I Regret To Inform You of the WONKS!
American popular media has illustrated the nation’s political culture based largely on geographical associations and stereotypes. A few obvious examples come to mind: the cowboy larping of Texas Republicans, the coastal celebrity of California Democrats, the Congressional rabble of the D.C. beltway. A little farther down on that list, the Iowa Caucuses appear, the homey commencement of the otherwise agonizing Presidential election cycle. For a single winter night, the eyes of the American pundit class fix themselves on the down-to-earth disarray of the caucus ceremony with its sort of potluck-esque approach to political congregation.
This preliminary assembly is a questionable facet of America’s exhausting primary season. Iowa, a mostly agrarian and white state is not especially representative of a largely urban and culturally diverse nation. It’s an intentional contradiction. Just as the American federal government is not designed to further the interests of the average prole against capital, the Iowa Caucuses are far from a meaningful democratic gathering. If anything, they are a negation of democracy, a ritual that reifies the norm of America’s center-right to far right political spectrum, a function of national hegemony localized in county community centers and high school cafeterias. Instead of empowering the democratic potential of Americans, it shackles them to the bipartisan Bastille of Clinton and Kennedy, Bush and Trump, a modest celebration of dual party control.
In the internet era, the attention the caucuses bring has been employed to both rebrand the state and its tedious tradition. Iowa isn’t just flyover country! For one night every four years, Iowa media professionals get to demonstrate to CNN viewers that the state is a lively place where pivotal things happen! Look at this silly, but crucial, display of democracy!
The caucuses post-2008 have essentially become advertising, proof of the state’s lowkey vivacity and a boon for Raygun’s tshirt sales, but they also have been utilized to portray the complot of the detached and affluent American ruling class as cute, fun, and vital.
Marx tells us that the predominant ideology of an era is the ideology of the overclass. In 2018, the encompassing principle, a cordially hokey pretense of bipartisanship, oozes downward from D.C. and pervades through the political structures of Iowa. And from this prevailing influence, a podcast was birthed, a podcast entitled WONKS!.
WONKS, in essence, is an attempt to deescalate the struggle of an inherently conflictual political sphere by bringing together Democrats and Republicans, campaign consultants and staffers, broadcasters and newspaper columnists, at the newly established Noce Jazz Club in downtown Des Moines. What if, and now hear me out, what if political parties, were actually parties?! In the overweening words of its organizers, “Republicans, Democrats and journalists get together for fun and secrets…and everyone is still talking to each other when it’s over!” What could be more titillating than inviting, say, an embittered Slavophobic Clinton field organizer and an underhandedly nationalistic Iowa gop official to the same stage together in order to wisecrack about the supposed wackiness of Iowa politics?
So far, thrilling enough to justify 4 episodes. The podcast/comedy production is in its infancy, but judging by its support from Polk County’s baby boomer petty bourgeoisie, I imagine it has a few more shows left in it. Just a few. The Iowa Caucus themed episode has already happened and I don’t imagine they can wring out enough content from the Iowan milieu to increase its longevity to even a year. That being said, there is no group of people better suited to thrive in a state of banality than the Iowan professional class. From what I’ve seen and heard, attendees have adored the podcast’s generally PG-13 take on Weekend Update political humor. Perhaps WONKS! can cement itself as a Des Moines social staple.
While the humor and personalities of WONKS! are mostly unremarkable, it still caught my attention as a program that deserved critique. Podcasts? Mildly snarky political witticizing? A neo-retro jazz club? These are touchstones of 2010’s urbanity I didn’t think had a market in the pop culturally lethargic city of Des Moines. WONKS! is undeniably hackneyed, but, one could say, curiously, maybe even, chicly hackneyed.
As I progressively worked towards my B.A.’s in English and Political Science at Grinnell College, two departments within an institution filled with academics who originated from more cosmopolitan locales, I began to note the many grievances my peers aired regarding the state of Iowa. As someone who has lived in the Hawkeye State his whole life, I wasn’t offended. In fact, they mostly confirmed observations that I too had witnessed and behaviors I had experienced. My peers and I came to agree that an average Iowan didn’t appreciate, or even apprehend, sarcasm and irreverence. Nearly all my close friends at Grinnell have described situations to me in which they humorously engaged with a local only to have their banter misunderstood as rudeness.
It is this cultural phenomena, this unawareness of jest, that urges me to offer WONKS! a bit of applause; the show is, at times, a bit cheeky. The Republican and Democrat guests do engage in the tenderest of roasting, a cloying rivalrousness that signals some semblance of opposition between their parties. Nothing riles up a crowd of 52 year old Iowan Wells Fargo marketing types quite like the teasing of “Hey, buddy, did Clinton even have a campaign?” or, “Michelle Bachman? What a loon?!” Despite the fact a mea culpa of, “I’m just joshin’ ya” has to follow every quip, at least the podcast features a simulation of contest. However, the flippancy has its inflexible limits.
Pushing, or even touching, the envelope in Des Moines can be a brazen comedic gamble. During the fourth episode (which no joke featured 3 dudes named Dave), when an audience member introduced a question regarding candidate outreach with the razz “now that the Des Moines Register has a total of 5 subscribers,” there were audible gasps from both the hosts and those in the crowd. The Des Moines Register is a sacred institution in central Iowa. An obvious, yet slightly barbed, comment on the mundane knowledge that newspapers are passé was just a tad too hot for this coterie of humorists. It is this bound of decorum that imparts the fundamental failure of WONKS! as a performance and political discussion, it’s too easy, too lighthearted; it doesn’t confront power and punch upward, or even punch at all.
I don’t typically like to be pedantic about what constitutes successful humor. It’s counterintuitive to overanalyze and codify an artform that requires risk and improvisation. That being said, WONKS! is tremendously unfunny and by precisely addressing its flaws, one’s understanding of politics and comedy can be further developed.
The ethos of WONKS! is absolute, bipartisan joviality. The program is explicit with its aim of cultivating affinity between liberals and conservatives, a goal antithetical to comedic expression. Imagine your favorite sitcoms, standup specials, or movies and what they would be like if the conflicts of their plots and bits were lessened or rendered nonexistent. Could they even been deemed comedies, or just a bland chain of droll conversations? Entertaining, compelling humor, especially the political kind, requires a subversiveness, some bite, nerve. As is, WONKS! can only offer the wit of a spirited Policy Studies 101 lecturer.
Former KCCI news anchor Kevin Cooney and Drake University political science professor Dennis Goldford are capable hosts, maybe a bit too perky, but they can lead a roundtable and interact with the crowd. It’s not top tier standup by any means, but compared to the dull parity of the guests, their local media panache is necessary respite. While the current season is mostly unlistenable, the first episode of WONKS! featured some particularly irksome and cringeworthy reactionaries, the gleeful jingoist Matt Strawn and Chuck Grassley lackey Anne Roth. Representing two of the GOP’s major ideological pillars, American chauvinism and bourgeois nepotism, the two were given a platform to normalize their ideals that directly instigate mass global misery in a whimsical, jocular manner.
Strawn was the most detestable, the facade of a smiley, suburban, happy go lucky, good ol’ cornfed Iowa boy calling attention away from his position as the chairman of the Iowa GOP. He was by no means a comedian, but his saccharine demeanor and familiar anecdotes about conservative kooks like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul roused some chuckles from the audience. In the final minutes of the night, deciding to capitalize on the platform he had been given, he transitioned from corniness to outright nationalism and declared, “that even though we all have different beliefs, we can still agree America is the greatest country in the world!” To my horror, what seemed like most of the crowd cheered in agreement! Imperialism. How fun.
Anne Roth was a more tragic and sympathetic figure, not due to her persona, but because of the circumstances of her existence. Every guest had to offer how they entered the industry of electoral politics, and most were fairly predictable, but her narrative had a deeper familial drama. Her parents met, dated, and married while working in proximity to, and as, Grassley campaign officials. Her genesis was spurred by Senator Chuck Grassley, a man whose greatest accomplishments are a few nonsensical tweets from 2014 and being a multi-decade stooge for the Republican establishment. Moreover, Anne Roth’s plot was made even more harrowingly morose by the denouement that she now works for the buffoon Grassley as well. The WONKS! crowd got a kick out of the professionalization of her very being, but the dynastic, bureaucratic tension that must pervade through her life calls to mind the dour short stories of a 19th Century Russian aristocrat.
This first episode also showcased the Clintonite careerists Emily Parcell and Matt Paul, Democrat staffers and organizers. Despite their positions in Clinton’s botched campaign, Strawn and Roth barely gave them any grief (probably a testament to how comfortable and secure Republicans feel in power now). The two were about as charismatic as their GOP counterparts and a little funnier considering they didn’t explicitly believe that America should continue to subjugate the rest of the world. But, they were far from inspiring political operatives. The show expressly conveyed their contentment with being the GOP’s timid and conciliatory rivals. When you’re participating in an event intended to foster friendliness, I imagine you’re not allowed to bring up how the Iowa GOP continually tries to ethnically cleanse the state’s cities and has run the medical infrastructure of the rural counties into the ground.
This article probably reads somewhat buzzkill-ish, after all, WONKS! is just a podcast in a humble American city. But, I love comedy, and I also want work towards a society unburdened by the oppressive hierarchies and deprivations of capitalism. WONKS! (and I gotta say how disheartening it is to write that all caps name) is unabashedly a cultural undertaking of the ruling class in Iowa. It may seem inconsequential, but the program, and what it ideologically represents at a national level, needs to be rejected. Politics cannot be complacent, it has to be confrontational.
Republicans and Democrats are not two teams with the same objective of making America a better place. Most politicians, often regardless of party, are willing delegates of those who control economic production. A true leftwing party allied with the working and marginalized, those exploited by the oppressive societal arrangement of capital, should be disgusted by the prospect of chumming around with GOP officials that only seek to ensure the wealthy can remain wealthy through profiteering and domination.
Someday, I hope that the conditions that caused WONKS! to exist have been ameliorated, and we can all stop pretending that Chuck Grassley is funny.
