By Prem Gongaju
In the topsy-turvy political affairs in the United States of America, it is befitting to begin this piece with the ending, which was quipped flippantly by one of the two senators from Iowa. Maybe, gleaning the lesson from the Grassley town hall debacle, she proactively told her constituents during her recent townhall meeting, “Well, we are all going to die.”
“Well, we are all going to die.” There is a syllogistic ring to it. “Well, we are all going to die.” Hence the obvious redux of the ancient Greek inference: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
We the People are mortal. “[A] woman who was extremely distraught screamed out from the back corner of the auditorium – ‘People are going to die’”– is an Iowan human being. Therefore, “[the] woman who was extremely distraught screamed out from the back corner of the auditorium” is going to die.
Why the brouhaha over the truth that we all die?
Oh, I see. She is a Senator. Not a morbid philosopher.
“Senators also serve their constituents — both those who voted for them and those who didn’t. They do this through their legislative activity — debate, voting and committee work — but they have other ways to act on constituents’ behalf.” (PBS SoCal)
Therefore, her morbid mouthing was suitable for the mouth of an undertaker, but not for the suave, sophisticated tongue of a Hawkeye Senator.
James Fenimore Cooper would be appalled to hear such taunting, trashy nonsense from a Senator from the State touting “Hawkeye’s chief strength is adaptability. He adapts to the difficulties of the frontier and bridges the divide between white and Indian cultures.”
The so-called Indians were banished to the reservations through one of the soul-crushing ways – the Trail of Tears. But they persevered and preserved their native soul.
From the published accounts, it appears that the Corn State Senator failed to serve and honor the exalted Hawk-Eye view of the humanity of her constituents. She failed to bridge the divide between the distraught have-nots and the golden haves.
As an NPC, she aims to serve one man and one man alone, and his Big Beautiful Bill, of which, “the tech titan and de-facto DOGE leader” Elon Musk, with his high jumps and high jinks, offered one of his parting shots, “I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful. But I don’t know if it could be both.”
I find the biting bark from the DOGE leader diabolically damning of the Big Beautiful Bill. In other words, it is an ugly bill, for it robs the poor Peters of democracy to pay the Pauls of the trumpeted plutocracy.
And the Iowan Senator is willing to betray her constituents for the support of the Big Beautiful Bill.
Furthermore, she appeared donning a ghouslish look against what appered like a tombstone in the background to mock her constituents present in her town hall by means of her unrepentent and unredeemable tone laced with the bile of sarcasm: “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth.”
No, Senator, they, the attendees in your town hall, understood all too well what it means to perish from this Earth, for they are the noble descendants, both white and black, of the Hawkeye folks who made the ultimitate sacrifice in the Union’s cause “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
And complimentory to President Lincoln’s prescient statement, Lord Tennyson’s lyrics soundly flows in “The Brook” – “For [senators] may come and [senators] may go, / But [the United States] go on for ever.”
