And here’s the point: I can’t tell you how often over the years I’d be walking Hannah in our neighborhood and someone in a pickup would pull over and shout some variation of the following: “Bet she hunts well.” “Do much hunting with the bitch?” “Where you hunt her?” To me, it summed up Iowa.
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to me, this is the most asinine part of stephen bloom’s terrible atlantic article about iowa. my family owned a beautiful airdale terrier for eleven years— airdales, by the way, are specifically bred for hunting—and never, ever, even once faced a question like that. just as we never went hunting with her, because we and almost everyone we knew didn’t hunt.
it’s like all the factual mistakes in the article, of which there are several, are purposely designed to make iowans look bad. my family wasn’t typically iowan, but people were generally friendly about that and eager to accommodate us. it’s not a state of meth-addicted yokels. someone who’s spent 20 years in iowa, especially in iowa city, should know better. if stephen bloom feels like an outsider in iowa, he might want to think about how his condescension plays a part in that.
