles east of the Mississippi River from Durand, Wisconsin down to just south of Galena, Illinois. I’m sorry to tell my fellow Iowans (and Minnesotans) that we’re really just Driftless wannabes; our part of the ‘Driftless’ isn’t without drift, it just looks like it. But that’s a story for another day and for convenience I’m just letting that go for now.