How Does Dubuque, Calif., Grab You?

Word processors are working overtime as one consultant after another offers a prescription for this ailing state at the hub of the farm belt. A common flaw in the diagnoses is the failure to understand that image is everything. Iowa’s image is awful. Say Iowa, and, unfair as it is, people think flat. They think rural. They think unsophisticated. Investors think not with my stockholders’ money.

Remaking Iowa’s image could take decades. Iowa does not have the time or the resources for that kind of public-relations campaign.

The quickest, simplest and cheapest way to present an attractive image is to utilize a name that’s already a winner in the marketplace. Like Florida. Or Hawaii. Better still, California. Utter that magic name and chairmen of the boards reach for their checkbooks.

Iowa should change its name to California.

The precedents are plentiful. New York State and New York City were born as twins, and no one has mistaken them for 300 years. Kansas City, Kan., copied from Kansas, the state. Kansas City, Mo., cribbed from Kansas City, Kan., and Manhattan, Kan., bummed from the New York borough.

Borrowing a place’s name is nothing to be ashamed about. Californians, in fact, would be flattered. They are a fair-minded people; after all, most of them came from Iowa. They will recognize the poetic justice in repaying Iowa for populating their state by lending Iowa its name.

Malcontents will be found in any crowd, including some who thought that they had booked flights to the West Coast only to debark in Des Moines. Their annoyance quickly would turn to gratefulness, not to mention delight, when they inhale the air outside LAX.

Any confusion between the old and the new, improved California would be shortlived once the Midwest namesake becomes identified as the clear-air California or the one with plenty of unclogged highways.

Economic development correlates closely with tropical flora, so it would be advantageous for New California to designate the palm as the state tree. Iowa’s prehistoric origin as rain forest and the expectation that it will return to that state would bring invest-in-tropical-paradise ads well within the bounds of permissible puffery.

Council Bluffs, Calif. . . . Cedar Rapids, Calif. . . . Sioux City, Calif. . . . Des Moines, Calif. . . . Clinton, Calif. . . . Davenport, Calif. . . . Dubuque, Calif. . . .

They were made for each other. California, here we come!