Nick Bergus

You, Too, Can Own a Nick Bergus Original

For the longest time, my dream was to move to a cabin in the woods that was big enough for a comfortable bed, a simple kitchen, a reasonable bathroom and a studio for letterpress printing.

Not that I knew how to set type or print with a letterpress, but the hands-on monotony was appealing.

The fantasy also presupposed the cabin had clean running water, electricity, internet and was accessible all year round.

Flash forward, and I discover Public Space One and the Iowa City Press Co-op offer workshops, including letterpress and found a joy of making art.

And now you can buy some of my prints on Etsy. All proceeds will go to Iowa City Mutual Aid.

It’s not a hermit cabin in the woods, but it’ll do.

Shop on Etsy

Reminder for Pride

If you’re making a sign or chalking on the sidewalk or spray painting 500 South Clinton Street to remind the community that the elected Johnson County Attorney chose to prosecute seven trans people for protesting an anti-trans speaker and shouldn’t be at pride, a quick reminder:

It’s Rachel Zimmermann Smith with two Ns and no hyphen.

Zuri

The dog we’d come to adopt was already spoken for, but we got a better one.

Zuri was athletic: a jumper of fences, a chaser of squirrels, and an eater of rabbits. Once she chased a herd of deer through Iowa City’s alphabet streets, collapsing in ecstatic exhaustion when she got home.

She escaped from the yard, from the house, and, once, her latched kennel. She loved running and diving into the snow after voles and cricking her neck at impossible angles to rest her head against chair legs and wall edges.

One time she ate rat poison at an Airbnb. Another time she surreptitiously ate a large gingerbread house in the middle of the night until she was surprised by a sleepy, suspicious human. Once she ate her own bed. And in her final days, she ate ice cream, a peanut butter and banana sandwich, a bacon cheeseburger, and cake.

When she first moved in, Zuri wasn’t supposed to get on the brand-new dog-fur-free couches, but we let her curl up there after a single day.

Zuri loved walks and could hike for miles. She loved car rides. She hated thunderstorms, fireworks, and going through the car wash.

She was a looker. Kids loved her one brown eye and one clear blue eye. She also shed a lot of fur.

When she started to limp, we guessed she was getting old and had maybe pulled a muscle. When it didn’t go away, the vet thought maybe it was arthritis. A scan revealed it was cancer and inoperable.

As the cancer progressed, she didn’t let it faze her. She was almost as good on three legs as four, and, even as she continued to atrophy through the late spring, Zuri caught a rabbit in the backyard.

All good things come to an end, and Zuri was a good dog.

How Lame Can It Get?

I know I said it wasn’t worth critique any longer, but a double byline story carrying this clickbait hed is outlandish.

If you have to print this, maybe just run the number? At least they got in published the next day, I guess.

We Are All We Have

Like any sane person, I’m distressed and overwhelmed living in a world that is a whirlwind of terrible things: rising fascism, the dismantling of democracy, our neighbors being stripped of their civil rights, the social safety net being sold for parts, hostility towards science, etc.

As we look around for help, it’s increasingly clear: there is no one but ourselves.

In this swirl of a grim reality moving at breakneck speed from bad to worse, I have found taking a deep breath, overlapping my sphere of concern with my sphere of influence and focusing on the people around me has been empowering and calming. As our federal, state and local governments continue to let people slip through cracks or be increasingly unable or unwilling to address ongoing crises, others are continuing to organize.

Iowa City Mutual Aid is one such collective working to meet the survival needs of the people whom our systems continuously fail. They work to support the most vulnerable: supporting unhoused people, writing letters to incarcerated queer folks, a community garden, emergency needs as they arise and more.

If you’re angry and looking for a way to help, please consider giving — and consider making it monthly to empower their work to help people and build community. (Des Moines Mutual Aid is their fiscal sponsor and donations are tax deductible.) Funds go to keep people in their homes, support international students getting their visas pulled and needs across our community.

Everyone Wants Something for Free

Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican from Wilton and son of Iowa GOP chair Jeff Kaufmann, according to Tom Barton in The Gazette:

“With assessment letters coming out, Iowans have been louder than ever with their concerns about property taxes. Iowans have expressed their concern, rage, and fear about unpredictable increases and their ability to afford staying in their homes. We are working to provide real relief to Iowans and their families, make Iowa a competitive state to live, and deliver a property tax overhaul that focuses on property taxpayers.”

First about those letters: they are required to be sent around the same time as the propaganda about tax rates despite not having any impact on a property owner’s tax liability until 18 months from now. Shocker everyone is mad about their largest asset appreciating in value. Wait. What?

Look, everyone dislikes taxes, but they sure do love parks, libraries, roads, sidewalks, safe buildings, emergency medical attention and their homes not being on fire. The GOP plan might fix the former, but it will absolutely not have a positive impact on the latter.

I Assure You

You have met someone who is transgender, and they were a person who deserves to live authentically and be loved just like you.

“Joyous”

So much joy after all the recriminations of the campaign. Grassroots movements , and welcoming people in, matters.

Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act: Notes on Preserving the American Republic

Josh Marshall has a sobering post at Talking Points Memo in which he quotes Lee Bollinger from an interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orbán and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.

We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.

“Failure of imagination” is a nice way of saying “people who shouldn’t be are in denial of what’s happening.” I’d point to Chuck Schumer’s failure to hold the line this past week.

Back to Marshall:

That is what is happening. And we’re in the middle of it. As semi-familiar as the words and concepts are, we all collectively need to concentrate on that statement. It’s neither a future possibility nor an accomplished fact.

That is, as John Connor says in Terminator 2, there’s no fate, and we can’t act like there is.

Trump and his administration, with the help of the Republican Party, while dismantling the federal government, are also simultaneously attacking other nodes of power outside of government: the government. Obviously higher education, but also, and here’s where Marshall goes deeper, the law firms that are necessary for private actors to work within the legal system.

A free society exists not simply because there are limits on the power of the government. The state may have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. But it does not have a monopoly on power. It’s free because there are multiple nodes of power — cultural, economic, social — in the national space. Universities are one of those. The private sector economy is another.

We each need to resist in our own spaces and places.

We’ve got a huge job on our hands and there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed. But the first step of acting is knowing exactly where you are. People who are thinking in terms of Viktor Orbán are not surprised by each successive move. It’s actually pretty textbook. How it all shakes out comes down to the decisions countless private actors make. It also means supporting institutions that are meaningfully supporting free society. That doesn’t have to be a matter of performative spectacles. At its most essential, it means not changing behavior.

This is war, and we need to observe, orient, decide, act faster than those we oppose.

Iowa City Man tells UI Police Detective to ‘Leave my Family Alone’ After Harassment

Oops, sorry. The Gazette’s headline is “UI police detective tells Iowa City man to ‘leave my family alone’ after harassment.”

Headlines frame stories — in the age of social media, are all many people read — and, unlike the Daily Iowan’s piece, this frame only tells the story of the prosecution and the police.

The ledes of the two pieces tell two very different stories. Compare the two. Here’s Trish Mehaffy’s from The Gazette:

A University of Iowa police detective said an Iowa City man created a social media profile of him using personal information, including his spouse’s name, and used “hateful discriminating language” that he would never use.

The first three paragraphs are all from the detective’s “victim impact statement.”

Meanwhile, here’s Emma Jane’s lede in The Daily Iowan:

Daniel Kauble was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation and six months of suspension — meaning he will serve jail time if he violates probation — for operating a parody account on X, formerly known as Twitter, impersonating University of Iowa Police Department detective Ian Mallory.

Simply regurgitating police reports, court filings and victim impact statements is stenography, not journalism. I don’t care how you feel about this series of events, acknowledging Kauble’s Twitter account was a parody is key to understanding what’s happening here, and “satire” or “parody” do not appear in The Gazette story.

(The Press-Citizen, if it ever covers this, will do it at least a week late with a clickbate headline such as “Who Harassed a UIPD Detective?” but it’s not worth criticizing.)