Joni Ernst’s Iowa Dystopia

According to Iowa’s new Senator-elect, Joni Ernst, Iowa has changed a lot since I was in grad school there. It’s become a state of godless, selfish, callous, and uncharitable assholes who don’t go to church, don’t care about anybody but themselves, are indifferent to others’ suffering, neglect their own families, and can’t be bothered to give to food pantries or contribute to clothing drives. She doesn’t mention it but they probably don’t put anything in the boxes for Toys for Tots and make the Marines cry.

Things were different when she was a young Hawkeye, of course, and all this heartlessness is the fault of President Obama in particular and liberal government in general.

“We’re looking at Obamacare right now. Once we start with those benefits in January, how are we going to get people off of those? It’s exponentially harder to remove people once they’ve already been on those programs…we rely on government for absolutely everything. And in the years since I was a small girl up until now into my adulthood with children of my own, we have lost a reliance on not only our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations used to do. They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide clothing for those that really needed it. But we have gotten away from that. Now we’re at a point where the government will just give away anything.”

Ernst wasn’t a small girl when I was in grad school, but she was only in junior high, so it’s probable she was thinking about other things at the time, but you’d think she’d have noticed that the salient economic event in Iowa in the 1980s was the failure of thousands and thousands of family farms. She might also have overheard some grownups talking about how the Reagan Administration’s economics team regarded it as a good thing all those families were losing their livelihoods and their homes because it was weeding out the “inefficient.” Ronald Reagan, the great Nostalgic, champion of traditional, small town, family values, supposedly leading America back to the glorious days of his own idyllic boyhood in an America defined by small towns and family farms, friendly Main Streets and crowded church pews, was, with his patented genial chuckle, presiding over an epidemic of foreclosures, the economic devastation of many small towns and the shuttering of countless businesses on every Main Street across Iowa, and the overwhelming of churches’ ability to help the inefficient among their congregants. You’d think someone at Ernst’s church might have pointed out to her that those “wonderful” food pantries and clothing drives were helping people who only a year before were hardworking, self-reliant members of the middle class put food on their tables and bundle up their kids in jackets and coats, hats and mittens before sending them out to wait for the bus in the cold and dark of a Midwestern winter made colder and darker by the need to turn off the lights and turn down the heat in order to save on the heating and electric bill.

The reason Ernst doesn’t see what she remembers happening anymore is that it never happened to begin with, not in the way she imagines.  She’s remembering a desperate response to an economic crisis that wiped out a whole way of life as if it was a barn-raising complete with a potluck picnic and a soundtrack by Aaron Copeland.

I haven’t spent significant time in Iowa since I left there with my MFA, but here in upstate New York people still go to church, still donate food, time, and money to food pantries, contribute to clothing drives, and take care of their families and look out for their neighbors, and I can’t believe that the good folks of Iowa are more godless, uncharitable, and heartless than we are here in the our socialized dystopia.

Clothing and food drives are good things and it would be nice if churches could do more to help the members of their communities who are in need---although I’m not sure how Ernst expects churches to give flu shots and treat cancer---but our problem here isn’t that folks aren’t compassionate or generous. It’s that we can’t keep up. There’s too much misery, too many people who need help. I’m guessing things are the same in Iowa.

Of course, Ernst, who, by the way, paragon of self-reliance and true believer in getting government out of people’s lives that she is, collects at least two government paychecks, one from the state of Iowa for serving in the state senate and the other from the U.S. Army and the National Guard, and will soon be on the federal government gravy train---she’s also a graduate of a state university, but of course boasts of having worked her way through school with no government aid--- isn’t talking about a real Iowa, either the one in the past where she grew up or the one she’s about to represent in the United States Senate in the present. She’s describing fantasylands conjured up out of her dreams and nightmares.

Enst’s epitomizes the qualities of the conservative mindset: Nostalgia, sentimentality, and fear bordering on terror of the complexities, changes, and messiness of real life, combining to create a desire to retreat into a childishly idealized past.

“Things were better when I was a kid. Let’s go back in time.”

You notice how she refers to her past self as a “small girl”? Sentimentalizing, idealizing, and infantilizing themselves is another habit of conservatives. It gives the game away.

It’s not the traditional values and solid virtues of the past they miss and would like to see restored.

It’s their childhoods.

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Updated after mature consideration: It’s possible I was too easy on Ernst by treating her as a mere sentimentalist and nostalgic and not giving her enough credit for her demagoguery. There’s a good chance a thorough perusal of her remarks would turn up qualifiers, implicit and explicit, that let her voters know she wasn’t talking about them, she was talking about THEM, those Others, the godless and heartless and negligent living in places like Upstate New York., because if there’s another thing that epitomizes Right Wingers like Ernst it’s a knack for Other-ing and Them-ifying their fellow Americans.

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For an idea of what life was really like in Iowa when Joni Ernst was a girl see The Farm Crisis at Iowa Public Television.

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Thanks  to Mike the Mad Biologist for the link to Jonathan Chait’s post at New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer, Republican Joni Ernst Admits Why Republicans Really Hate Obamacare.

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Comments

[JD]

So in fact it's "Margaret that she mourns for". Snickering at the thought of Joni Ernst colliding with Gerard Manley Hopkins....

[Linkmeister]

Are there no Iowans who could hit her with a cluestick?

[Falstaff]

Nailed it as usual, Lance.

This is an area where you really have the number of the modern conservative movement, as you seem to every time you turn your mind to this subject. We're in the midst of a nationwide nostalgia-fit at the moment here in Australia too, where a former prime minister's (John Howard, who George W. Bush once called his "favorite Aussie," pronouncing 'Aussie' Ah-See, American-style, instead of Ozzie, the Australian way) book about... in brief, I guess, the Australian Reagan -- Robert Menzies, the longest-serving prime minister in the country's history, who ruled almost uncontested throughout the 1950s and early '60s (he was PM in the '40s for about five minutes before that, until his own party deposed him) is a runaway bestseller that describes the Menzies era as Australia's golden age.

Which is immensely frustrating to me, because Menzies was an ultraconservative liar -- the Aussie journalist and political writer Mungo MacCallum (isn't that a wonderful name?) has pointed out that the man even lied when choosing a name for the political party he helped found, naming them "the Liberal Party" when, in fact, they've been extremely conservative from the word go -- who combined all the worst features of Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan, and it's just as infuriating for me to watch my adopted country go through this mass longing for an imaginary past as it is seeing it happen in the U.S.

All this nonsense is especially strongly-felt in my adopted home state of Queensland, which has always been more conservative than any of the other Australian states. This, combined with the snotty oh-those-thieving-politicians-are-all-the-same attitude most Aussies seem to have about politics in general (it's the same sort of "No, they are NOT all the same, you blind fools!" reaction that leaves me frothing when I look at some Americans' attitudes about same) has left me feeling very angry and depressed of late, especially when thinking about how things are shaping up after the U.S. midterms.

On the up side, though, the conservative fools in charge of this state (who are actually kind of unpopular at the moment, even while everyone gasses on about how wonderful conservationism and the old days are; it's weird) have to call an election no later than June of next year. Would that we could try and get rid of that embarrassment Prime Minister Tony Abbott that fast -- he doesn't have to call an election any sooner than January 2017, and you can bet he'll take all the in power time he can get.

Oh, well. Here as well as in the U.S., we lefty types have to take the crumbs where we can find them.

[Theophrastus Bombastus von Hoehenheim den Sidste]

This all to me is quite amusing in its way, for when I was in elementary school in Fort Madison in the sixties I found the place a state of godless, selfish, callous, and uncharitable assholes who bullied the weak without mercy, didn’t care about anybody but themselves, were indifferent to the suffering of others, neglected their own families, and couldn’t be bothered to give to food pantries or contribute to clothing drives.

Five decades pass with the place as unchanged as the inside of the geodes you can dig from the bluffs along the Mississippi.

[Fiddlin Bill]

I'm inclined to think it's mostly cynical manipulation, not genuine misplaced nostalgia. As far as history, people used to just die--from appendicitis, from an infected tooth, from an early bad heart developed by tobacco and too much lard. The pies were still better, and a cigar after a big meal was a delight. Limbaugh put his money where his mouth is early on, and ate lots of hamburgers for political reasons. I'll be he's stopped now. Ms Ernst should look at a fine book of photographs called "Minnesota Death Trip." That's life without a safety net. Ms Ernst would be too busy raising 14 children to get into right wing politics back in the day. And they wouldn't have let her vote either.