A reaction to Stephen Bloom

Relatively recently, Stephen Bloom wrote an article for The Atlantic on how he viewed Iowa. He refers to it as “a place of bizarre contrasts”, mentioning its status as the second state to allow gay marriage, and then spends the rest of the article explaining how very rural and conservative it is.

The thing that got to me the most about this article was not how very rural and conservative Iowa is – there are certainly many conservative things about Iowa and many Iowans, although Bloom himself says at the beginning that it’s a state of contrasts, with a very liberal Democrat as one of its senators – but this sentence here: In a perfect world, no way would Iowa ever be considered representative of America, or even a small part of it. 

Why? Why would a state that is ranked 30^th in population (out of 50, obviously – so just under halfway, and about half a million people off of exactly halfway in the rankings) not be considered representative of America? Why would a state that has one conservative and one liberal Senator not be considered representative of America? And, here’s my biggest question, if Iowa is not representative of America, what state is?

My experience of Iowa – as someone who grew up on the Missouri River, just over the border from Iowa, who has family in Iowa, but who also has family on the East Coast, West Coast, and overseas – is one of the contrasts that Bloom mentions, not just the rural conservatism he focuses on. Do I know people who hunt? Sure. And they then have venison or pheasant for meals the rest of the season. Do I know people who are rabidly anti-gun,vegetarian or vegan, and wouldn’t dream of killing an animal even to eat it? Of course. One of the best places I know to get organic food and vegan food is in Iowa. Do I know people who go to church on a regular basis? Sure. Do I know atheists, Jews, Hindus, Mormons, and people who claim Christianity but haven’t been inside  a church in years? Of course. Towns in Iowa are insular? So are neighborhoods in Nottingham – and, I would imagine, New York.

Iowa has cities – not New York style cities, but only 2% of the US population lives in New York City –  as well as small towns. Iowa has symphony orchestras, and rock concerts, and films. Iowa has public radio and television, and art galleries, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Iowa has a plethora of small businesses as well as big box stores. Iowa has universities and colleges, airports, and the hometown of a former President. This may surprise Stephen Bloom, even though he’s lived in Iowa for 20 years or so, but Iowa has electricity, running water, telephones, and access to the internet.

I also couldn’t help but notice that most of his ridicule was about the older generation of Iowans – at least 50 years old and over. They wear hats, they carry a penknife, they answer the phone with their last names, etc. Somehow I don’t think some of those are unique to Iowa.

But my main question to Stephen Bloom is this: If Iowa, a microcosm of both liberal and conservative, containing elements of both urban and rural, isn’t representative of the US, what is? Should we focus on the eleven biggest states, which Wikipedia says have 56% of the population, and ignore the other 39 with 44%? Do we need to revisit the arguments that led to the House of Representatives having proportional representation while the Senate had equal representation? Do I need to remind him that the US is supposed to be for all people, regardless of creed, colour, or political stripe?

Also, if you really hate it that much, there’s nothing stopping you from leaving. I-80 (I’ve only ever heard it called simply the Interstate by people who don’t have access to another interstate – like, say, I-29 or I-35, also in Iowa – or to distinguish it from one of the many US or state highways that also criss-cross the state, when giving driving directions) is right there. Oh, wait, you say that academia is facing many of the same employability problems that you mention about farming and manufacturing? Funny how that didn’t make it into your article.....I suppose it was just too easy to fall back onto the rural stereotypes that people have been using for the last hundred and fifty years or more.

P.S. If you've read Bloom's article, please please read this one too - it's another, better-than-mine, response.

Thinking about the future

I’ve been reading through the Wordpress.com Post-a-day prompts, and I have noticed that there is some repetition. This isn’t totally surprising, as it would be very difficult to come up with 365 completely unique post ideas. It is often said that there are no truly original ideas - just adaptations and original ways of portraying them - and that is what I’ve noticed among these prompts. It also helps that the vaguely repetitive ideas are spaced out quite a lot, so, if you were doing these prompts in a timely manner, you might not notice. Certainly there’s possibility for wide variation in the treatment of the prompts: later prompts about protesting, for example, pull in reactions to the Occupy movement where earlier ones might be less specific and more philosophical.

One of the trends I noticed among the prompts is thinking about the future.  Write a letter to yourself to be read in a year. Or ten years. Where do you want to be in ten years. Come up with a bucket list. Or a list of life goals. Is 2011 anything like you’d thought it would be in 2001, and what do you think 2021 will be like.

I sometimes think about doing these prompts, but I run into problems. I write a bucket list, but then realise that there’s nothing preventing me from accomplishing some of these things apart from spending my time writing a bucket list (or surfing the internet or watching TV) instead of getting started on things like learning Japanese/French/Arabic or revising my novel. I have a list of books I want to read, and there’s nothing actively preventing me from reading them except my own relative apathy and procrastination.

The other problem I have is just thinking about the future. I learned very quickly that the future rarely turns out like you expect it to. I certainly didn’t expect to end up in Slovakia. I didn’t expect that the only full-time work I’d be able to find with a Master’s degree would be as a barista. I didn’t expect to find Jon. It’s good to have goals, of course, but I have found that setting those goals too far in the future almost guarantees that something will come up to change them.

I can’t think about the future. At this point, I can’t see past February, when my current visa runs out. (Goal for today: at least one job application and compiling the paperwork for the next visa.) I can’t even fathom what my 31st birthday will be like. I certainly can’t think as far ahead as 2021. Will we be married? Have kids? Still be in Nottingham? Still working? I have no idea. It’s completely dark to me. And this isn’t a depression-based thing, either - I don’t think that I’ll be dead or anything. I just don’t have an image for what it will be.

I have goals, of course. I want to stay in the UK, get a non-minimum-wage job, stay with Jon. But those are all either short-term or continual goals, not ticks on a long-term list.

Ramblings about the EU and the Euro

I feel like writing, but I don’t quite have the inspiration or attention span to focus on fiction and/or poetry, so instead I’m just going to ramble. I keep being fascinated by Wordpress’s Post-a-Day topics,  even though I don’t have the discipline to actually do them. So I’m going to ramble based on some of these topics.

First up: The Euro.

Well, more accurately, the EU. The topic as given by Wordpress is “What is the future of the Euro? With all the trouble in Greece, Spain and Italy, do you think the currency will survive? Do you understand why there are multiple currencies in the world? Do you wonder why there isn’t just one kind of currency? Do you think your nation’s money is better looking, or worse, than other nations?”

I’m just going to adapt that to my general feelings on the EU, touching on the monetary issues even though I don’t quite have the expertise to completely understand it all.

First of all, sometimes I have heard the EU referred to as “The United States of Europe”, mostly in a derogatory way. This frustrates me no end, and not because I am from the US. No, it’s because that’s inaccurate. The EU is not like the US is now. It’s so much more like the US was under the Articles of Confederation.

Under the Articles of Confederation, the states were much more like independent countries. They had much more control over both their internal and external policies, and could opt in or opt out of the “national” demands. The national government had a bit of control over defense, but not the range of responsibilities that the current federal government has. In the same way, Brussels has certain responsibilites, but the member states can opt in or opt out of some things. And the Euro is probably the best example of this. If the EU were like the current US, the Euro would be used across the region, Brussels would have the responsibility for minting and regulation, and when one member state went bankrupt, it wouldn’t completely demolish the overall economy. California was bankrupt a few years ago, but the US didn’t completely implode. (*note: this is one of those areas where I don’t have details or expertise to back up my statements - just the vague impressions that I’ve gotten from headlines*)

But, just from living in the UK, I do know that the EU doesn’t have the same control or influence over its member states that the US has over its. At the moment, it’s an alliance, not even close to a nation - more like NATO than the US. I don’t know if it will survive in its current form - the Articles of Confederation didn’t - and certainly the Euro problems at the moment are shaking things up.

I think the Euro will survive, at least within the Schengen group (and, yes, I know that there are a few countries in Schengen that aren’t on the Euro yet). I think the convenience of not having to convert money, for both individuals and corporations, will outweigh any drawbacks or pride issues involved with switching currencies. It only makes sense for a region with no (or almost no) border checks to have the same currency. If you’re taking the bureaucratic hassles out of international travel through a region, take them all out.

The problem with the Euro, as with all currency, is that it’s an intermediary in a barter system, and based almost entirely on trust. We trust that our little pieces of metal and bits of fabric-paper will be accepted in place of actual goods or services. And when we travel, we are assured that our historically relevant bits of fabric-paper can be translated into somewhere else’s historically relevant bits of fabric-paper. And the reason that a global single currency won’t work in the foreseeable future is because of that trust aspect. There are plenty of places in the world right now where there is no trust - not just places like Greece, which is publicly melting down, but places like Egypt where the government is in transition, or North Korea, which doesn’t trust anybody. Until there is global economic trust, there will be no global currency.

The last bit of the WordPress prompt is about currency appearance, something I am also a bit fascinated with at the moment. First, US currency is ridiculously boring. It’s a bit better now that they’ve added colours to some of the bills, but overall it’s one of the most monotonous currencies I’ve seen. I kind of can’t believe that in a country with so much emphasis on disabled rights and access and all - there are Braille instructions on drive-through ATMs - the paper currency is still all one size.

Second, I work in retail, so I handle money almost every day. Every once in a while someone hands over a Scottish note - and once even a note from Northern Ireland - and I can’t resist looking at it, over and over again. I wonder so many things about currency - who the figures are, mostly, and why they were chosen for specific denominations. Whenever I travel, I study the money. Euros can be fun sometimes because, although its a single pan-European currency, the coins are marked with specific countries’ designs, so it can become a collecting mania. Same with quarters in the US, and the newest designs of coins in the UK with the partial shields.

Third, money can be an important cultural touchstone. When I was teaching, I always did at least one class about the currency of the US and the UK (and Canada, when I could find pictures). There are linguistic nuances to money - buck, quid, etc. - cultural differences with prices and taxes, and also just appearance differences.  By going through currencies with my students (and the associated cultural things), I hope I made them a bit more prepared for experiences in those countries, so that they don’t just hold out their hands saying “Your money baffles me,” spend twenty minutes ranting about why a little kiosk won’t take their traveller’s checks, or expect to pay with a $20.00 for something marked at $19.99 in the US.