Except when he’s cashing a paycheck viva its taxpayers.
AP:
A journalism professor derides Iowa and faces fury
IOWA CITY, Iowa – Only a few weeks before the first Republican presidential contest, some Iowans are on the attack like never before.
They’re writing angry blog posts, doing research to discredit their opponent and railing against elites, but this vitriol isn’t aimed at Republican candidates. It’s focused on University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen Bloom, whose article for The Atlantic magazine’s website painted Iowans as uneducated Jesus freaks who love hunting and don’t deserve the political clout they will exercise Jan. 3.
Every four years, some pundits and voters complain about the small, largely white states of Iowa and New Hampshire getting to play outsized roles nominating presidential candidates with their first-in-the-nation contests. But what makes Bloom’s critique stand out is that it came from within and was expressed in brutal terms by a talented writer who has spent years reporting on Iowa.
Add in some factual inaccuracies, sweeping generalizations and stereotypes about Iowans, and you have an outrage that is playing out from Sioux City to Keokuk (which he labeled “a depressed, crime-infested slum town”.)
Bloom said he wrote the article to expose “uncomfortable truths and unconventional truths” about Iowa’s population and economy and generate a debate about whether its four-decade run as the first caucus state should continue.
In the article, he paints Iowa’s cities and rural areas as economic wastelands with little culture. He calls the state politically schizophrenic with Republicans living west of Des Moines and Democrats to the east. He describes rural areas as hotbeds for suicide and filled with the uneducated, the elderly and meth addicts. He calls the Mississippi River “commercially irrelevant” and describes cities along it as “some of the skuzziest” he’d ever seen.
Bloom, who is Jewish, complains that Iowans constantly talk about Jesus and hunting. “That’s the place that may very well determine the next U.S. president,” Bloom, a New Jersey native who came to Iowa in the early 1990s from San Francisco, concludes.
Really, the Iowa-Missouri state line is something of a Mason-Dixon line. Iowa’s original white settlers were New England farmers, and the elite establishment of its body politic, and the politics of its eastern half most definitely, have something of a New England egalitarian anti-White feel. Even the western half Republicans really aren’t anything stellar. It did not surprise me at all when the Iowa Supreme Court tried to dump gay “marriage” on the state.
All in all, this rant is nothing more than infantile stammering in advance of someone not named Romney winning the Hawkeye Cauci. You didn’t read this four years ago when Obama won Iowa’s Democrat caucus goers.
As far as the Mississippi River being “commercially irrelevant?” Stand on the riverfront at or near St. Louis to disabuse yourself of that notion. If the Mississippi south of the Missouri confluence floods during the wrong time of year, it’s going to strand all the barges, and watch what happens to food prices. Hell, that’s why all the riverboat casinos are now “boats” (really, floating buildings) in moats, because the river is so full of barge traffic that it’s too dangerous for extended riverboat cruises. Even when the casinos were real boats and really did “cruise,” they never went very far, a mile back and forth if you were lucky. The Mississippi River between northern St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois is truly The 405 of the world of inland water channels.
