Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
President Donald Trump took over the TV to tell the world that he intends to bomb Iran back into the Stone Age. God Bless America.
And YABADABADOO!
I had been thinking that I might be losing my fastball, but this guy lost his marbles somewhere back in Bedrock. Holy senile, Barney!
Aw heck, we’re all killing ourselves in the bye and bye, anywho.
What does a fellow do, losing his teeth and his friends, but drive around the lake in search of his lost youth? There’s the Cobblestone Inn. I might have left it in a booth in there. Willie is still singing on the radio. He wants to get back to the basics with Waylon, because money makes a mess of things.
When it comes to culture, I am of the Stone Age. Never heard of Bad Bunny before the Super Bowl, and I cannot remember what teams played. I thought Hillary Clinton would win. Clearly, I should not manage a news operation. Increasingly, I don’t. I hang onto a title like a Mountbatten in the House of Windsor.
It appears I have nothing to do today, a goal I have been working toward since my first job picking up trash at the Vista Theatre 57 years ago with Guy Colvin. So I go into the office to get in the way. Son Tom does a great job managing the news, while I remain comfortably out of touch sequestered in the commentariat. I talk NCAA pool results and, having worked up an appetite, leave so something can get done.
Trump should recognize that he hasn’t much time left. He looks awful and sounds worse, buggy as a Middle Eastern preacher. He could afford MLB.TV and watch the Twins, unlike me. He could take it easy and golf some more.
I will be 69 next month. I was raised by cartoons where Wile E. Coyote blows himself up with Acme dynamite trying to spark regime change with the Road Runner. Trump never got the moral of the story: You can get hit on the head swinging your own anvil.
Brother John is older than I, and does not live on cheeseburgers and Diet Coke, and he can’t put in a full day of work. You wouldn’t want either of us itching the trigger. We are safe enough cruising Bel Air Drive at 23 mph listening to Willie and Waylon, holding up that huge pickup on our back bumper itching to get nowhere fast.
Water runs over the dam, bound for the Gulf of Mexico. I am homeward bound. It’s a good place to be, if Iowa doesn’t kill you just from breathing. You are reminded of the past in gauzy glimpses of messing with chubs in Shorty Lawrence’s bait tanks. Five decades ago I was a college kid in St. Paul when the Americans were taken hostage in Iran. I recall sitting in a classroom desk where I heard the news. We were scared of being drafted.
Now I have a chair that can fling me to my feet, and we are still fighting with the consequences of regime change from when we helped install the Shah to keep hold of the oil for British Petroleum.
Pounding rocks all these years for the oil.
The petrochemicals are worth killing for. They might be killing my family and friends. It’s everywhere, in the air from the spray and the water from the leaching and the plastics in our innards.
We’re bombing Iran back to the Stone Age for that.
I am feeble but I can figure that much out on a drive around the lake. After my visit to the office I took a fitful nap and walked the dog. Ed Norton of The Honeymooners worked his way up from the sewer to the street. I earned this.
Trump earned a break, too. He stole it the honest way, right before our eyes. Now he has plenty. He knocked off the dictator of Venezuela for the oil, and a few layers of ayatollahs — a productive few weeks for someone obsessed with legacy. Not everyone can bulldoze the East Wing of the White House. Not everyone would join a holy war with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Not everyone can wreck an economy and unravel NATO in a matter of months. Time for him to relax and enjoy it.
Roll away the stone on Easter with a pledge to rain Hell on Iran if it doesn’t open the (bleeping) Strait of Hormuz, with a sneering nod to Allah. Bonkers, Barn. Roll around the lake in an electric car. Wind turbines line our horizon. White tanks apply anhydrous ammonia distilled from gas. Teal fly through. Old men drive on. Or so they should if they have their wits about them.
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, ” released by Viking Press in 2018, and “Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World,” released by Ice Cube Press of North Liberty, Iowa, in September 2025. Email times@stormlake.com.
