Storm Lake, Iowa
I miss Frank Miller. He died a long time ago, when I worked at the Algona
Upper Des Moines newspaper. I grew up with him but never met him. I
learned to read with him.
When the Des Moines Register announced that its Pulitzer Prize-winning
cartoonist died, with an empty box but for his signature, I remember walking
the two blocks to the Kossuth County Courthouse in a daze.
This may seem an overreaction from one of thousands of readers. Or, it may
have been a premonition of how Iowa would change. I think a little bit of
our state died that day with Frank Miller in the Merle Hay shopping mall
parking lot -- not of a heart attack, as he did, but of a dry rot.
THE REGISTER occasionally uses a Miller sketch, as it did on a recent
Sunday with an editorial about urban sprawl. The sketch overpowered the
editorial, which I could only skim. It was an ink drawing of a barn amid
trees, and for me evoked an Iowa I once knew and fear we have lost.
It occurred to me, as it often has, that the great debate in our state is
what we have lost and what we are becoming.
The hog lot fracas is not so much about groundwater as it is about how Iowans
conduct their affars. We always have had manure and flies and cattle defecating
in creeks. We have not had huge corporations owning our agriculture -- at
least not blatantly as it is now. We are becoming a state of hired hands,
a transitory people whose interest is vested more in a 401K plan than in
our neighbors.
We have turned the one-room schoolhouse into a museum site along the lake.
Instead we consolidated schools, dried up small towns, put in computers,
hooked up to the Internet and watched our test scores start to slide. People
who argue against putting cops in the schools here fear not so much a police
state as they do the loss of a civil society. No longer can we control the
occasional hooligan through a football coach.
We drive to Wal-Mart to buy everything we need, and walk Main Street asking
merchants for donations for this cause and that, oblivious to who our neighbors
are and how they eat.
IT TAKES A GREATER man than me to articulate what it is that Iowa
was, just a decade ago, just before the farm crisis, and how it has changed
and depreciated. But I know it has.
The industrialization of agriculture, the depersonalization of communities,
the crazy wave of business and institutional consolidation, all seem to
weave together into an uncomely fabric that apparently cannot be unwoven.
This is not the rolling state of happy working people that Grant Wood depicted.
Maybe it never was. Stone City is abandoned after a brief fantasy.
There had to have been a truth in those colorful, corned hills that produced
the great men and women like Norman Borlaug, Henry Wallace, Harold Hughes
and Ruth Suckow. Today, we produce Robert Waller (Bridges of Madison
County) and Jane Smiley (1,000 Acres), who move to ranches in
Texas and California to dump their spouses.
The Des Moines Register, sold to an out-of-state corporation, is
retracting to its golden circle immediately around the metro area, the state
is funding school technology with revenues from gambling, and the leaders
of the Des Moines chamber of commerce are hirelings for foreign corporations.
THAT WALK TO THE courthouse in Algona took me past a bank that was
grand in its time in Greek revival style. It was bought by United Bancshares
(now Boatman's, I think) and covered up in glass that reflected the courthouse
square.
I remember seeing myself in that glass, and I think:
I knew that place that Frank Miller drew, not so long ago. He probably couldn't
tell me where it went if he were here today. But it would be interesting
to see what he would draw.