We’ve never understood what, exactly, Verlyn Klinkenborg did to land on the Times editorial board. Besides, what kind of a name is “Verlyn”? Anyway, it becomes clear from his editorial today that his main achievement seems to have been moving from Iowa to California in 1966. Ever since then, he’s been hopscotching around the country taking fellowships and visiting professorships and writing soft-focus expressions of the rural life for people who consider the lawn a somewhat threatening form of wilderness.
We kid. We kid because we love. Actually, Lyn—can we call you Lyn?—finally made us proud to have once dropped his class at St. Olaf College. With today’s solid if unstylish essay, all is forgiven. The meritocracy has been paid off in full.
So, anyway. Lyn writes about Iowa’s new proposal to eliminate income tax for everyone under the age of thirty. This would be an aggressive attempt to put a stop to the “brain drain” that takes Iowa’s finest away from Iowa to places like Minneapolis and California. The problem is serious but the strategy is kinda dumb. As the Klinker points out, South Dakota right next door has no income tax whatsoever, and their brain drain has been just as bad—stemmed only by poaching Minnesota and Iowa businesses away from Luverne and Cedar Rapids. (A fact that has got outstate neo-cons all aroused in recent years.)
No, the real problem is Iowa’s complete immersion in “industrial farming”—the kind of petrochemical agribusiness we’ve been bitching about for years now. But what really compounds the problem is that no one seems to care. Owing to the emigration of Iowan artists, writers, professors, entrepreneurs—even publishing geniuses from Council Bluffs—to greener pastures, there is literally no one left to point out the obvious. This is why we’re half serious when we say Verlyn’s main achievement was moving away from Iowa as a young man. The drain has been going on for fifty years, and that makes a serious, thoughtful, well-networked literary writer originally from small-town Iowa a rare thing indeed.
And let’s just say this, as long as you’re still listening. The Plain People of America would probably profit more if the Borg moved back to Iowa as an example to his countrymen. Scribbling his best work for the indigo pages of the Times, he may as well be writing on the bathroom walls of a Whippy Dip.
On the other hand, we welcome all Iowans here to Minneapolis. We urge you to turn out the lights, and move to Uptown. We have arts! Music! Theater! We have visiting professors! We have SuperTarget! To ease you through this exciting transition, we wish to inform you that it is possible to continue working in agribusiness while you get your bearings here; there are plenty of jobs down the street at Cargill, where through the magic of GPS-enabled technologies, you can remotely spray soybeans and kill hogs and mismanage manure lagoons in the depopulated farming territory formerly known as Iowa.
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