Thursday

Guess where I am. No. You’ll never guess. I’m in Des Moines, Iowa. It is FREEZING here, but I love it. My flight left at 1 p.m. yesterday from LAX. No demonstrators, but the soup at the Delta lounge was only so-so. It was tasty but lukewarm vegetable soup.

The walk to my connecting flight at Phoenix was about 10 million miles. But when I got to my gate, everyone in the waiting area had warm, friendly looks on their faces. Solid citizens. Not terrified. Not in a hurry. Midwesterners. The heart of the heart of the country.

So utterly different from LAX they might as well be on different planets. Actually… they are on different planets. Planet fear and planet peace.

I slept the whole flight except for a few minutes eating a pitiful chicken dinner.

At Des Moines, the terminal was surprisingly crowded. Again, the travelers were calm. Totally unlike the shrieking at LAX baggage claim.

I stopped at a Walgreens to buy shampoo. The plump clerk smiled sweetly. Like a doe.

At my hotel, I watched a strange Japanese monster who preys on humans in snake skin. Then a glorious Sheraton room service ultra-rare cheeseburger. Heavenly Iowa beef.

Today I went to a gathering of Iowa land investors, brokers, farmers, the beautiful Lt. Governor Kim Reynolds — soon to be Governor — and The Bachelor from TV. I had seen him many times on TV. He was ultra-handsome and friendly.

The people at the dinner were chatty and outgoing and confident. They live in what Fitzgerald called “the warm center of the universe.” The U.S. Midwest.

I left the dinner on a cloud. There is hope.

Back at my hotel, on CNN, Don Lemon had a panel talking about the riots in Berkeley last night. One of the panelists was the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. He’s famously not smart but tonight he broke the bank.

He understood that the hundreds of masked, vandalizing, fire-starting, rock-throwing blacks (they looked black to me) were secretly organized by that most evil of the evil — “the right wing” — and had been agent provocateurs for the right to create repression.

INCREDIBLY — DON LEMON TOOK HIM SERIOUSLY AND DISCUSSED THIS AS A REASONABLE HYPOTHESIS!!!

A smart blond woman on the panel dismissed it, but an aging hippie named Todd Gitlin took it seriously, too.

A very sad moment for America. To believe for one nanosecond this kind of third grade nonsense!

To have it on CNN. Well. Forget that part.

Just pitiful. An unbelievably beautiful college girl who lives near me in Malibu told me a few days ago that the population of the USA was 8 million. This was genius compared with our former labor secretary.

Never mind. It’s time to sleep.