I am Iowa at the funeral of my dad’s only sibling, my uncle. I have not been back to Iowa since 1986 or thereabouts. We are in a town called Burlington on the Mississippi River about a third of the way up the state from the south. Just south of here is a little town called Keokuk, Iowa, an old former manufacturing town located on lock 19 on the Mississippi. I am going to the funeral in a little while but will have some impressions of life and the economy in the heartland when I return. In the Washington area, we have pockets of poverty in the current economic climate but nothing like you see here where manufacturing plants have closed and houses are crumbling in disrepair. It is useful to have this sort of perspective from time to time. Things are not bad uniformly throughout the midwest – North Dakota is literally booming – but in many former manufacturing and farming towns, it is very tough.
The Economy and the American Heartland
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