Stephen Bloom, professor of journalism at the University of Iowa, recently published an opinion piece in The Atlantic, titled Observations from 20 Years of Iowa Life. The piece is elitist and condescending and patronizing to a degree rarely seen in prose. My Iowa friends, native and non-native alike, are up in arms, and rightly so.
I’ll offer this as my only comment:
Among his many unjust criticisms of Iowa and Iowans, Bloom relays at the end of his article an anecdote of doubtful veracity about a driver asking him as he walks his dog, “Do much hunting with the bitch?.” The point of the anecdote remains obscure to me.
What bothers me most, perhaps, about the anecdote though, and Bloom’s telling of the anecdote, is that Bloom has not yet, despite his twenty years in the state, managed to grasp the dry wit for which Iowans are famous. When, as he relays in his self-loathing article, a driver supposedly asked the dog-walking Bloom, “Do much hunting with the bitch?,” I myself assumed that the native Iowan interlocutor in the pickup truck was talking to the dog.
Pity that the humor was lost on Bloom.
-Nate Kreuter
BA, English, University of Iowa, ’02, with Honors and Highest Distinction, Collegiate Scholar, ’02
PhD, English (Rhetoric and Writing), University of Texas at Austin, ’10
