Ames Progressive

My Karl Rove experience began Sunday as I walked down the hill toward the Iowa Memorial Union with my eye on a guy across the street carrying a pie in the same direction.Several minutes later I was indoors and shepherded into the protesters’ sectioned-off quarters – “Protesting? Or here for the lecture?” – where a refreshingly vitriolic Frank Cordaro of Des Moines Catholic Workers Home fame called for a citizen’s arrest of Rove.

Before long, the pie guy entered the room, pieless. Cordaro had finished speaking, so I walked over to Pie Guy and a couple others, presumably all University of Iowa students. I inquired if they had anything planned for the lecture. “Booing and turning our backs on Rove.”

After I told Pie Guy I’d seen him with the pie he was there and back again, pie in hand, and I was following him out of the protesters’ pen toward the IMU commons.

Pie Guy, it turned out, had an inside connection who said Rove was staying in one of the building’s hotel rooms – specifically Room 217. This sounded more interesting to me than the protest, so I hit the “2” inside the elevator and became an accessory to Pie Guy’s nefarious antics.

When the doors opened, Room 217 stared back at us. We wandered the halls for a while in search of “a lot of security” but didn’t see anything. When Pie Guy suggested waiting in the elevator for Rove, I decided I’d rather see the lecture than get beat down by a Rovian thug.

At the entrance, a cop asked me to open my coat and went about haphazardly patting it down. Rove’s contract with the university allowed for five minutes of audio/video use, press only. (Pie Guy later told me he was searched especially thoroughly since he’d spent the preceding two hours walking around with a pie.)

The “lecture” consisted of U of I journalism professor Frank Durham asking Rove pointed questions for a half-hour, followed by an hour of questions from the audience. Rove spent most of the time mocking the audience – “That comment shows a stupid, simple mind” – and perpetuating Bush administration lies. He faced constant heckling, but only a few people were kicked out. A lot more walked out on him.

The moment du jour came during the open mic session. A guy read a passage from a Lee Atwater article in Life Magazine that Atwater wrote shortly before his death in 1991:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring – acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Atwater was Rove’s friend and mentor (and, interestingly enough, an accomplished R&B musician). He worked a number of prominent Republican campaigns and perfected the art of personal destruction that Rove has so criminally mimicked. I failed to write down Rove’s response to what he was read, but it was nothing atypical.

Rove’s sociopathic tendencies came forth most prominently after a questioner asked, “How can you make jokes with all this blood on your hands?”

“Oh wow, I feel bad,” he replied. Then shortly thereafter: “It’s funny that a guy wearing a Palestinian symbol around his neck would be talking to me about blood on my hands.”

Surely, a lot of post-lecture conversation focused on who “won” this epic battle between Rove and the legion of raging dissenters. Which, of course, is exactly what Rove is after – controversy, after all, makes bank.

So I think I can safely identify the loser – the University of Iowa. Rove’s an unprosecuted villain, and if you disagree I suggest you take a closer look into the administration’s attorney firing scandal and the subsequent jailing of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman – just one of hundreds of examples, no doubt.

The university claimed that its motives were innocent enough. Its lectures committee leans left, and it wanted to balance things out with a prominent conservative. What it accomplished instead was padding Rove’s pockets with $40,000 and creating a spectacle entirely devoid of anything other than anger, bullshit, and yet another example of how utterly absurd politics in America have become.

If it’s any consolation to Pie Guy, Des Moines Register student blogger David Goodner wrote in a forum, “We followed Rove to 126 Restaurant and made him run out of the backdoor like the criminal he is. We followed him to his hotel room too but the cowardly war criminal wouldn’t answer the door. so we piled tables and trashcans in front of it.”

And also this: “Uhm, we had about 250 people at our protest, about 30 come to our weekly meetings, and the picketing outside 126 was impromptu and completely spontaneous. about a dozen of us were enjoying an after-protest schmoke when we got the lowdown on Rove’s location at 126 so we threw something together on the spot.”

A friend of mine summed up the whole affair nicely. As Rove left the stage, I heard him shout out, “Fuck you, Karl Rove!”

Good riddance to that.