Phthursday Musings: Propelling Ahead

You all might recall November 3, 2020. That was Election Day, and Joe Biden was elected President of the United States, though it took a couple of days for it to settle out, and then there was also an attempted coup, but for the moment let’s not talk about that.

That day I drove all the way to Clinton, Iowa to serve as a pollwatcher. I went to Iowa because it was a swing part of a swing district in a hopeful swing state. In the end, the reality was, the people who ran the polling place - that’s Moose Lodge 363/474 to you - were super professional (because why wouldn’t they be) and nobody I saw walk through tried to pull anything (because why would they) and I was only able to sort of help one guy, and I wasn’t really able to help him anyway because he was still technically registered to vote back across the river in Fulton.

Multiple times I tried to write about the experience and I wrote a lot and then I couldn’t figure out what else I wanted to say and I abandoned it. What I wanted to write about was how familiar the west end of Clinton felt - stunningly like the south end of Rockford - and about Clinton generally, a smallish place which had sustained a Minor League team for a long time until MLB contracted the number of MiLB teams, an old river town in a state with a track record of doing well with some of its river towns, in one of the handful of weird Obama-then-Trump counties which at once felt like national bellwethers while also feeling like anachronisms. I could just never quite get to where I wanted to get to.

This very afternoon, we found ourselves in downtown Clinton, and I have a lot of thoughts about what we saw there, and with the nation’s 250th birthday impending, I have some general thoughts that overlap with that topic, and it seems like just maybe it’s time to try and say something more about all this.

Downtown Clinton looked very worn out. There were a couple of bright spots which we found in our short time there, but it felt, in multiple meanings of the word, like a place which had been abandoned. There were some cars, there were some people, but there was so little visibly going on. (To be fair, it was in the 90s and you wouldn’t expect a lot of people to be walking around anywhere in that heat and humidity.)

When I had been there in 2020, I drove through the downtown briefly, but the main part of town I saw was on the west end, along U.S. 30. There’s a business district which stretches along the old Lincoln Highway and which has some newer businesses - and if anything, this time around, it felt a little busier out there than it did in 2020 (a time when there was a pandemic going on, of course.)

The Moose Lodge itself felt thoroughly like the old Ken-Rock Community Center on 11th Street in Rockford. The floor, the walls, the overall vibe, like something from decades earlier which was still holding on. And what I remember writing about before is how places like Moose Lodges and Elk Lodges and the like used to be so much more ubiquitous and how they used to be part of local social fabrics in a way that’s increasingly lost. You all know what I mean, things like how prominent insurance agents or realtors sort of doubled as community leaders in a way they just don’t anymore.

Downtown Clinton felt like a more extreme version of that. Storefronts which I would guess used to be for certain important business leaders seem to largely be antique stores, or more likely, antique stores without antiques. One place we saw claimed to be a vacuum cleaner store, and I don’t doubt that there were vacuum cleaners, but the main thing we saw in the front of the store were used tennis shoes.

Clinton still has a population of 24,000. It’s a dropoff from a peak population of about 35,000 in the 70s, but it’s still bigger than Brookfield. That’s 24,000 people who live and shop and play and buy insurance and do whatever else they do.

And we did find some things. We found Bowser’s Castle, a store with Pokémon cards and board games and D&D stuff. We found Underground, a record store with a bonanza stash of used vinyl in the back. (Yes, yes I did buy a vinyl copy of Eddie Rabbitt’s greatest hits.) And the Clinton LumberKings do still exist as a baseball team, in a summer collegiate league. The town may be down but it’s not out. We even found Rat Fink, outside of Underground!

What’s been long ailing places like Clinton long predates the current administration. But along with so many other things, one thing we can say is that the current administration constantly tries to command public attention, and there just isn’t that much public attention to go around, and what we have is an extreme case of a long-standing problem whereby local focus is increasingly lost. Not that I’m advocating for unfettered parochialism here! My point rather is that I think it should be possible to maintain balance between globalism (in the most benign possible sense of the word) and local focus, and as a nation, we’ve just thoroughly blown that. And even so there are people trying. And they should be supported, every which way we can.

I think with the 250th birthday impending it’s actually very relevant to think about what’s still good and right about America. And I think there is sincerely a deep generosity of spirit about the country that persists even across so much bullshit. A lot of the good vibes coming out of hosting the World Cup come back around to the idea of a generosity of spirit. The way that Boston embraced the Scottish fans. Rock Chalk Algeria in Lawrence. I keep hearing these arguments being made about “the real America” being something other than what’s presented geopolitically, and while I think some of that comes off as wishful thinking, I think at the highest level it’s absolutely true.

Forests burn and grow back stronger than ever. That’s how we can think about a lot of the damage that’s been done by this administration and by the greedy oligarchs who back them. That’s why when I see a place that looks like it’s taken a hit - and objectively downtown Clinton has taken a hit - I really do want to seek out the new growth and in some small way support it. I want to be a part of collectively lifting people up. That was what animated my coming to Clinton in 2020.

I know this can sound silly to some people but I legitimately believe all of this. And as of late I’m feeling better about some things and feeling more inspired to find some better way of connecting. (I also feel super exhausted from what seems like endless running around and the exhaustion and optimism can be at odds with one another!)

I’d really like to hear from people on all this. Like, is it possible we can somehow take the (for me at least) unexpectedly positive vibes from the World Cup and whatever positive vibes we can take out of the 250th birthday (because those fools can’t destroy all of it) and nurture something?

Appropriately your Phthursday flag is that of Clinton, Iowa:

Here’s what’s remarkable about this flag. It was designed by an eighth grader who felt the city should have a flag. And he pursued it, and it happened, in 2018. There’s a story here about how it came to pass.

I couldn’t find an explanation for the iconography but I think it’s pretty obvious. The blue is for the Mississippi and the green is for the land and the paddle wheel represents the city’s past as a river commercial hub. The paddle wheel has been used in other iconography as well; there’s a huge paddle wheel placed in 2019 in Gateway Park along U.S. 30/67 along the southwest edge of downtown:

What these things tell me is that the town was trying as of 2019 to turn things around and I’ll bet you that the pandemic hurt a lot and that the MiLB contraction also hurt a lot. (It was after 2020 that they lost their minor league affiliate.)

The flag itself is totally unique. While we didn’t notice it flying anywhere, it’s not hard to imagine that it could have been. The thing about a paddle wheel is that it’s all about moving forward. That it might be in an old-fashioned way is in my mind just a clever way of thinking about having a step in the past while constantly propelling ahead.

I also think the idea of an eighth grader presenting clips of a TED talk (no doubt the one Roman Mars gave) to a city council about flag design is all kinds of wonderful and I think this should happen everywhere. Maybe I’ll talk my now seventh grader into approaching the village board in Brookfield…

So we’re in Maquoketa tonight (more about this in an upcoming post or two) and we’re staying in an Airbnb near downtown. I know that Airbnbs can be controversial but for whatever it’s worth, I like the idea of staying within a community and walking around and eating there and shopping there so long as it’s within limits which I realize isn’t always the case with how these things go.

This particular Airbnb has a small Denon stereo with a CD player and there’s a cabinet with a handful of CDs in it. (No record player so I’ll have to wait to play Eddie Rabbitt until we get home!)

It seemed obligatory to play this when I found it there, given what I wrote four days ago:

I find little serendipities like this convince me that we’re moving in the right direction. Propelling ahead, if you will.

And we’ll be doing more of just that - propelling ahead - and if things go well I’ll have some more anecdotes in upcoming days. There’s a big, crazy, beautiful, maddening, fucked up country to see. Our country. Where we are all of the people who for whatever reason chose to make it so.