As someone who grew up in suburban Detroit, I’m used to watching the place where I live be maligned. Not to mention as someone who later lived in Wichita, Kansas and, most recently, in Des Moines, Iowa. I have also lived in Boston and New York so I am very familiar with the coastal view of the Midwest, as immortalized in the famous 1976 Saul Steinberg map of the world for The New Yorker.
So Stephen Bloom’s obnoxious stereotyping pf Iowa and Iowans, especially small town rural Iowa, in a recent Atlantic online piece didn’t strike me as anything new – especially since he wrote something similar (for the LA TIMES?) soon after he first arrived in Iowa City some twenty years ago. But his latest attack has raised a stink here, especially as the Iowa presidential caucuses approach. One of the best defenses of Iowa/Des Moines comes from my old friend Jane Burns. see: http://sneezingthrough.blogspot.com/
TakeBetsywithyou 