{"id":14392,"date":"2011-12-19T06:00:26","date_gmt":"2011-12-19T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=14392"},"modified":"2011-12-19T11:37:54","modified_gmt":"2011-12-19T17:37:54","slug":"gloat-global-insult-local","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/gloat-global-insult-local\/","title":{"rendered":"Gloat global, insult local"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Hey Madge, I soaked in it!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a self-immolating polemic in the Atlantic<\/a>,<\/strong>\u00a0 University of Iowa \u201cjournalism\u201d professor Stephen Bloom (seen mugging at left in what must be a pretentious Palmolive print ad) has succeeded in making \u201creporting\u201d a smug act of self-pleasure. Read it\u2026I\u2019ll wait.\u00a0 Are you\u00a0reveling in his urbane wit?\u00a0 Neither is the rest of the state.<\/p>\n

I loved Postville<\/a><\/strong>, which makes his level of probing insight gleaned from twenty years of experience into the folkways of us ignorant herkamur jerkamur locals all the more indicting. One would think there\u2019d be a statute of limitations on vaingloriously claiming alien status, but nope, he\u2019s apparently STILL NOT ONE OF US.\u00a0 Et tu, Stephen? Bloom turns the dagger against his meal ticket in Karl-Rovian fashion, swift-boating our most enduring strength into our greatest failing.\u00a0 The fiber of Iowan character and honesty is mystically morphed into the bullheaded complacency of the docile, meek, and stupid.<\/p>\n

“Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in education) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that ‘The sun’ll come out tomorrow.'”<\/em><\/p>\n

By that rationale, only an abject failure would choose to gorge himself on the public teat for a score of years in a dank cesspool of human filth, no? Perhaps Agent Donnie Brasco is striving to meet the irony-hungry readership of jaundiced university-town hipster literati. Unlike his target demographic, Bloom won\u2019t be an office temp this summer. He\u2019ll come home from his current stint as a visiting scholar in Michigan (a true, Tom Joad), where he moonlighted by scratching together an egotistical rant on the putrid state of Iowa\u2019s economics and culture, ultimately comdemning the Hawkeye state as a place so woefully backward to not deserve the first-in-the-nation caucus on the grounds that most of the unrepresentative citizenry will probably spend the evening walking into walls and\u00a0groping with childlike glee at shiny things.<\/p>\n

With broad brush, Bloom paints a mishmash of cartoonesque semi-Southern sweeping generalizations and stereotypes that would make Joseph Goebbels proud. In any other pocket of the world, such irresponsible erudition would be condemned as racism or bigotry. Subject matter plays second-fiddle to his own reflected self-glorification when not unlike a beleaguered Jane Goodall, Bloom is seemingly forced on our public dole at a redneck\u2019s gunpoint to entrench himself among Iowa\u2019s mouthbreathing,\u00a0knuckledragging chimps for two decades. If that\u2019s true, kindly lift your barrel off his turtleneck, Cletus, and let this card-carrying member of the sophisticate be on his way.<\/p>\n

Come deadline time and lacking of a poetic capstone to this composition, Bloom\u00a0clumsily contrived a story a la Jayson Blair of how he can\u2019t walk his Labrador around Iowa City without a hayseed\u00a0Elmer Fudd\u00a0inquiring of him how well she can track a scent. Clearly his constitutionals lead him past noted cobblestone-paved coondog haunts such as the New Pioneer Co-op and International Writer\u2019s Workshop.<\/p>\n

Bloom has offered up in defense that he was doing \u201cthe real job of journalism\u201d and if you feel affronted, it is because you want to \u201ckill the messenger, ignore the message.\u201d That\u2019s fine. There is a whole heck of a lot of truth in the article.\u00a0 All of Iowa\u2019s fiscal and cultural ills, incidentally, are not being courageously battled in \u201cKeokuk\u2026a depressed, crime-infested slum town\u201d, but by smug, suede-elbowed cosmopolitans on sabbatical in between lattes as they ride the gravy train in academia\u2019s ivory tower.\u00a0 Ones like Bloom\u00a0who valiantly\u00a0in the face of logic persevere a cush lifestyle of oppressive yawns, having his TAs scribble red letters on top of lazy, uninspired doggerel (remind you of anyone?) and taking semesters off paid to write bestsellers. Were he a Christian (he\u2019s not, a belabored point he trounces in every other paragraph) he\u2019d describe this as his cross to bear.<\/p>\n

The rub is the subtext, where Bloom basks in his own intellectual glory comparatively, finding a way somehow to thrust himself in the role of detached omniscient third-party observer while wholesale impugning the Iowa electorate as thoughtless sub-sentient bovine in a tone that would only makes sense as an expatriate, not your employee.\u00a0 Thank you, good sir, for altruistically miring yourself in the Marianas Trench that is Iowa for so long.\u00a0 We really had no idea your bathysphere went that deep, you cut-rate Jacques Cousteau.<\/p>\n

So what will become of Stephen Bloom? He is parrying off rebuttals such as this one as examples of aforementioned ignorance and anti-intellectualism. He\u2019ll deservedly cower behind the bedrock Constitutional principle of free speech. In Iowa City, he will be protected as a generously publicly-subsidized snob and dandy. In the hearts and minds of the citizenry, he looks like something dragged out of the packing plants he documented a dozen years ago and has rendered and repurposed in every essay he\u2019s written since.<\/p>\n

You see, being a pompous\u00a0(insert your word of choice)\u00a0is inherently and indefensibly un-Iowan wharever y\u2019are in these here Yoonahted States. And like his absurd east-side Iowa City Labrador, that dog don\u2019t hunt..\u00a0 Lookeee ma, I can fabricate a cutsie homespun ending too.. in \u201cskuzzy\u201d Davenport no less.<\/p>\n

Merry Christmas Stephen Bloom.<\/p>\n

Hit the bricks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In a self-immolating polemic in the Atlantic,\u00a0 University of Iowa \u201cjournalism\u201d professor Stephen Bloom (seen mugging at left in what must be a pretentious Palmolive print ad) has succeeded in making \u201creporting\u201d a smug act of self-pleasure. Read it\u2026I\u2019ll wait.\u00a0 Are you\u00a0reveling in his urbane wit?\u00a0 Neither is the[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[1819,1820,1818,1817,1162],"class_list":["post-14392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference","tag-atlantic","tag-iowa-caucus","tag-postville","tag-stephen-bloom","tag-university-of-iowa"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-3K8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14392"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14465,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14392\/revisions\/14465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}