The hardest part of beginning in 2025 is overcoming entropy. In part, extended yet short-term separation from family contributes to it. In part, the unknowns of our politics do too. There is the warming planet, aging, pressures of a fixed income, and not enough time to do everything I want. I guess this blog post is to say I need to write through it.
I have little to say about our politics. The best advice I’ve found has been to not assume anything and wait to see how the Trump administration unfolds. With the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the president-elect is better organized than he was in 2017. The U.S. House already looks to be mass confusion. The U.S. Senate has an old guard of Republican octogenarians upon whom we count to control the reins on the president. If Grassley is any guide, I don’t hope for much. We won’t really know how things will shake out until they do.
2024 was the year I got more views on this blog than any previous year. I looked through the posts and the attraction is unclear. The post after the high school class reunion got some interest. The post about buying a saucier was popular. Most of the top posts were written in previous years. Going forward, about what should I write? These things:
As I write part two of my memoir, some of those chapters will find a home here. Partly this is drafting and re-drafting the narrative. Partly, if the content seems timely, it’s a way to get it out there.
There will likely be another high school class reunion this year. If there is, I’ll post photos from it here again.
2024 was the year with the hottest global average temperature on record. As extreme weather hits locally, I expect to cover it.
There will be a few book reviews.
There is a Nov. 4, 2025 school board election. In the past, few journalists covered it, so I did. We had a couple of cycles where there was great interest in the school board election with multiple candidates. I’m not sure how that will shape up this year, but if it is interesting, I’ll cover it.
That’s all for now. It seems like another slow day in Big Grove. I hope to make the best of it.
The year ended with a series of warm, foggy days around the lake where we live. The unseasonably warm temperatures are not good for anyone except the garden insects who might survive another season.
My spouse and I are sharing our one DVD player while she is with her sister in Des Moines. Sunday I hooked it to the television and began watching five movies by Michael Moore including Roger & Me about his efforts to speak to General Motors CEO Roger Smith after the company announced it was closing plants and shedding tens of thousands of jobs in Flint, Michigan.
I made many trips to Flint after GM plant closures started. Ostensibly, those trips were to recruit truck drivers yet it was more than that. One day I found some hiring information in my papers and counted the number of prospective truck drivers I personally interviewed between 1987 and 1993: more than 10,000. My work was at the cutting edge of American business moves to reduce costs, in the case of the people I interviewed, by laying them off. The experience changed me forever. I haven’t been back to Flint since we moved to Big Grove Township in 1993.
The scenes Moore depicts in his films are too “special.” While the stories are believable, his method of selection and framing are transparently peculiar: made to make his point. It is as if he searched for the right setting and characters to film the way a writer tries out words and phrases from their tool box on a page. In one scene, President George W. Bush advises Moore to “get a real job.” Whatever these films represent, they are in the mainstream of progressive messaging.
It was good to revisit these films over the holidays. I’m ready for 2025. As local writer Paul Street wrote in his recent substack, “Get ready for some serious shit and struggle!”
I look forward to seeing what 2025 brings and have already begun creating things to endure after I’m gone. Let the work of resisting the new regime begin, while making something positive from our lives.
The forecast was snow yet it isn’t cold enough. Instead, a light rain is falling… enough to keep me off the state park trail until it ends. Warm weather this time of year has become the norm thanks to increasing average, global, ambient temperatures. Climate change is cooking us on a slow roast.
I looked at my 2024 calendars and a few big projects kept me busy: politics and the general election, trips to deliver my spouse to her sister’s home in Des Moines, the summer high school class reunion, publishing my first book, and then getting and recovering from COVID-19. The usual daily chores of writing, reading, gardening, cooking, cleaning, and health maintenance took a lot of time. I had more medical appointments than usual this year. I existed as best I could.
I don’t make resolutions for the new year. I hope to gain perspective on my quotidian life and do better in each moment of consciousness in it. Shorter version: I’ll go on living.
My writing process is focused on finishing the second volume of my memoir this year. If all goes well, I’ll publish it in 2026. While waiting for feedback from the first volume, I’m weighing whether to make the book more available in book world by posting it where it can be purchased.
Our family is in three different cities this New Year’s Eve. I don’t mind being alone this holiday. I rarely stay up until midnight. Today’s main decision is whether I will visit the grocer to buy festive food. The more I think about it, the more likely I am to make do with what I have.
Many thanks to readers of this blog. Each visit, like, and comment is appreciated. Although I don’t post all the comments, I read them. I plan to continue to post here for at least another year. I’ll do the best I can to make it worth your time.
Christmastide is to settle in and regroup for the coming year. For me, the season lasts from Christmas Day until the Feast of the Epiphany, which is slightly more British than I am. Before retiring, I had to work either on the holidays or during the festive season. There are no such requirements this year.
Planning for next year takes the form of a to-do list revised from last year. The broader topics include gardening, writing, home and yard maintenance, physical health, and a short list of specific, short-term or continuing projects. Items like cleaning, cooking, and daily chores just fall into place without being listed.
Mostly, I want to keep going.
With the family split up this Christmastide, whatever I do will mostly be on my own. If I can get a start sorting the accumulated stuff in the lower level, that will help with writing my autobiography. It seems as good a place to start as any. As the weather warms, I’ll work in the garage and outdoors more. The next couple of days will be taking it easy and resting for the surge of activity in the new year.
Rain is forecast all day. I resisted the urge to leave home and go shopping. I avoided on-line shopping places as well. I’ve been reading more than usual and am developing a meal plan for the rest of 2024. I’ll be home alone a while longer as my sister-in-law gains confidence in post-surgery living. I look forward to the return of my spouse.
I feel pretty healthy today. That sentence is not always true.
Story ideas have been percolating. All of the new ones require research and developmental thought, so I started a blog post for each and pasted in relevant information. I don’t feel like finishing them. I expect a visit from the muses when it is time.
During the holiday trip I considered my next book. The working title is “Memoir in 25 stories,” although 25 seems like a low number. I want to cluster selected events in my life around specific places to be built out with historical information and memories. Those places include where we lived, significant work sites, and places we visited. For example, I call one place “The Calumet.” It is the land bordering the southern part of Lake Michigan in Illinois and Indiana. It will take some explaining to depict what I mean by the place name. In describing it, I set the scene.
Partly, the book is about what our family did. There are also major themes in which I have broad experience: breaking the unions beginning with the PATCO strike, the destruction of the post World War II society, and changes in workplace. It will also be a story of how people can be creative in a society that has limited interest in such work-product. I will focus on my writing, and partly on educating a child to be creative. I think there is a useful memoir in all this. Now I must revise the 62,000 written words to fit the new paradigm.
I attempt to stay positive as it rains. It is hard to do, so I work. The dishes are all done, the laundry is folded and put away, and the resonances of this difficult year vibrate my core. I may be living a life yet I feel I’m just skidding into 2025 while unable to gain traction on things that matter. I’m hoping and working toward a better year.
This is the face of a man trying to understand how his Android camera works. The background on the state park trail was planned. The green sweatshirt is my standard winter uniform, although I own sweatshirts in several colors. The watch cap was a gift from a farmer friend. My unshaven face is because I’m at the end of my once every three days shaving cycle. I’m looking at the lens because that’s what I think I should be doing. As selfies go, this is graded C-minus. It reinforces my belief I am not photogenic.
As if 2024 was not bad enough, today’s Cedar Rapids Gazette reported the University of Iowa is ending the American Studies Department in anticipation of anti-diversity legislation effective next year. I graduated from the progran in 1981 when it was a loose interdisciplinary group not even formalized into a department until 2000.
One of my valued possessions is a copy of Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization with Alexander Kern’s signature inside the cover. I bought it for a buck at the library’s used book sale. I doubt Republicans behind anti-DEI knew of Kern’s early leadership in American Studies at Iowa, or of the Beards’ seminal work. I think that is the point of the anti diversity movement: public schools will only teach one version of American history, the one we legislators approve.
I’ve been around long enough to remember local folks questioning why we should build a big, fancy library in our town with population about 2,000. The money was donated, then the building was deeded to the city for one dollar. The expense of permanent staffing generated some griping. We live in a time when it is not a long distance from these attitudes rising to the surface again, and this time closing the library permanently. I hope not, but here we are.
On the positive side, this week a federal judge struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. Nevertheless, Iowa leads the nation in the number of banned books.
Let’s face it. These discussions and repression of information in public helped make 2024 a difficult year all around.
I’ll likely continue to make selfies. Once I figure out the camera, I might work on posing. For now, I’ll deal with life as it presents itself. What else are we to do?
Lonny Pulkrabek and Rita Hart two days before the 2020 election in which Hart lost her race for Congress by six votes. Masks because we were in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic.
It seems urgent to figure out what to do in our politics going forward. I’d like to begin my work just after the New Year’s holiday. Disengaging from politics is not a useful option. I plan to stay with the fight and so should more of us.
It’s been almost seven weeks since the Nov. 5 election in which Iowa Democrats fared poorly. Donald Trump won the top of the ticket race against Kamala Harris, and Republicans added to their majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Republicans retained all four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Mariannette Miller-Meeks winning in the first district by 799 votes. I’ve been reading, listening, and thinking about my experience and the best I can describe Democrats current situation is we are tied to the whipping post and everyone is whaling on us.
I get it. We get it. We lost the election and as we recover from the losses, we see the state party as a visible whipping boy. The week before Christmas I drove past the office on Fleur Drive in Des Moines and even I cringed at how little the building changed since I last paid a visit. Democrats won’t win elections by repeating the same strategies and tactics we used in 2024. It seems appropriate to have a discussion about whether to blow up the Iowa Democratic Party and start over.
I like the song Whippin’ Post, which I heard the Allman Brothers Band play on Feb. 19, 1972 at the University of Iowa Field House.
Sometimes I feel, sometimes I feel, Like I’ve been tied to the whippin’ post. Tied to the whippin’ post, tied to the whippin’ post. Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’.
I haven’t felt like I’m dying since the election. I attribute that to being an experienced septuagenarian with little to lose. We have the wrong expectation if we think the state party will dig us out of the hole we’ve gotten into. It is useless to whale on the state party and expect running the chair out of town on the rail will fix the problems. Further, it is plain wrong to expect the state party to lead us out of the darkness. We must find our own way.
There is a different usage for whipping post besides the place we can tie folks who don’t live up to our expectations and flog them.
John C. Leggett and Suzanne Malm described “Whipping Post” as a metaphor for a romantic relationship in which the participants masochistically stay in though it has gone bad. This definition invokes the mutuality between the leadership and members of the Iowa Democratic Party. It is aptly applied to today’s politics. We must free ourselves from the relationship and break up.
Endemic to the current party structure is a misdiagnosis of key issues in a campaign. More than anything, politics has gotten local. In Big Grove Precinct, where I live, the electorate is divided. Trump won here in 2024. During the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won over Joe Biden 671 votes to 637. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton 575 votes to 529. Barack Obama won here in both 2008 and 2012. My precinct has a divided electorate and has recently been won by both Democrats and Republicans. While new people moving to our area lean Republican, the key issue is how does an organizer build a Democratic majority at the polls, recruiting votes regardless of party? We didn’t address that in 2024. It was hard to get anyone to do normal grassroots work in my area. Both these things need our urgent attention.
Others have recently written about the First Congressional District Convention on May 5, in North Liberty. The description I wrote soon afterward hits a key point:
A speaker at the convention looked around the room and suggested the dominance of white-skinned, grey-haired delegates is the problem with the party. Whatever. Had rain not been forecast during the convention hours, I would rather have been working in our yard. The trouble, as I experienced recruiting a replacement for my position on the county central committee, is literally no one is willing to do the work to provide steady volunteer work for local Democrats. That’s a much different problem than skin tone and hair color among people willing to show up on a spring Saturday.
It also indicates that whoever is party chair will have minimal influence on how campaigns are organized. It is up to us to self-organize.
No matter how many teams of canvassers are deployed by Democratic organizations, Democrats will be frustrated. I suggest something else is at work. What drives people not to care about our governance? Where did the breakdown of top-down methods used in the past by Democrats occur? Answers to these and other questions seem more important than keeping the Iowa Democratic Party (or ourselves) tied to the whipping post.
Mariannette Miller-Meeks at the Iowa State Fair, Aug. 13, 2010. Photo credit – Wikimedia Commons.
By the end of the holidays I need to resolve my relationship with politics for the coming years. The federal trifecta with Republicans controlling the executive and legislative branches of government was a clear win, if a somewhat marginal one. After reading many news stories and comments, and based on my experience, I am ready to move forward. In general, Democrats are still licking their wounds, yet life is too short to dawdle in the arena. First, the situation, then what I plan to do in my next post.
Let’s start with President Trump. He is a lame duck going into his second term with about a year and a half to get anything big done. (Obama was hobbled after the 2010 midterms). This time the president-elect has a shadow administration comprised of the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025 to support him. He also has a number of billionaire buddies he hopes to install in his cabinet and other key governmental positions. Don’t forget his side kick, the richest man in the world, who is willing to spend untold sums of money to get his way. These things can be counted among Trump’s assets.
Out of the box, Trump seems particularly weak. Partly this is his own doing, yet the evidence is more visible with each passing week.
The man is apparently governing via social media. Few people I know pay much attention to social media whether it be Truth Social, X, BlueSky, Threads, Instagram or Facebook. It is his decision how to govern and conduct routine press relations. A more effective way to do this would be to enable his press secretary Karoline Leavitt to play a larger role by releasing his appointments, policy announcements, and general news, thus creating a buffer to moderate his bad stuff before releasing it. As he is doing it, the message is off the cuff, and haphazard. Ultimately we can’t believe anything he says, but we knew that from the first term.
Some Republicans, including the president-elect, have been kicking around the word “mandate” after the November election. Enough dust has not been raised to obscure the fact President Trump barely won the election. The Republican majority in the House is super thin (5 members), and the 53-47 majority in the Senate is not filibuster-proof. In the Senate, it is not clear the aging cohort of octogenarian Republicans will cave to his every wish. It will be a rough road ahead for the president to accomplish much during the 119th Congress, if they are even capable of getting all the Republican legislators behind him on any legislation.
Trump is losing initial skirmishes. John Thune beat his choice of Rick Scott for Senate Majority Leader. The Senate wanted no part of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. His side kick Elon Musk got out ahead of him in the public debate over keeping the government funded. Trump didn’t respond to Musk for hours. After he did, his demand that a suspension of the debt ceiling be included in the CR was ignored. All of these things point to a weak second term as president.
Despite this impressive ledger of liabilities, his minions, like Mariannette Miller-Meeks, continue to parrot his talking points about a mandate, to wit: “November 5th, 2024 is a day that will forever be remembered as the day the American people voted for a mandate—a mandate for change.”
There was no mandate, Trump barely got a plurality. Unlike his economic policy, I predict this weakness will trickle down throughout Republican governance. Stay tuned for what’s next for my advocacy in the next post.
I dug out my packet of hot chocolate mix from its hiding spot in the back of the pantry shelf. The shift to winter is palpable and I’m going to need a cup to get by. As a bonus, it was mixed and packaged by a friend of our child.
Late Friday afternoon, the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services reported the first case of bird flu jumping to a human in the state. According to the release,
The individual was exposed to infected poultry while working with a commercial flock in northwest Iowa. The individual reported mild symptoms, has received appropriate treatment and is recovering. The case was identified through testing at the State Hygienic Laboratory and confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
As of December 20, 2024, the CDC has reported 64 confirmed human cases of H5 HPAI across nine states. The majority of the exposures are linked to infected poultry or dairy cows. There is no evidence that human-to-human transmission of influenza A(H5) is occurring in the U.S.
With all the egg production in Iowa, this was bound to happen. It could be a big deal, and it could be close to nothing. Time will tell.
No one wanted to shut down the government right now and the Congress didn’t yesterday. I don’t presume to know what the president-elect and his wealthy sidekick were thinking about this. I do know:
A continuing resolution was passed until March 14, which gives the new administration the ability to influence budget going forward. Everything else we heard in the media during the last 72 hours has been posturing.
Democrats would like to eliminate the debt ceiling completely, and this wasn’t the time for partial measures. They rejected the president-elect’s proposal to suspend the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a leftover policy from World War I.
The Republican House could not pass a CR without Democrats helping them get the two thirds majority needed. The final CR had bipartisan, bicameral support, which is the way it is supposed to work, sort of.
If the Republican House had been doing their work and passed all of the funding bills in regular order, in a bipartisan way, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.
The main news media wants there to be a lot of drama because it helps their bottom line. Over-dramatization of the lack of a budget was, in part, the media’s doing.
In the end, what was expected to happen did.
While reading my 1981 journal I found a record of dreams of Mark Twain visiting one of my fellow Army officers, and Norman Mailer, at whose home I arrived by water landing. I don’t know what either of them meant. I do not dream about writing or celebrities that much. What I like is talking about writing with friends.
The lake trail walk will be chilly this morning, with ambient temperatures in the high teens and low twenties. As soon as the sun rises, I plan to get out on the trail.
I had an early dinner last night with a friend. The restaurant was near where I lived while in graduate school. Plenty of seats were available at 3 p.m. The food was good, the service excellent. We talked for a couple hours about writing. While enroute home it sprinkled rain as warm weather held on to autumn in the face of winter’s imminent arrival.
Like many, I followed the U.S. Congressional hijinks regarding a continuing resolution to fund the federal government from tomorrow until March. So far, nothing passed. I had no expectations as the Congress has a poor track record of passing budget bills on time. The situation was complicated by Trump’s largest campaign donor taking the issue to his social media platform. It’s been more than a year since I deleted my account on X, so I don’t know the details. We’ll see if they pass something before midnight tonight.
When I sent 20 copies of my book to friends and acquaintances, I didn’t understand what a big ask reading it would be. Given that about half of the U.S. population didn’t read or listen to a single book in 2023, I should have been more skeptical of the printed book format. Reading appears to be in decline as a favorite way for Americans to spend their free time.
I discussed this with my publisher and they suggested my observations were accurate and recommended I consider an audio book format should I broaden the reach of my book. That idea is filed away with other sales pitches until I hear back from more of the 20 book recipients.
Writing a book will be the format for the second half of my autobiography. The die is cast on that, yet once it is finished, I may consider other types of writing as my main work product. Not as short as a blog post, but readable in the increasingly shorter attention spans of potential readers. How in the heck did we get to this place?
I’m bunkering in for the holidays, which this year are even weirder than in previous years. We gave up Christmas decorations five or six years ago, and the family is split this year with one of each of the three of us in different cities. We are in process of working something out. There are four or five days in which to do that. I am reasonably certain we will be more timely than the federal government has been in passing a budget.
Journey Home 
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