What is it that Iowa fears about ideas? [View all]

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July 12, 2023
Art Cullen | Storm Lake Times Pilot

What is it that Iowa fears about ideas?

The two best movies about Iowa are “The Music Man” and “Field of Dreams” for their wry and subtle understanding of our culture. No arguments about it. Don’t even bring up “State Fair” or “Bridges of Madison County,” each dreadful in different ways. I have not seen “Cedar Rapids” the movie but I hear it smells good.

Over the Fourth of July holiday I found myself tuned in again to “The Music Man” on TCM. Early in the musical — I am not a big fan of musicals but for this one — the mayor’s wife Eulalie MacKechnie Shinn demanded that Marian the Librarian remove the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám from the shelves in River City because it is a dirty, smutty book with references to “lying out in the woods eating sandwiches.”

Mrs. Shinn is immediately distracted by the next town controversy.

It then struck me that the other classic Iowa movie also has a censorship theme. Annie Kinsella summons her courage to take on the prevailing mood of a school board meeting to ban a book by a famed author endorsing “promiscuity, godlessness, the mongrelization of the races.”

What does it say about us that our two main cinematic hallmarks involve book banning?

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