Author: Paul Deaton

Categories
Living in Society

After an Iowa Caucus

Another campaign is over.

I am tired and borderline sick.

Tired because I didn’t get to sleep Monday night until 1 a.m. Tuesday morning, messaging back and forth at midnight with a local reporter.

Sick because a good friend was sick, came to our Democratic precinct caucus, and spent a few minutes with me.

The Big Grove Democratic precinct caucus was some fun and a lot of what I expected. I will provide analytics in a future post but here’s what was important: attendees were engaged and respectful. While everyone didn’t get the outcome they wanted, many did.

This was my first time as caucus chair for a large group. In 2016 I was Hillary Clinton’s precinct captain. In 2012 I was chair of Cedar and Graham precincts in a consolidated caucus. In 2008 and 2004 I was caucus secretary. Because of years of public speaking experience dating back to my time in the military I felt comfortable at the microphone and dealing with issues that arose during the event.

I had a great team of volunteers for secretary, registration and crowd control. We started registration a little after 6 p.m. and the line was gone a couple of minutes before our 7 p.m. starting time. I estimated 50 minutes for check in during my planning, which was about right.

Many pixels have been spilled about the new reporting application used by the Iowa Democratic Party. It took me a couple of days to figure out the process, however, by Monday morning I was running test scenarios to familiarize myself with it. I reported our results using it at about 10 p.m. without any issue.

Tuesday I was contacted about a potential on-air interview about the reporting application. MSNBC Field Producer Dan Gallo had obtained a copy of an email thread in which county caucus chairs discussed the application and I was on it. I phoned and told him my story. It turned out to be a nothing burger because from a user standpoint, it worked as expected. That’s pretty boring for television and the on-air interview didn’t happen.

Most of my friends who were caucus chairs in other precincts were tired Tuesday as well. The six and a half hours from arrival at the high school to returning home from turning in my materials to the county party weren’t long. They were intense. Recovery will take a few days.

Tuesday I gave an interview to a student from Northwestern about the caucus. He asked a couple of questions about the application which I said worked from my end. He asked about all the news stories and the then unreported results. I said it’s not my fault the national media had plane tickets booked to New Hampshire and a filing deadline they couldn’t meet. They may have planned to write about the outcomes, but the outcome they decided to write about became there were no results. The narrative was a bucket of malarkey.

People said they wanted more transparency with what went on at the Iowa caucuses. The state party worked toward that end. The new process was complicated and is taking more time for state-wide results to be tabulated. It is transparent. What do you want? This isn’t Burger King where you can have it your way.

The count of presidential preference groups was accurate. We counted four times in our precinct, and reported results in the application and on paper. If it takes more time to report aggregated results accurately, so be it. Accuracy and the paper trail are what matters more than feeding a media narrative.

Attendees in our precinct watched the process unfold and when it was finished, ratified the numbers and slate of delegates to the county convention and our new central committee members. To a person people with whom I spoke left caucus with a feeling they had contributed to the Democratic process. In the end that’s what the Iowa caucuses are about and will continue to be about for as long as we hold them.

I’m feeling better as I write. This campaign is finished and another has already begun as our eyes turn toward the general election. Being tired and sick will pass, it is passing as a new day begins.

Categories
Living in Society

2020 Iowa Caucus Day

I spent most of the last three days understanding and preparing for my role as chair of our 2020 Iowa precinct caucus tonight. I’m ready.

According to the voter rolls we have 462 registered Democrats in Big Grove precinct. More are expected to register at the caucus. Our party affiliations will likely decline from the 562 we had in 2008.

We never know who will show up. In 2008 we had 247, a record number. With the loss of Democrats in the precinct I expect less. We won’t know until registration closes after everyone in line at 7 p.m. is checked in.

I’m seeing a couple of articles saying you shouldn’t “vote” for Elizabeth Warren because then Biden wins. Malarkey!

Reasons people support Elizabeth Warren as I do are complicated. For one night we should stand with our candidate, the one we want to advance in this way too long nomination process, and let the chips fall.

By mid March we’ll know who are the contenders for the nomination. Iowa will have faded into the background. If our candidate is not viable tonight, that’s another thing… one that will be decided in the dynamics of those rooms.

Since I began preparation for my role I’ve been thinking about what Obama said: Respect. Empower. Include.

Those are my guideposts in the crazy politics of the Iowa caucuses.

Categories
Writing

Note from Ravenna

In 1974, when I arrived in London, I had a short list of European places to visit.

Most of my list was the result of an art history class taken the fall semester of 1973 in the then new art museum of the University of Iowa. The art collection was removed during the 2008 flood and never came back to that building.

I wasn’t a good art student, and elected a pass-fail grade versus A – F. My teacher was disappointed when he discovered my choice. I passed the elective course.

Despite my chary engagement as an undergraduate student, there I was in London beginning a 1970s version of the Grand Tour. It was a rite of passage to elevate myself from the blood, slop, bacteria, and gore of two college summers working in a slaughterhouse. It was the same plant in which Father died in an accident. I had rejected the post-college job the company recruiter offered me that spring. It was time to break loose from my local moorings. Once I got to Europe it became clear there were hoards of young people doing the same thing.

A wad of American Express travelers checks was tucked inside the baby blue bag Grandmother made for me, about $2,000. The money came from selling the band equipment and the Volkswagen micro bus used to haul it around. It turned out to be enough cash for the trip.

On the list were the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, Italy. Our art history teacher marveled at them and inspired enough enthusiasm to pique my interest. It was that way for many of the places I visited. It was also an easy side trip enroute to Vienna, Austria where a student I met in Stratford at a performance of Twelfth Night had invited me to stay.

Ravenna was significant for more than mosaics. On the train rides from Barcelona to Rome, along the Mediterranean coast, I met several Italians. They insisted I learn to speak Italian if I would visit Italy. I studied French in college and had reasonable fluency. Learning another Romance language wouldn’t be too hard, I thought. I searched a book store in Genoa for an English-Italian phrase book and found none. I settled for a French-Italian phrase book which served. By the time I got to Ravenna I was able to check into the hostel, order meals, and converse on a limited level without speaking English a single time.

I was concerned about funding the rest of my European trip while in Ravenna and sent the pictured note to Mother. She came through with an American Express travelers check which was waiting for me when I arrived in Amsterdam. It turned out I didn’t need the cash. I don’t recall whether I gave it back to Mom when I returned to Iowa. She kept the note.

No regrets about spending most of the money I had in 1974 on a trip to Europe. A return to the continent seems unlikely today. At least I escaped the slaughterhouse. That will have to be enough.

Categories
Writing

Challenges of a Local Food System

First Spring CSA Share, 2015

Eight years ago I attended a local food summit in Iowa City with more than 80 people. It was an event designed to connect local meat and vegetable growers with customers.

Among the speakers was Andy Dunham of Grinnell Heritage Farm. He spoke about the challenges of scaling his carrot production to meet consumer demand at New Pioneer Food Coop in Iowa City. It made no sense at the time they couldn’t produce more, although eventually they did.

Yesterday Dunham revealed New Pioneer and other grocers weren’t buying as much organic produce as they had. Because of decreasing grocery sales and Iowa’s unpredictable weather made worse by climate change, they are exiting their community supported agriculture business and what they characterize as a broken local food system.

It was a surprising decision from a farm many considered to be vibrant and sustainable.

For the full story about changes at Grinnell Heritage Farm read Cindy Hadish’s post on Homegrown Iowan here.

The idea there is a functional “local food system” is a story we tell ourselves to get through the challenges of raising and marketing locally grown meat, vegetables, fruit and flowers. The challenges of sustainability for a community supported agriculture project don’t go away be saying these three magical words. It’s hard work, subject to the vagaries of weather, cultural adaptation, marketing, and endemic farming challenges.

Each farm runs differently with unique revenue streams from CSA shares, meat sales, restaurant and grocery store sales, farmers market sales, government programs, pasture rentals and more. In the world of big agriculture operators carve a niche of customers and product lines to keep themselves financially sound. It doesn’t always work.

Grinnell Heritage Farm is a USDA certified organic fruit and vegetable farm. Most local food producers are not certified organic because of the expense. Many follow organic practices but can’t afford, don’t want, or don’t feel a need to get certified. Most consumers can’t tell the difference in farm products. For Grinnell Heritage Farm to downsize is a bad sign for the future of organic farming in Iowa. If they can’t make it, who will?

Climate change is real, it is happening now, and we haven’t seen the worst of it. The last two years were hell for local food farmers used to predictable growing seasons. Variation from year to year is expected, but not like this. Larger operations like Grinnell Heritage Farm feel the brunt of changing climate.

Consumers are a fickle lot. Yesterday I calculated spending about 24 percent of our 2019 food budget on locally sourced fruit and vegetables. We buy more local produce than most regional consumers. We also have a large garden not included in my calculation. A bag of locally grown carrots is stored in the crisper drawer of our ice box yet I buy USDA certified organic carrots at the wholesale club as well. I haven’t been able to grown enough carrots to meet our needs and the ones from the store are cheap and serve culinary purposes. I know the face of the farmer on the local food I buy but they and I combined can’t supply our household with enough carrots.

The changes at Grinnell Heritage Farm were surprising, but not completely unexpected. With growth in the market share of organic produce, large corporations are getting involved and comparatively smaller operations are being pushed out. Whatever arguments one might have with Dunham’s characterizations of the marketplace or his assessment of the impacts of climate change, he and his family are doing what they believe will save their farm. That’s what all insurgent local food producers do.

As consumers we need to be ready to support local food farmers or decide we don’t care. Either choice has ramifications for our local food environment. I can’t call it a system today because a big part of it will be lost with the exit of Grinnell Heritage Farm from the marketplace.

We had hoped for and worked toward a local food system and could imagine it. The dream hasn’t proven to be sustainable yet.

Categories
Writing

Food Policy Council

On Thursday, Jan. 23, the Johnson County Supervisors appointed me to fill a vacancy on the Food Policy Council.

There were eight applications for the position according to county records. Supervisor Janelle Rettig  made the motion to approve, with Supervisor Lisa Green-Douglass seconding. All five supervisors voted for my appointment.

I accepted and look forward to my first meeting. Now my part of our work begins.

The Food Policy Council was established in 2012. The county website explains its purpose:

The purpose of the Council is to improve dialogue and discussion and provide necessary advice on food and agriculture issues to the county, municipalities, community boards, local agencies, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and other interested groups. The Council will address food system issues in the county, including the development of the Council’s Governing Principles and strategic goals, data-gathering, research projects, and policies to address food system issues.

On my Aug. 30, 2019 application I listed my reason for applying, “Have long been interested in this voluntary position and there is an opening. I have time and interest sufficient to serve. I have financial resources to be able to do so.” That seems pretty boring, a comment others have made about some of my posts here.

The contributions I hope to make by serving on the council include, “I am particularly interested in learning about and taking action to meet hunger needs in the county. I am also interested in the relationship between food, Type 2 diabetes and poverty.” We’ll see where the work takes us.

What I’ve learned on the county board of health, as a township trustee, and as an officer of our home owners association is listening is the key skill required to get anything done. I approach this new project with an open mind and a bias toward doing the most good for the largest number of people. As soon as the caucuses are done I plan to dig in.

Categories
Work Life Writing

Two-Day Work Week

Soft shell taco, Spanish Rice, and refried beans. Midwestern staples.

Yesterday was my Monday and today is my Friday at the home, farm and auto supply store.

A two-day work week suits me.

I’m ready to call it quits from an operational standpoint. Spring is coming with its multitude of outdoors work. The two days could readily be used for more productive endeavors. It’s the paycheck that keeps me there. There is always a use for the income.

The Iowa precinct caucuses are Monday, which leaves four days to prepare for my role as temporary chair. I’m pretty well along but little else will get done in the run up to Feb. 3. After that I can focus on pruning fruit trees, getting our income taxes prepared, spring gardening, and everything else that has been delayed by winter.

Spring isn’t here, but it won’t be long.

Categories
Writing

Filling the Gaps

Wise County Virginia Civil War Group

The boxes of letters written to Mother over 55 years fill gaps in my life’s story. Things I didn’t remember came to life as I began to read them.

I hadn’t thought there was a record of some parts of my life. Now I see a lot was shared with her, more than expected.

The work of opening more than 200 letters is a big task. Reading and considering them will occupy time. Reflecting on what I said will be the crux of an autobiographical work, especially in the period from 1965 until 1974 when I began to keep a journal. When I was in Europe I wrote home a lot.

What about the period between my birth in 1951 and seventh grade when we started at the new school in our Catholic parish, after that first letter from camp?

I remember things from an early age, including visits to my maternal grandmother when she lived on Fillmore Street. Mother took enough photographs to provide a meaningful chapter or two of those early times.

Likewise, there are enough census records and genealogy snippets of public documents to piece together the earliest times. There are a few photographs from those early days, including one of Aunt Stella in her coffin and one of Granny Reed. I remember an explanation of those pictures, although I’m not sure who gave it. The photographic record of my maternal ancestors is equally thin. There is the photograph of Maciej Nadolski on a fishing trip to South Dakota, and that’s pretty much it. However, there is plenty between census records, public documents and snippets of memory to create a narrative of my forebears. There are also legions of shirt tail relatives living in both Minnesota and Virginia if I want to visit.

A question: To what extent do I write about a broader society and how it influenced me? I don’t have a good answer yet.

A case can be made for letting life’s artifacts tell the story. The census records show my grandfather worked as a coal miner, and there is oral narrative of how he started a retail business to compete with the company store. It didn’t work out, and eventually he was convicted as a draft dodger during World War II. He served prison time during which his children were split and went to live with relatives. My uncle explained the charges were a result of a “misunderstanding.” Do I need to broaden the story of mid-20th Century Appalachian economies, resistance to the draft during World War II, and dig deeper into the public record of those times? Do I just need to clarify and tell what I know? Telling what I know is straightforward. Awareness of what I do know and what I can yet learn is a separate issue.

People also have things that are personal and private. My default position is to let those lay. The end result of these efforts will be to create a narrative suitable for a broader audience, something interesting enough to read. Importantly, it will be something our daughter can read to know her own history without reviewing the thousands of documents and artifacts sitting in boxes and albums around our house.

That Mother kept my letters is remarkable. Reading and digesting them will be a welcome experience. I look forward to gaining insight into who I was then and how today’s version came to be. The number of gaps in the narrative has been significantly reduced by this find.

Categories
Living in Society

Why Should Progressives Consider Eddie Mauro For U.S. Senate?

Eddie Mauro

When Eddie Mauro is campaigning around Iowa he considers the communities in which he finds himself.

“Every time I drive into a community I look at places where I say we help insure that,” Mauro said. “We help insure that restaurant; we help insure that daycare…”

As president and chief executive of UIG, a Des Moines-based insurance company he founded, Mauro and his team of 70 people provide property and casualty insurance to businesses in all 99 Iowa counties. He’s also one of five candidates for U.S. Senate in the June 2 Democratic primary election.

On Thursday, Jan. 16, Blog for Iowa interviewed Mauro at a coffee shop in Coralville. When I arrived he was standing at a table with his hands on his hips. He appeared to be stretching after sitting in his vehicle for a while. He had another stop in Waterloo after our interview so it would be a long day of campaigning. This post reflects a transcription of his responses to my questions.

In addition to running a successful insurance company, Mauro spent a lifetime in community organizing and activism. Mauro is a founding member of AMOS (A Midwest Organizing Strategy) which “seek(s) to channel individual action into a responsible and powerfully organized force for the common good,” according to the AMOS website. He also worked as a coach in a number of small Iowa towns.

BFIA: What does being a community organizer mean to you?

MAURO: I started doing service work back to (when) I was 14 years old. Catholic Worker in Des Moines was forming then. I started getting involved with the homeless at an early age and have been involved with the homeless community ever since. As a teacher we used to take kids out in the mornings. We would crawl under bridges, and abandoned buildings, or wooded areas, and we would serve the homeless. We had a Saturday program as well with the produce in the impoverished neighborhoods of Des Moines. I’m still doing homeless work.

BFIA: In terms of community service, what are you most proud of?

MAURO: Proud of?

BFIA: What do you look at and say, “boy this was really good.”

MAURO: I’m not proud of any of it. I feel good that God’s given me the wherewithal to step up and help. I do a project in Tanzania called Water Systems of Tanzania. I go over there usually a couple of times a year. It’s a phenomenal project. We created a non profit called the Purify Project. We have some water quality issues here in this country for sure. People are dying every day in Africa. So it’s a good project.

BFIA: Why are you running for U.S. Senate?

MAURO: There are a lot of reasons for running. Primarily that Iowans deserve a leader today to address the problems facing this country with the urgency and the courage that’s demanded in this moment in history. We don’t get that out of Joni Ernst. We have a United States Senate that is broken and under performing.

BFIA: How do you deal with Joni Ernst’s popularity? She was popular in 2014, she continues to be popular.

MAURO: First of all her popularity has been sliding as people are starting to sense that a lot of that was a ruse. She’s been doing a good job of talking, misleading, and conning, and tricking people. It’s starting to become evident that she hasn’t done anything meaningful for Iowans. In fact, she hasn’t even been a senator for Iowans, (but) a senator for special interests and big industry, for her buddies the Koch brothers who created her, who she’s fiercely loyal to. The people in the state deserve better than that. I don’t think she’s overly popular here. I think there’s a lot of holes in that popularity. We are going to talk about she’s voted to take health care away from Iowans five times.

BFIA: I’m seeing people who don’t care about that and are willing to set her voting record aside and say, “she’s our girl.” There’s a plain acceptance of her votes on issues.

MAURO: Those issues are real, Paul. To go out to people and say, ‘Yep, you really like her. Well why do you like her?’ Are you aware of what she’s done for the healthcare? Are you aware of what she’s done to women’s rights? Are you aware what she’s done to turn her back on vulnerable women who are domestic violence survivors? Are you aware of what she’s doing to our public schools, the future for our kids and our teachers? Are you aware of what she’s done for rural Iowa, of the lack of courage that she’s displayed when it comes to the renewable fuel standard, and how she’s cow-tied to the president?

It’s not enough to say all the bad things she did, you have to very well stand for something. So I’m out preaching what I think are strong progressive bona fides while I talk about what we can be doing in rural Iowa. What we can be doing on Main Streets and town squares that I do business with now for over twenty years. What we can do with rural farmers to really give them a strong P&L and balance sheet, something they are yearning for. While at the same time tackling climate change. So we’re going to go out and communicate that we deserve better and we can do better than what we’ve gotten out of Joni Ernst who has not been a senator for this state.

We go out and sell that message wide and far, we’re convinced our strategy shows us that we win this race by five to seven points.

~ First published on Blog for Iowa

Categories
Writing

More Letters Home

Camp Letter

Our daughter and I drove to my home town on Sunday to visit my sister. The conversation ranged across many topics and toward the end of the visit she asked if I wanted to take the second of two shoe boxes containing letters I wrote home.

Of course I did.

I wrote a lot of letters home and to friends before email became a widely adapted replacement.

The earliest letter I found was written while attending YMCA camp as a grader. There was at least one more camp letter, followed by a couple while I was in high school, more in college, and in every stage of life afterward. There were some recent holiday cards and letters.

We logged on to the internet from a home computer for the first time on April 21, 1996. As soon as Mom got an America On-Line account we began communicating via email. She had already been using email in her work at the Corps of Engineers, just as I had been using email when I worked at for the oil company from 1989 to 1991. Over the years I saved as many personal emails as I could and there are a few between me and her from the late 1990s. The last email I sent her was dated March 7, 2014. It was about putting a photo on her Facebook account.

While it seems unlikely the others to whom I sent letters will return a similar archive, I have their letters and what is turning into a substantial trove of documents, partly written by me and partly by Mom and my friends about what my life was about. Combined with my hand-written journals beginning in 1974, and 14 years of this blog, I should be well prepared to relearn who I was and what I became.

The question becomes how shall I organize everything? There are no good answers as new documents are discovered and processed.

Artifacts like the camp letter pictured above lead me down a path of memory I had forgotten. It’s about canoeing on the Mississippi River, about campfires, and summer free swims, and having fun away from home and telling my parents all about it in a letter. Now that they are both gone the memories are welcome.

Letter writing, then email, journal writing, blogging, and now texting has become a part of who I am. I believe I’ve become the better for it.

Categories
Living in Society Social Commentary Writing

Media’s Theft From The Commons

Iowa City Press Citizen Jan. 23, 2019

“Right-wing media have been laying the groundwork for Trump’s acquittal for half a century,” Nicole Hemmer wrote in the New York Times. “These tactics (i.e. minimize Trump’s transgressions and paint a picture of non-stop Democratic scandals) are not inventions of the Trump era. They are part of a decades-long strategy by the right to secure political power — a strategy originating in conservative media.”

For a student of history the story is not only about conservative mass media beginning in the mid-20th Century. It goes further back.

It’s been a few decades since I finished graduate school yet I remember we studied nineteenth century newspapers from the Old West in Kansas, Oklahoma, and the like. They were mainly gossip sheets in which people could and did say just about anything. Whatever was needed to engage locals and sell advertising, whether it was true or not. It is a part of human nature to want to hear gossip and the outrageous things that may or may not be going on in a community.

What’s different now is corporations have exploited this aspect of human nature to generate revenue. They’ve been successful at doing so. In a way, right wing media is yet another corporate theft from the commons.

One can’t make the argument that media has ever been without bias. Journalists, editors, and even historians have their implicit point of view which may or may not serve the truth or other human needs. I’m thinking here of the work of Howard Zinn, David Hackett Fischer, Clifford Geertz and others.

Joan Didion described it as well as anyone, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” What we hadn’t planned for was the malicious intent of people who would come to dominate news and information sources, and the role that would play in the stories we tell ourselves.

The first sign of trouble should have been when our favorite news personalities began to earn millions of dollars annually for what should have been a public service. That Sean Hannity earns $40 million per year is all one needs to know about FOX News. Even Walter Cronkite earned close to a million.

My media behavior toward this impeachment effort is similar to during the Nixon and Clinton proceedings. I tune it out. One exception though. While I’m still in bed, before I turn the light on, I pick up my phone and read Heather Cox Richardson’s daily letter. It’s about all that I can take. Is she biased? Of course. But my tolerance for the biases of Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard where she was educated is a bit higher. Plus she feeds my confirmation bias.