Wednesday, August 20th, 2008...12:09 pm
Journey to the Center of the Midwest
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We’re in Iowa now, all the rawness sucked out of my life the moment I traded in my 90-pound Kryptonite bike lock for a slim plastic coil, a piece of laminated twine. I’m not going to lie; high levels of social cooperation freak me out. The only other place I’ve lived where people didn’t steal bikes was a military dictatorship.
Iowa City is precious in a way that reminds me of Kimya Dawson, which almost makes sense because Diablo Cody went to school here. Used book stores, clean hippie homeless, organic food cooperatives. Couches on the front porch, broken down grills in the back. Menus remind us that “GMO foods have NEVER BEEN PROVEN SAFE”; road signs, to share.
I’ll be blogging more, in a random, obsessive manner.
2 Comments
August 24th, 2008 at 8:45 am
I’m not going to lie; high levels of social cooperation freak me out. The only other place I’ve lived where people didn’t steal bikes was a military dictatorship.
If by this you mean that Iowa City has too much bourgeois niceness for your taste, then I disagree passionately. When I had to go to gym class at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in the desert agricultural hick town of Indio, California, it was a hellish environment because of those boys’ lack of bourgeois niceness. It was like going to prison for 40 minutes a day, five days a week. In comparison, I find it difficult to understand people who whine that supposedly hypercivilized places like Disneyland and shopping malls are “too clean.”
Neither of us should let our libertarianism distort our judgment about “high levels of social cooperation” per se. A well-ordered society isn’t necessarily an unfree society. Isn’t this part of what Friedrich Hayek meant by spontaneous order? Isn’t this what Sudbury-model schools demonstrate empirically in their way?
August 24th, 2008 at 8:52 am
By the way, what are you studying in Iowa, besides another culture?
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