THE GREAT STATE OF IOWA has featured in my writings in the past, when – alas! – I was not in possession of the knowledge I have at my disposal today. Indeed, the fact that the Dvorák Memorial, at Spillville, commemorates the Czech composer Antonin Dvorák, who worked in Spillville only extremely briefly in 1893, led me to believe that Iowa was a cultural backwater in which hayrick-haired, hayseed-sucking farmers lolled about chewing the milky bit of grass stems. Indeed, today’s headlines in the Des Moines Register might even add to this opinion, when the newspaper comes out with such issues as:
“Cattlemen say manure rules pose threat
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources has proposed new rules that would ban manure applications between Feb. 15 and April 15 on frozen or snow-covered ground, citing the danger to water supplies from manure that runs off frozen surfaces or melting snow.
The rules would apply only to those open feedlot and confinement feeding operations that have the equivalent of 500 beef cattle, 350 mature dairy cows or 1,250 finishing swine.”
IN MY PREVIOUS JOURNEY into things Iowan I invented, and had masquerade as real and true, an Iowan who represented all of the above slander. I would like to hereby state that there was not one jot or scintilla of truth in what I wrote, and that Iowans are stand-up guys, every bit as stand-up as our own Tony Blair. When the truth is hard to bear, Iowans are there.
“Cattlemen say manure rules pose threat
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources has proposed new rules that would ban manure applications between Feb. 15 and April 15 on frozen or snow-covered ground, citing the danger to water supplies from manure that runs off frozen surfaces or melting snow.
The rules would apply only to those open feedlot and confinement feeding operations that have the equivalent of 500 beef cattle, 350 mature dairy cows or 1,250 finishing swine.”
IN MY PREVIOUS JOURNEY into things Iowan I invented, and had masquerade as real and true, an Iowan who represented all of the above slander. I would like to hereby state that there was not one jot or scintilla of truth in what I wrote, and that Iowans are stand-up guys, every bit as stand-up as our own Tony Blair. When the truth is hard to bear, Iowans are there.
WHAT HAS LED me to this opinion is the bare-nuckled, no-holds-barred approach taken by good ‘ole Charles “Chuck” Grassley, Senator for Iowa, who has stood out among other, lily-livered, weak-kneed, vacillating senators and leaders in proposing a “final” solution for the bounders and cads at the stricken insurance giant AIG. The company executives have awarded themselves $165 million in bonuses despite receiving a multi-bilion dollar government bailout.
IN AN INTERVIEW WITH Cedar Rapids radio station WMT, Senator Grassley said: “I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them is if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”
ALAS, I DO NOT EXPECT A WAVE of belly-cutting, and neither does Chuck, unless he is thinking of finishing swine getting gutted back home, but I welcome further calls for the unscrupulous to fall on their swords rather than take government awards for gross incompetence.
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