What’s the Matter with Me?

By ART CULLEN

People have been telling us country bumpkins for a long time what’s wrong with us. After awhile, you begin to believe it.

“What’s the matter with Kansas?” William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette famously asked as William Jennings Bryan and the populists challenged the railroads and White’s mercantile class. White became the sage of the prairie and friend of Teddy Roosevelt by telling the rural riffraff to let the folks in Emporia, Topeka, New York and Washington determine their interests.

“What’s the matter with Kansas?” Thomas Frank asked by title of his 2004 book that pondered why these rural folks vote against their seeming self-interest.

Lately, the authors of a book called “White Rural Rage” suggest that we, especially us men, are an imminent threat to democracy. (What about Gov. Kim Reynolds, city boys?) Paul Waldman was a columnist for the Washington Post, Thomas Schaller was a columnist for the Baltimore Sun. They argue that our festering irrational rage will vault Donald Trump back into power. Then, you have Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times, musing that the rural voter is a mystery.

Trump is our fault.

We’re racist.

Okay, I was born and grew up in Storm Lake, Iowa, White and rural. Hog central. I know what I have seen basically since the Reagan Revolution — half as many family farms, the elimination of the independent pork producer, the union busted, wages half as much in real terms.

The Coast to Coast store left downtown Lake Avenue after Walmart moved in. Where Walmart isn’t in smaller towns, Dollar General is.

Storm Lake is better off than the rest of rural Iowa. We’re growing, thanks to immigration. That’s not so in two-thirds of Iowa. They tore down the school in Fonda and the main street is about to fall down in Pomeroy.

It must be us who did this to us. Our racism and what have you, despite the fact that Iowa twice voted for Barack Obama. Manufacturing coincidentally tanked after Wall Street declared us dead in 2008. River towns emptied out and the voters left behind swung to Trump.

How could that happen? How could people vote for former US Rep. Steve King?

Trump said he would drain the swamp — the elite, the power structure, the people who sneer at us hayseeds. “I am your retribution.” They think we are ignorant. King was right when he said that wealth flows from the land, and that we were getting screwed. He went too far in his comments on race, especially. He couldn’t shut up. White Republican voters in rural Northwest Iowa, spurred by the corporate establishment, got rid of him in a primary. Rep. Randy Feenstra more politely represents the money that’s always run things.

Sinclair Broadcasting owns the airwaves. The bar has Fox News on the TV. Facebook fills in the misinformation gaps. One of our oldest voices of moderation, the Centerville Iowegian, shut down, along with so many other weekly newspapers. You are led to believe that somebody stole the farm and the Mexican stole your job, and nobody is there to say otherwise.

The Democrats don’t bother along the back roads. They think rural people are too stupid and wrapped up in cultural grievance to notice. The more they think that way, the more they enhance Trump’s chances.

Trump’s chances are pretty decent, the polls say.

A sure way to win is to assume that people in Buena Vista County cannot possibly know what is in their interest. Deplorable. What brilliant politics to tell me that I must be an idiot because I am a rural White man who believes that the farm bill has become a welfare vehicle for agri-industry. How ingenious to ignore Latinos in meatpacking towns as if they do not exist.

There are three or four chemical companies, meatpackers, book publishers and news outlets that control the food you eat and the messages that are stuffed down your throat. They want you to believe that somebody in Nemaha is a threat to democracy but Goldman Sachs and the Koch Network are benign business interests. The thing about growing up rural and stupid like us is that you depend on your instincts and senses, especially your nose, to know when you’re being served up a plate of bull garnished with sophistry.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2024

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