On Iowa

The Editor in Cheese beat us to the punch today in commenting on Verlyn Klinkenborg’s essay in the NY Times on the Iowa brain drain.

Klinkenborg blames it a lot on the state’s encouragement of industrial farming and the resultant slaughtering not only of pigs, but also the family farm and all the real jobs that went with it.

The only part of Iowa I know well, where I grew up, is the example of exactly what Klinkenborg describes. The downtown, which used to house all local businesses, including two department stores, a mens clothing store owned by my girl friend’s father, a record store where you could actually listen to the record before you bought it, and an appliance store where the owner would wait on you personally and give a deal on a portable stereo to an impoverished college student who had once dated his daughter (after the clothes store daughter dumped me.) There was a movie theater that had a Saturday kids movie club for 35 cents a ticket, (Disney movies were 50 cents,) and another movie theater across the street that had a short life as an “adult” movie house before becoming a teen concert venue briefly before being torn down. The tallest building in town–at six stories–was full of doctors and dentists and lawyers.

The upper floors of that building are now condos. The main floor, is now home to a “loan” business. There’s one new office building built several years ago for an agricultural insurance company which was run into bankruptcy by its corporate controllers, destroying the pensions of their employees while enriching themselves. There’s a forlorn four-plex movie house at one end of the erstwhile retail mall, which received government subsidies to supplant the local merchants, then failed itself.

The rail yards which used to handle the farm produce have moved north and west, mostly to Nebraska, where they got a better tax deal, no doubt, from a state that turned Republican before Iowa did. The local food processing companies have long since sold out to Con-Agra. Immigrants were imported (no kidding) to fill the jobs the native Iowans didn’t used to want.

There used to be three funeral homes near downtown. Now there is one big one–part of a chain that has bought them up all over the Midwest. Here, dying is big business.

On the far edge of town, there is some economic activity: a new mall full of chain department stores and, you guessed it, a Wal-Mart. But, the biggest industry in town is now gambling. Like Pawlenty here, they saw gambling as the solution to their economic ills. A lot of jobs were created in the three big casinos, but you know the sort of jobs we mean–the sort that employs the locals to sweep up, make change, deal the cards and clear the buffet tables. The management talent comes from Vegas, and the profits go back there, less, of course, what they cosmetically donate to civic projects like the community college where they train their next generation of food service workers.

All evidence suggests Iowa is the next state about which someone will write a book like Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” The state turns conservative at the same time it is turned into a third world natural resource and labor supply for the corporate grist mill. The sweet smell of the freshly fertilized rolling corn fields has been replaced by the sour mountains of pig shit from the pork factory farms. The sound of the train whistles I could hear from my bedroom window late at night is drowned by the clinking of the slots.