‘That’s the joke of Iowa’

I’ve worked at newspapers in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but I think when it comes to “the full-on hokey,” Iowa has it much worse:

With the caucuses now two days away, all Iowa’s a stage, and all its men and women merely players. “That’s the joke of Iowa,” said Justin Berkley, an Iowa native and the bar’s general manager. “Everyone wants to picture us as an episode of ‘Hee Haw,’ sitting at the counter in the diner or out in the cornfield.”

For the most part, the locals—at least the politically active ones—play along. “The beauty of it is, the rest of the year, everyone will try so hard to be metropolitan, and for four weeks every four years we try darn hard to be hicks,” Berkley said.

His phrase for the Iowans’ playacting: “the full-on hokey.”

PREVIOUSLY: “Seldom has a people been less interested in spiritual self-expression and more concerned with hog nutrition.”

UPDATE: Quit being so elitist, you big-city journalists. Iowa is, in fact, “quirky” and “charming.” Oh, and its people dig their cars out of snow!!!

Comments

[amy]

Pthhbt. I got no hoke on me. Yeah, I get the Iowan ear-scratching "Waal, I'm just a simple kinda guy," crap -- I think every Iowan guy uses it as part of the come-on -- but if you believe or tolerate that crap it's your own fault. And it's not canny, that's baloney. It's lazy, it's born of fear of putting yourself out there and looking like a fool, which, after 15 years here, I suspect is the single greatest mortal fear of midwesterners, next to personal indebtedness. Which is itself not unrelated to foolishness.

Dunno about quirky and charming, but clean, courteous, civic-minded, and (in general) earnestly law-abiding is what I've seen, and liked. It's possible that it helps if you ignore what the sexes do when they segregate.

[Brendan Wolfe]

I reread my post and I'm not sure that it's clear. By "has it much worse," I mean that the perceptions of Iowans are more hokey and unfair than the perceptions of those in the Granite State. And I don't blame Iowans for doing, as Milbank calls it, "the full-on hokey." It's what the world wants, after all. Iowa wants and needs the attention every four years, just as Iowa positively hates the attention every four years.

There is a larger lesson here. (I think. And it's couched in a couple flagrant generalizations. But here we go . . .) You've got a bazillion big-time journalists crawling all over the state following the Next Leader of the Free World (whomever he or she is) and they are pretty freaking blind to the complications and truths of the place they're actually in. They aren't able to get beyond the "Hee Haw" of it and Iowans are just accustomed to giving them what they want.

But if journalists can't get a place like Iowa right, imagine how far off they are in writing about Iraq, Afghanistan, or Russia!

[amy]

sorry, Brendan, I started in rant mode w/o preamble. No, I meant the journalists who fall for it deserve it. It'd be one thing if they'd never read any coverage of Iowa before, but they ought to've, at least on the plane. Then again, I'm no one to point fingers -- when I came out here from eastern PA, I wasn't sure there'd be roads. I had this image of writers in Quonset huts in the snow, & figured I'd want a gun. Or -- nah. My boyfriend did that retarded "Waal, I'm just a simple kinda guy" thing too, the very first day, and if he hadn't laid it on so thick it might've taken me four minutes instead of two to stop ignoring it and tell him to knock it off. And I'm an oblivious kind of woman. The journalists should pick up faster.

[Brendan Wolfe]

I hear what you're saying, Amy. Allow me to amend one small but significant portion of my previous comment: Those big-time journalists? They're not blind to the complications of Iowa so much as their coverage is. I mean, they're smart people, but we live in a media environment that operates according to pre-arranged narratives. So here's the Iowa story that plays out (regardless of reality on the ground) and don't you go fucking with it. This is by agreement of reporters, their editors, their audience, and, of course, by Iowans themselves.

Because I call these pages The Beiderbecke Affair, I reserve the right to all of a sudden insert Bix into the conversation. But the same thing happens when Iowa (and in particular Bix's hometown and mine too, Davenport, Iowa) appears. It's all cornfields and "I'll be!" and no biographers or jazz historians have yet asked themselves what the place was really like when Bix was growing up. They'd be surprised. But Bix operates according to a pre-arranged narrative, and don't you go fucking with it!

[amy]

Re reporters:

http://www.amazon.com/Let-Now-Praise-Famous-Men/dp/0395488974

Yeah, yeah, mediacorp, paycheck, j-school student loans, absence of towering genius and suicidal drive. Excuses, excuses.

Bix: I don't have the know-how to fuck with the Bix narrative. I think you're supposed to say "Golly" a lot, too. That's what the Davenport boyfriend did.