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[On the Sunday before the Iowa caucuses, a group of college students left Chicago on a six-hour ride that would add their combined manpower to the campaigns of the variousPresidential candidates. Northwestern University sophomoreNathaniel Whittemore of Scarborough, Maine recorded histhoughts in an ongoing journal. In it, he muses on topicsranging from the meaning of our transnational highway system to the dichotomy of the Iowa caucus system in thenew Internet age of communication. Along the way, heexplores the motivations of today’s political youth and reflects upon a politic process that left at least onecampaign’s staffers looking as though they had been hit by a freight train.]

Sunday January 18

, 3:15 PM

Behold the endless concrete carpet; the paved sewing thatstitches together the disparate vestiges of our once-proudAmerican dreamland.The second half of the 19

century birthed the new normalcyof the American Century. It was a time in which it becameseemingly easier to spot the depravity, the anomie, the scum, thefilth and the poverty than to hold in heart the compassion andfreedom and dreams that both hope and the politicians tell usthis country was founded upon.In the 1950s, the transnational highway system affirmed thepromise of the power of industry and ingenuity. Affordablesingle-family housing proved that we were working with somethingmore than an American

pipe

dream.Then, as now, however, the success of the ‘some’ came inlieu of, or even at the expense of the success of the rest. Asthe nuclear family proliferated in its cute ‘lil Levittowns,stories were being stacked onto high-rise housing projects, thoseuncompromising monuments to inevitable hopelessness. The sunroomsof suburbia and the outhouse of urbanity can be no more separatedthan the horsefly from unending piles of decaying excrement.America is largely defined by the middle; the consensusthat coagulates pluralism into comfortable and principledcompromise.It is defined by the in-betweens, the gaps, the divides. Itis defined by the seemingly inexorable difference between thehaves and the have-nots, the shoulds and the should-nots, thecoulds and the could-nots, the f--ks and the f--koffs.Hopefully, it is also defined by that middle ground between

reality and dream in which despair and hope clash epically forthe soul of humanity.Or maybe it’s just all political.--------Iowa is the first stop in the democratic brutality thatwill culminate in July, when the other half of this giantPangaeatic refuge will unleash its chosen warrior to wrest backour collective destiny from Bush Part Deux (in nomini patri yfille).They say it will be a battle of the middle; a fight at thecenter to get those undecideds to swing one of two ways. Eachside will suggest that the election is nothing less than ajudgment on the soul of America, and maybe that’s true.If they are right, whoever

they

might be, then it seemsappropriate that it all starts in Iowa. You can’t get much morein the middle of America than f--king Iowa.Already pundits and the fashionably disinterested havebegun to write off one or more of the candidates as unelectablein the looming face of American Bushism. Still, I can’t help butwonder if pronouncements like this aren’t more about salvingthose deep parts of our subconscious that become comfortable withwhat

and remind us how much harder it is to

act

than to

react

and how much moral fortitude it takes to stand up

for

somethingrather than to shout out

against

.In 1972, Hunter Thompson wrote the following passage:

How many more of these goddamn elections are we going tohave to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary”holding actions? And how many more of these stinking,double-downer sideshows will we have to go through beforewe can get ourselves straight enough to put together somekind of national election that will give me and the atleast 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance tovote

for

something instead of always being faced with thatold familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

In the thirty-two years since Thompson wrote that, littlehas changed, and maybe even less has gotten better. In Iowa, wewill begin to find out whether Hunter has to endure at least fourmore years of pessimistic frustration. Moreover, we will begin tofind out whether the November election will be a battle for oursouls or simply our votes.Behold the concrete highway; if only the principled groundupon which we stand was always as firm and seemingly endless.

Monday January 19

, 6:51 AM

Jesus, it’s so cold. I think that maybe I’ll ask to makephone calls today. This is the sort of gut-wrenching, icy blastfurnace cold that makes one wonder why in hell anyone left thecomfortable warmth of the Mesopotamian cradle. What everpossessed our proud dark ancestors to march out of the FertileCrescent and trek three quarters of the way across the goddamnworld to Iowa of all places is beyond me. Why this flat freezingground has seen so much blood splattered and frozen is beyond me.But then I guess it’s the same reason that thousands ofred-cheeked volunteers will strap on their campaign buttons andorange beanie caps and brave this merciless frigid day to swaythose last few “undecideds.” Everyone wants a sense of their owndestiny.That, more than anything else, I hear, is the great promiseof democracy.As we pass from Chawktaw Way onto Locust Drive (home toboth Kerry and Dean headquarters), a stinging sense of ironymakes me wonder whether the Chawktaws, the once-inhabitants ofIowa, knew that the extinction of their way of life was justcollateral damage from that great fated freedom and, even more,whether or not we are the locusts, bringing naught but chaos anddestruction. I hope that we are not, or, if we are, that thesefreezing toes and hands blistered from the cold are part of ourpenance.If those Chawktaws did fall in the wake of the AmericanDream, we damn well better live and die every day fighting forthe promise of it.