Fern and Joe: On the Road
Fern: When did we go on that Iowa road trip with our friends? I don’t remember the month, but I know it was during the Before Times.
Joe: The before times?
Fern: You know. Before Trump was president. Before Covid. Before the Supreme Court took women back half a century.
Joe: Yeah, sometime in the Fall. We went to that clock museum. And a trout hatchery. And someplace that served Iowa’s best pork tenderloin. Went to that covered bridge. The weather was good. We had a really nice time.
Fern: Did you know that Robert Waller and I had the same New York agent for a while? He used to publish nature essays in the Register that were pretty good. But the book was awful. The Bridges of Madison County. What a phoney-baloney romance. The hero was monologuing for pages.
Joe: That was before we had the word “mansplaining.” As I recall, you were reading in bed and threw the book across the room.
Fern: I always thought Iowa was beautiful though. The gentle rolling hills, the big sky. I even like the mechanical wind turbines dotting the landscape.
Joe: It’s different, taking a road trip in the state you’re living in. You see things more without the impetus to get someplace. I took some pictures that I’ve used in my paintings.
“Green Pastures” by Joe Geha, acrylic on Canvas 30’x40’
Fern: But that trip was also tainted for me. In the Before Time. When we didn’t know better. All the Trump signs. Big ones on barns. The small towns looked poor. Main streets with boarded up stores. I think I counted three signs for Hillary and there were so many for Trump I stopped counting. I was so upset. When we came home, you assured me he wasn’t going to win, remember?
Joe: I’m glad I wasn’t asked to bet the farm, because I would have, I was that positive. How could he win? I thought if I can see through this con artist, surely everyone else could.
Fern: Then again, you never watched The Apprentice. Everyone in New York knew Trump was a bullshit artist. He got less than 20% of the votes in Queens, the New York borough where he grew up. Less than 20% in Manhattan where he lived and did business. What does that tell you?
Joe: That the people who knew him also really knew who he was. Iowans must have thought he really was a businessman. They believed that.
Fern: I used to be proud, telling my friends and family back home that Iowa was a progressive, fair-minded state. Even before Obama. Or before Iowa became the first Midwestern state for marriage equality. I was impressed long ago back when we had one of the most liberal senators – Tom Harkin – and also one of the most conservative. But to my mind, Grassley always seemed like a good conservative. You know, the thrifty farmer who wasn’t going to pay for gold-plated toilets in the military. He was one of the only Republicans who voted against the Gulf War. I think the Register quoted him: No Blood for Oil!
Joe: So what happened? What changes a person like that?
Fern: He wanted to win, I guess. But also what happened to Iowa?
Joe: I can’t help feeling there was a willful ignorance on the part of Iowa voters. And it had a long, slow build-up: the farm crisis of the 80’s, the closing of manufacturing state-wide, the outsourcing of jobs. What remains is the anger of the left-behind, the so-called deplorables. Plenty happened to Iowa. And to America beyond. In a way, four years of Trump was like revenge.
Fern: Conservatives made liberal a dirty word. And socialism worse. But isn’t it a kind of socialism that gave Iowans farm price supports?
Joe: And all of us Social Security and Medicare. And highway systems and the minimum wage.
Fern: Yes, the stuff that helps people.
Joe: Remember years ago, when we vacationed in Mexico and rented bikes and every so often, we’d have to get off and walk because the roads were so bad. The road was smooth for a while and then there were ruts and giant potholes. It was because the road was privatized. People paid for the maintenance of the road only in front of their own property. Socialism is a scare word conservatives have used against every advance the people have made for collective good.
Fern: Don’t forget public schools. Iowa used to have the best schools in the country.
Joe: I support public schools, but I don’t know about them from experience. I went to Catholic school from elementary through high school: Four years of Latin, four years of science, four years of math, of literature, of French. And religion, four years of that, too. And I had hours of daily homework! In four years of high school I never had a single study period. First semester at university, I couldn’t believe what a breeze college was. I did have a great high school education.
Fern: Yes, but your parents paid for it. And the school also gave you scholarships. And if you didn’t do well, you would get kicked out. What I’m saying is, that private schools, religious schools don’t have to accept everybody. Or devise a program for any child with special needs. Public schools do. That’s why they need to be supported with all our public education funds and not have it syphoned off to private schools.
Joe: Which our governor has been trying to do. Another reminder of the Before Times.
Fern: Speaking of which: Did you ever know anyone who had an abortion? I mean in the bad, old days? Before it was legal.
Joe: Fern, I just said I went a Catholic high school. It was all boys. So no, I did not know anyone who had an abortion. I believed it was a mortal sin to have impure thoughts!
Fern: There were two girls I went to college with. We raised money in the dorm. Sent one off on a Greyhound bus who came back bleeding and we took her to the hospital. Another girl I loaned money to. Six hundred dollars in 1968! A few weeks later, a check for that exact amount came in the mail, signed by this girl’s father. No note. So I knew then that she had told him. She wasn’t able to have children after that.
Also in Iowa, a friend of mine told me that she had an illegal abortion over fifty years ago, when she was married and pregnant and with a much wanted baby. But during pregnancy she had contracted German measles. A baby born with the Rubella virus is subject to deafness, blindness, heart damage and mental deficiencies. Today there is a vaccination and Rubella is almost entirely eliminated from the population. But not back then. Actually it was a sympathetic doctor who, at some risk to his professional life, performed an illegal abortion. Right here. In the McFarland Clinic in Ames, Iowa.
Joe: Off this subject. Please. What do you think of Iowa losing first in-the-nation status with the Iowa Caucus?
Fern: Mixed. I went to that first caucus in an Ames elementary school. Real democracy at work. I loved it. Being with all your neighbors and choosing a candidate for president of the United States! It was amazing! What do you think?
Joe: I don’t care, really. I’m not as political as you are. I understand why people would want the caucus to stay, but fifty years was a good run. And to my mind Iowa is not a strong representative state. And seems to be going backward in many ways.
Fern: First in the nation caucus gave Iowa a status boost. Which now it needs more than ever.
Joe: And a new slogan. How about, ”At least we’re not Indiana!”
Dear Fern and Joe, I love the dialogue format! You can substitute Upstate NY for rural and small-town Iowa, same dynamics.
I loved the discussion in your column. You touched on so many things about what has happened in Iowa, to Iowa, to the people of Iowa and it makes me both angry and sad to think of all we had and now have lost. I would amend Joe’s new slogan a bit - “At least we’re not Indiana - yet.”