Coal Trains and Corn

Coal Trains & Corn

The last full week of September I was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Iowa Wesleyan is a small liberal arts college ( 800 students) in a town about ten times that size. The first thing one looks for & doesn’t find in Mt. Pleasant is the mount. The area is flat with a few ripples like a sheet that has been shaken out, and a deeper, wooded ravine cut by the Skunk River flowing south to the Mississippi. Was the name Mt. Pleasant a wry joke or did the first white residents feel as though they were on top of the world because of the endless sky? The town square is just that --- a small, square, green park surrounded by shops & restaurants. Very pleasant. In the past ten years several large corporate employers have moved out leaving an economically depressed community.

The college had an exhibit of twenty of my portraits ( including Rachel Carson, Frederick Douglass, Paul Robeson, and Emma Goldman, Terry Tempest Williams, Howard Zinn, Jane Addams, and Bill McKibben). I spent the week talking with students from virtually every department ( art, literature, history, education, business, philosophy, psychology) about the issues inherent in them. I stayed in the Rodeway Inn in a strip of motels about a mile from the college. Across the street was a Wal-Mart SuperCenter and next to that a McDonald’s and a Kentucky Fried Chicken / Taco Bell. One finds the homogeneity and conformity represented by these businesses everywhere in this country. Some people are probably comforted by that fact, while others, like me, are deeply saddened. As surely as the loss of biodiversity diminishes all other life as the gene pool shrinks, so, too, does our cultural diversity become impoverished and flattened by the loss of local business with its specific local character. The particular, eccentric café becomes the plastic cut out. These are businesses that do not want to serve real & curious people in real & curious community, they only want to extract profit and leave the victim less healthy culturally and physically. Luckily, in the center of Mt. Pleasant there were no links from these national chains.

My motel window looked out from the back into a wall of corn that stretched away like an endless buzz cut, the corn growing so straight, dense and regular that it looked like an immense greenish-brown wire brush. This is #2 field corn grown for livestock feed and a host of industrial and food additive uses. To understand what this corn means in terms of our industrial food landscape and our moral and physical health, I urge you to read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book that demonstrates how this corn, once it has been engineered, chemically fertilized, sprayed with fossil fuel based pesticides, transported, and rendered is not much different from lapping up petroleum --- and about as good for you. Pollan is a terrific, engaging writer who tells a story we all need to know.
Our food, which by definition should be about our health, has become another mechanized way to make money by a process that gladly creates collateral damage on its way to increasing profit.

That said, the people I met, professors and students, were wonderful --- smart, funny, friendly, talented & trying to make the world a better place while making the best of their immediate problems. Like so many places I visit, I felt I could, if they would accept me, move here & be happy in this community. My hosts, Ann Klingensmith and Don Jones, the two full-time professors of art at Iowa Wesleyan were a delight to be with. Ann is a superb and profound printmaker and Don is one of the funniest people I’ve met in long time. Both are warm & genuine.

I learned something important, though, after I had given my first couple of talks. I usually explained that I began the portrait project after 9/11 when the duplicitous rhetoric from the Bush administration turned to convincing Americans why it was necessary to attack Iraq. I mentioned that all the reasons given were lies & that I felt compelled then to begin making these portraits. I assumed that everyone knew what I was talking about. There were no objections to what I was saying. One evening at a reception in the gallery, a freshman, Brian, whose psychology class I had talked in, came up to me & asked what exactly were the lies of the Bush administration. I had forgotten that these students were only 9 and 10 years old when 9/11 happened. Many of its infuriating aspects which are so immediate to me were merely the noisy backdrop to their childhood. And, more importantly, to avoid confrontation, their middle and high schools had never taught them the true history. If there is no accountability at a national level, if leaders who tell lies and commit crimes are never exposed and prosecuted, teachers won’t tell the students the truth. That fact explains both why accountability is so important and why it is avoided. People who know their true history are hard to fool.

I explained to Brian about the lies about weapons of mass destruction, the lies about Al Qaeda in Iraq, the lies about Saddam Hussein being complicit in the attacks on the World Trade Center. I explained that my interest was in the truth, not in political partisanship. I told him about the lies that brought the US into wars with Mexico, Spain, Vietnam, and countless other Central and South American countries. He thanked me. We live in a country of denial because the truth is upsetting and unprofitable to multinational business. People in denial continue to be good consumers. But lies and denial are, in the long run, far more upsetting than truth. And people in denial are not able to solve the real problems that affect their lives and futures. Only knowing the truth will enable solving the problems.

Every fifteen minutes in Mt. Pleasant a train whistle sounds. It’s a harsh, nostalgic sound. It sounds reassuring, and carries a sense of tireless progress It seems to connect us to a past as familiar as Saturday night square dancing and Sunday afternoon baseball. On the road that divided the college from the town, the lights flashed & the gates came down. Cars and pickups waited and idled. A coal train rumbled by. Coal car after coal car, each one slightly overfilled so that one could see a long black, tapered hump of coal over the car’s lip. Tons and tons of Montana coal chugging east to feed the power plants in Chicago. Much of this coal had been exploded from Mountaintop Removal sites just like the ones in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky that I have written much about. It’s interesting to me that people here --- as much as I could tell --- accept the coal trains as being about the energy and health of our economy, our necessary power and electricity. Just like the familiar corn growing around them, they fail to recognize the coal train as an addiction that is destroying nature --- both the past in terms of our mountains and the future in terms of climate change. Like corn, coal appears to be about health. But is not.

Mt. Pleasant is a religious area. Many of the churches have marquees out front with slogans advertising something they think important. One said, “Faith should be your steering wheel, not your spare wheel.” Cute. And the marquee at the Calvary Baptist, which I passed on my walk from the Rodeway Inn to the college, said, “God’s answers are wiser than our prayers.” That one perplexed me. Who is wise enough to know what those answers are --- assuming there are any? Isn’t it condescending to assume that people only pray self-indulgently? But I still wasn’t sure what the minister had meant. Was he or she making something clear or more mysterious? Finally, I decided to think about what it would mean if I had said it. I prefer to think of Nature and God as being one and the same. Nature’s answers are always wise because they are always about perpetuating equilibrium. About putting back whatever you take out. Even at its most violent, Nature gives and takes equally. And its bounty and beauty are beyond telling. Our prayers are often less wise than Nature because they perpetuate the idea of Nature as a resource to be exploited ( corn, coal), rather than as a marvelous system we must emulate and if we want to continue to live in it. That’s a very simple and obvious wisdom. Not mysterious at all. I pray that we all strive to understand it.