What is Noheartland?
In the coming days, weeks months into years I will try to make sense out of the place that Iowa has become - a place I don't recognize anymore. Maybe some of you understand - that place that was home doesn't seem like home anymore because it has been torn apart. The decline of Iowa from blue-purple-red has been coming on: it didn't happen overnight. But the rapid turn to the right - as away from the right thing to do and the political right - has turned Iowa into scorched hell scape.Â
Dramatic? Maybe. But maybe you should come along and decide for yourself.Â
...crossing Iowa on some train...
The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers then the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and grey as sheet iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
The persistent notion that Iowa (and the Midwest in general) is special - holy almost - in the narrative of some American dream: the Heartland much like Iowa Nice is a lie. Iowa is Noheartland.
"Go outside and blow the stink off ya!"
- Leo KopsaÂ