Maybe trick-or-treating enables the entitlement mentality.

This is October 31. In addition to its being the end of the month, it marks something called Halloween. When I was a child about half a century ago, I used to go freeloading with my little brother. We probably hit every house in an area of about a quarter mile and brought home a lot of calorie-laden food.

We never thought twice about it. We never questioned the safety of the food. We never asked ourselves why would people we did not know or only knew vaguely would be all ready and apparently happy to give us candy or other treats. And when we found the occasional person who was not participating, we somehow felt that we were being deprived of something to which we were entitled. [And we somehow resented that our neighbors, almost all of whom attended Catholic school, would get the next day off and got to eat their stuff sooner.]

I have long suspected that this type of attitude explains a lot of people’s attitudes toward other parts of life these days. Maybe trick-or-treating enables the entitlement mentality.

In the cards for our city?

I recently put a post on the Saint Paul Issues Forum [link at left or below on the side] in which I noted that today’s paper has an article about Cottage Groves history card deck and asked who or what would go on a Saint Paul deck.

I figured that some people or things would be obvious [Pig’s Eye Parrant, Alexander Ramsey, Harriet Bishop, the Mississippi River, Winter Carnival, Gordon Parks, Lexington Park, the Capitol] and wondered what others might be included, speculating out loud [so to speak since this is a written medium] about other people/things [Bishop Cretin? the Hill family? Vic Tedesco? Gordon Parks? Wendell Anderson? the gangster era? Sister Giovanni? the colleges in town? the parks – and which ones? Max Shulman?]

I chose to put that post there rather than here because they have more readers and this is something I am more interested in starting than in finishing. But anybody reading this who maybe is not a member of SPIF and wishes to make a suggestion here may feel free to do so.

Did anybody note that we just had something called a World Series?

Did anybody note that we just had something called a World Series?

The DPP showed the importance it gave the event when they put the story of the third game on page 17C of Sunday’s city edition.

I guess that maybe I am nostalgic for the way they used to do it, play games during the daytime at whatever would be noon or one o’clock at the home team’s ball park, taking days off for travel only when geography seemed to require it, being aired on network radio and shown on major network television, heard by people who could, with or without permission, sneak a radio onto their work or school premises and seen by people who could go home for lunch and sneak a peek or two of smuggle a television into a break room.

Those World Series were noticed by people from all across the country and even people who were not baseball fans seemed to have an interest, even if the local team was not involved or there was no local team. Wherever you went, you could ask, “What’s the score?” and the person you were asking would understand what you were asking about. It might turn out that he/she did not have any more current information than you did, but you both were thinking of the same topic. Other differences [political, religious, class] were put aside for a few days and replaced by temporary new divisions [Giants-Indians, Cardinals-Yankees, Dodgers-Yankees, Mets-Orioles, etc.] took their places in areas where there were no teams and in areas where the locals were playing there was a new us-vs.-them which replaced the Cold War in people’s minds for a few days.

Those days are not coming back, but maybe each October we should at least reflect on then.

Pitts on Political Correctness

I like syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, jr. and usually find his columns both interesting and edifying.

Sunday’s column published Sunday in papers around the country [including the DPP] did a splendid job demonstrating how we are allowing language to lose its precision and, therefore, losing its ability to decry what needs decrying.

I have posted an excerpt below and I commend the entire article to everybody’s attention.

[Political correctness] struck me as among the signature excesses of touchy-feely liberalism, this effort to purge the language of all terms that were, or could be perceived as, exclusionary, undignified or objectifying.

Over the years, I’ve made peace with much of it. I say “African-American” even though I find the term cumbersome and imprecise. I say “letter carrier” instead of “mailman” because yeah, not all postal workers are men. I say “person with AIDS” instead of “victim of AIDS” because no one wants to be defined as a victim. And so on.

But some of it I’ve never been able to buy. I dismissed admonitions to say “differently abled” in place of the perfectly adequate “disabled.” I laughed off a PC Bible that omitted all talk of sitting at the “right hand” of God out of deference to the tender feelings of the left handed.

Such excesses make me fear PC will fatally neuter the language, robbing it of clarity, vigor, frankness. So I’ve always had a tender spot for those outlaws unwilling to sacrifice directness for correctness.

To put it another way, if you say “black” instead of “African-American,” I ain’t mad at’cha.

The problem is that over the years, so-called political incorrectness has become less about restoring clarity to language than about providing cover for offensive words, ideas and actions. Language should let you say what you mean, but if what you mean is mean-spirited, we ought not diminish that by calling it simply “politically incorrect.”

Interesting URL

Likely I will say more about this later, but for now let me note that in a reply to my October 16^th post ["Notes on a Visit to a strip joint [former one, that is]" a poster identifying him/herself as “JA Rotgut” has referred me to an interesting web site, leehelgen.com.

It does seem amazing that somebody so prominently in public life, who wanted to be a technology advocate on city-wide wireless, would forget to protect the most obvious internet manifestation of his own name.

I don’t know if JA Rotgut will ever get as well known as Dick Tuck, the legendary bane of Dick Nixon, but this is an interesting move. [Also, and I know that it is kind of juvenile, but the chance to align Helgen’s name with Tricky Dick’s was too much to pass up.]

Is there a Catch-22 here someplace?

From an article today in the Winona Daily News

Under provisions of the USA Patriot Act and the Real ID Act, the Hmong who fought alongside Americans in the “secret war” against communists in the 1960s and 1970s in Laos are considered “terrorists” — disqualifying them for asylum or green cards.

Last month, the Senate passed an amendment by Sens. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., that says the Hmong and other groups that had been ensnared by the anti-terrorism laws are not to be considered terrorists. The amendment was part of a larger bill funding foreign aid and U.S. diplomacy, which faces a veto threat over issues unrelated to the Hmong provision.

The situation prompting this action seems overtly ridiculous. After all, isn’t terrorism more of less a big part of what we hired/co-opted/coerced the Hmong into doing back then which helped set up the situation in which we found ourselves morally obliged to welcome Hmong people here.

If I am understanding this correctly, our senior senator deserves some compliment for h is role on this.

If I need drastic re-education on this, feel free to comment.

R.I.P. Paul Wellstone

Five years ago today was the Wellstone plane crash. We will be hearing a lot about him and his wife and daughter in the next few days. And although they aren’t being mentioned much, we might even hear a little about Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy who went down in the same plane.

I won’t write any special tribute at the moment. There will be plenty of them available elsewhere.. Likely in the next few days I might have a comment on one or more of the tributes I see or what happened in those days five years ago.

What I will post here is something I wrote October 29, 2002 to an out-of –state relative who asked.

Ray, any thoughts you would like to pass on about Wellstone? I never
followed him. But, from the media coverage, it sounds like he was a decent
person whose views I would disagree with most of the time. Of course, his
"goodness" may be inflated by the media who seldom act as critically in the
days following death as they might in the days before. I also think it is
interesting now to watch both parties try to make the most of the situation
and continue the campaign, while pretending to be waiting until after the
funeral stuff is over. Who are they kidding? Anyway, I would be interested
in the insights of my Minnesota political correspondent.

For perspective, the relative is a conservative type who lives in a red state and usually, if not always, votes Republican.

This is excerpted for general relevance, but not otherwise edited, from what I wrote then.

I first met Paul Wellstone 20 years ago when he was making an unsuccessful run for State Auditor and have seen him dozens of time since in large and small groups. I suspect that if I met him again he might recognize me, but I doubt he would recognize me by name, but it is hard to know. He did have an uncanny ability to remember names and faces, but any good politician is able to make you think that he/she knows you even if you have never met.

Paul Wellstone was an orator who could make a dull room come alive and even get the most blasé excited. He seemed to advocate what he believed and believe what he advocated much more than most political types I have known. He was one of those people labeled "liberal" who never seemed to think that looking out for the little guy meant looking out for the unborn, but he came across as somebody who honestly had those convictions. [I have become convinced that most politicians either favor "abortion rights" or "life" not as a matter of personal conscience, but as a matter of political expedience, the choice being determined by where they are, who they are around, and whom they are opposing. If Reagan and the Bushes and Hatch and Helms were/are really pro-life one must wonder why they did/have done so little for the pro-life cause domestically and continued to expand relations with China.]

He voted against letting W go to war in Iraq and many thought that was the end of his career, but polls were showing that the vote had not hurt him.

But I am getting a little sick of hearing about how perfect he was. When the Republicans came back to power in Congress in 1995 and Oklahoma City was bombed [and he was facing reelection in 1996] he voted for the "anti-crime" legislation of the time, creating both "midnight basketball" and a few dozen new federal capital offenses and tried to allay us with the idea that he accepted them both since the first was more important than the latter.

And this year I was relishing an encounter I had with him in 1994. I had raised a parliamentary question about whether [as the chairperson was about to do] it was proper to let our then-mayor, Norm Coleman, speak at our county-unit DFL convention as if he were an officeholder from our party when he had just been elected by running against us. While that matter was being resolved, Wellstone came by to speak.

Since the practice is usually to suspend everything to allow visiting dignitaries of such rank to speak [since they may well be trying to make a couple of dozen such stops a day], he started to speak. As part of his speech, he suggested letting Norm speak since the party needed to have a big tent and maybe Norm would come back inside. Needless to say, I lost that point of order. That Norm Coleman would be running neck-and-neck with him all of this year [although Wellstone had a 6% lead in the last Minnesota poll] seemed to have enough irony to amuse me.

I have known quite a few politicians and only a few that I actually think have served for the basic reason they really thought they could do something good for other people. A lot of others have seemed to think that they could do a lot of good for a lot of people [albeit the ideas of good and which people have varied a lot] while doing good for themselves, but doing good for themselves has seemed to be the first reason. I am not sure if Wellstone was one of the first type or not. He may have been, but I didn't know him well enough to say.

The Details at Lord Fletcher’s Castle.

The Mpls. paper has an article today [one paragraph pasted below] about Lord Fletcher’s castle [sometimes and formerly referred to as the Saint Paul City Hall/ Ramsey County Court House]. The article, by Pat Pfeifer of their staff, refers to some of the international aspects of its design.

I find it interesting because I have been in the building a few hundred times and had never noticed a lot of this. [I don't remember a cigar shop there, but maybe I'm just too young.]

Of course, I am not an artist and apparently don’t know good stuff when I see it. I have always thought of Onyx John as being ugly and have often entered from Kellogg Boulevard so I wouldn’t have to see him.

I have noticed and actually appreciated the murals in Council Chambers, although I note the attitudes on gender and race they reflect are obviously dated and would not be accepted today.

Since the security precautions which were implemented on and since September 11, 2001 trasnforming the building into Lord Fletcher's Castle, I have done what I can to avoid even going there since the machinery and the guards athe castle do not seem to like me. [especially the machinery. Some of the guards have been very helpful.] By the time I make it through security with my clothes still on, I usually just want to get whatever I was down there done.

Maybe next time I'll look a bit more. That is, if I am still dressed.

Around every corner and on every floor, there's some treat for the eye. Walls are covered with exquisite woods -- unobtainable and impossible to replace -- from every continent except Antarctica: Australian blackwood (sixth floor); American butt walnut (old cigar shop, first floor); Prima Vera from Mexico (ninth floor); Kona from Hawaii; Cuban mahogany (courtroom 840), and many more. Floors and lobbies are made of marble quarried in Italy, Belgium and France. Huge murals by Chicago artist John Norton oversee the City Council/County Board Chambers on the third floor. Three ceilings are gold leaf.

Truth in Metaphor Dept.

All the time I have been referring [here and in other places] to the "tobacco Taliban” I thought the term was appropriate and alliterate metaphor.

This doesn’t prove anything, but it makes me think there may have been more truth in the term than I thought. [from Washingtonpost .com

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Smokers are like animals that do not think rationally, a Malaysian hardline Islamist cleric said at the weekend.

Islam discourages the faithful from smoking, just as it bars them from alcohol, said Nik Aziz Nik Mat, spiritual leader of the Parti Islam se-Malaysia, which seeks to turn the country into an Islamic state that punishes thieves by lopping off their hands.

Smokers did not use their brains because they continued to let themselves be addicted to the habit, despite knowing it was bad for their health, the Star newspaper quoted Nik Aziz as saying.

"People who do not want to think are like animals," Nik Aziz told the launch of an anti-smoking campaign in Kota Baru, the capital of Malaysia's northeastern state of Kelantan, which is his party's last remaining bastion.

Nik Aziz, himself a non-smoker, has earlier said smokers would not be included among his party's candidates at Malaysia's next general elections, widely expected to be called as soon as early next year.

Louisiana changes OR GOP Inconsistent? revisited

The morning news is telling us that Louisiana has chosen a Republican governor. Now the Republican Senate leadership will be able to call for Vitter’s resignation. [Cf. October 16 post “GOP Inconsistent?]

Who wants to bet that they will?

Sainted: St. Paul

From the “Sainted and Tainted” Section of yesterday’s DPP: “Sainted: St. Paul . . .”

Does somebody feel that a saint needs recanonization? Actually, of course, it appears that the city is the target of the blessing, but the juxtaposition of the spelled word next to the abbreviated word does look funny.

Actually, considering that the paper refuses to spell the word out, shouldn’t they be labeling the feature “St.ed and Tainted”?

Boxmeyer columns

The local paper ran Don Boxmeyer columns back to back this week which doesn’t happen very often. In fact I’m not sure that it has happened since his retirement in 2002.

I have always enjoyed his writings. He is a little older than I and has been here longer. Most of the time it seems it seems the people of whom he writes are people I don’t know or know only a bit, but are on subjects I find interesting and even if I don’t know the people being written about, it seems that I must know several people who do know them. And, perhaps because I was raised in a lost neighborhood someplace else, I enjoy reading about the lost neighborhoods, even though it seems that most of them were lost shortly before I arrived here.

Montgomery Ward's Midway store, the subject of Monday’s column, was one of the first places I patronized when I came to Minnesota. It was large and hard to miss. With Brown and Bigelow, their towers made the Midway identifiable from quite a way off.

Tuesday’s column was about the lost neighborhood known as “Connemara Patch” and the Cardenas family in particular. I know Rick Cardenas and I know his sister. In 1985 I placed his name into nomination for DFL endorsement for Fifth Ward City Council. [For the record, the convention endorsed nobody. Rick did not run in the ensuing election and Hugo Masanz went on to be unseated by Janice Rettman.] I had heard of Connemara Patch and recognized that the name had an obvious Irish derivation, but did not know where it had been. I actually thought it had been over somewhere closer to the Badlands. Nor was I aware of the financial shenanigans of Archbishop Ireland and James. J. Hill in the matter, although I had been aware of personal financial matters involving both Bishop Cretin and Archbishop Ireland which some local Catholics might find a little uneasy to talk about.

We treat our history haphazardly and inconsistently. But one thread that goes though all of is that progress has to happen and progress is defined by those with money.

Wards had to go because some people found a way to make more money convincing us that Midway Marketplace would be a good substitute and that a new Wards in the new center could survive. It turned out that Wards was too sick to survive in any format. There were four anchor tenants of Midway Marketplace. Only one – Cub Foods – is still there.

Connemara Patch, like the West Side Flats, Williams Hill, Swede Hollow, Rondo, and others had to go. The homes and neighborhoods of poor people [Someday I’m going to go off on the semantics here. We use the adjective “poor” to refer to both wealth and quality. This often seems to give the wrong messages.] go.

As Linda Ellerbee used to sign off, “So it goes.”

When they put Mr. Boxmeyer out to pasture in January 2002 [Mr. Boxmeyer assured me it was voluntary, but considering all that has gone on there that probably needs to be taken with a whole bag of Morton’s finest] I was afraid we wouldn’t be seeing his work any more. So this week’s double exposure was indeed a treat.

Notes on a Visit to a strip joint [former one, that is]

I went to the candidate forum for candidates from Wards 5 and 6 tonight. I was surprised that the attendance at the old Payne Reliever site exceeded 100 people there. It was sponsored by Payne/Phalen District Five Planning Council. [Full disclosure: I am a director of the organization but did not take part in the arrangements.] It seemed to me that most of the people who came were the people who usually make our bigger meetings more than it did the folks who follow the candidates, but I am sure that both groups were there.

Although this was not a League of Women Voters event, the forum was stylized after the ones that they do. And, by and large, the candidates [all four of whom were there] did and said the things that you would expect them to do and say.

There were a few things other than the attendance which seemed noteworthy.

Before anybody else could do so, Dan Bostrom invoked the name of Bruce Vento, calling him a friend, before anybody else could use it. In his closing statement he also cited his role in getting East Consolidated School renamed for the late congressperson.

Pakou Hang countered with describing Paul Wellstone as her friend.

I do not discount either of these claims of friendship, but one should keep in mind that friendships with deceased politicians are easy to claim since they cannot counter the assertion themselves and they tried to convince a lot of people that they were friends when they were living, even having pictures taken with others and signing letters, certificates, and plaques. I do know that the late congressperson attended Johnson High with Councilmember Bostrom, but do not know what to infer from that.

Lee Helgen made a nice reference to Bostrom’s and Benanav’s push to require certificates of occupancy in one- and two-family rental properties. I am sure that many of his supporters were biting their lips on that one.

Questioners gave all of the candidates a chance to demagogue with inquiries about subsidized housing and pit bulls, vacant buildings and crime, but nobody really played things that way.

I did learn that the lame duck Boy Wonder in my ward is older than his opponent. But of course my problems with LDC Helgen do not derive from his age.

I still think that District Councils are not the best organizations to run this kind of forum as I still think the risks to the organization can dwarf the benefits, but this one somehow worked out all right, at least as far as I can tell at this time.

GOP Inconsistent?

People have been saying that Republicans are demonstrating bias or at least being inconsistent by saying Craig should resign but not making the same demand on Vitter, that they regard homosexual infidelity differently than they regard heterosexual infidelity. They may be right. After all the GOP has not made any great effort to makes friends from non-heterosexuals.

But, in all of the commentary I have read and heard, I have not run across anybody who has noted that a Republican would appoint Craig’s successor and a Democrat would appoint Vitter’s. And partisanship often trumps consistency or principle.

A Bridge in Phalen Park

There is a bridge in Phalen Park just north and east of the picnic pavilion. When it was reopened in 1992, it was dedicated to the memory of the late City Councilmember, Karl Neid, jr.

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the dedication of that bridge. A plaque on the west side inside announces that and explains a little about Mr. Neid. Hundreds of people cross the bridge every day as the running/walking and bicycle paths that surround the lake pass over it. I doubt if many of them ever notice the plaque, much less read it. And after fifteen years, given varying maturation and migration factors, there are probably quite a few who do not even remember the man for whom the bridge was named. A few may be aware that each year a city employee receives the Karl Neid award.

Maybe one reason that so few people ever look at the plaque is that it sits on the bicycling side of the bridge, so that to read it most people would have to put themselves in harm’s way to read it. And maybe it is just that there are plaques on bridges and other public works everywhere are so omnipresent that we just don’t notice them.

I won’t eulogize Karl Neid, jr. right here right now. If I’m still doing this in May when the anniversary of his passing or on his spring birthday which I don’t know right now, I will likely say a lot more.

But I do wonder how many ever notice that bridge or speculate on how some of our municipal public matters might have turned out differently were he still with us.

And if you get around that bridge sometime soon, take a look.

Entitlement Nation [Holiday Department]

To those of us who are old, today is really Columbus Day, the day when we celebrated or observed the “discovery” of America. But somehow it was decided almost forty years ago to move several holidays so that they would always come on Monday.

Somehow more three-day weekends seemed good for business. I will leave it to the economists to figure out if it helped business. I think it had a bad effect on general morale. It seems to have set up one more thing to which we feel entitled, rather than a treat when it happens.

Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Columbus Day, and Veterans’ Day were all decided by the federal government to be observed on the third Monday of February, the fourth Monday of May, the second Monday of October and the fourth Monday of October, respectively. I am not sure of the reason that Independence Day was not moved, but they probably figured that having the “Fourth of July” on the sixth or the first would seem funny. Likewise, they somehow never got around to moving New Year’s Day. They left Labor Day fixed on a Monday since it was there already and did not touch Thanksgiving since it had set up a four-day weekend and the purpose of the Act was to lengthen weekends, not shorten them. And can you imagine the ruckus if they had touched Christmas. Merchants would want to make sure that they did not lose any selling time and some religious people would remind us that the December 25^th date is fixed in the Gospel according to St. Mark.

Since then, they moved Veterans’ Day back to November 11^th. Veterans groups and several states balked at the change. They pointed out that the old date was established because it was the date of the 1918 Armistice. [At the time many people still referred to the day as “Armistice Day” which was the holiday’s name until after the end of World War Two. Those people are mostly gone now.]

Also, since then Martin Luther King Day has been established and fixed on a Monday, the third one in January. And people seldom refer to “Washington’s Birthday” any more. “Presidents’ Day” seems to have replaced it. [Of course, George Washington’s actual birthday was February 11^th and was usually observed on February 22^nd. Neither date could ever come on the new date set for the holiday.]

One of the things that happens when we move these observances to Monday is that we pay less attention to why we are having the observance and more to the day off that it establishes. And if we don’t pay attention to the reason for an observance we never get to another question:

“Do we really still want this holiday?”

Tutu the Fourth Time

Well, now Fr. Dease has changed his mind. You have to admit that it can be hard to make a decision based on moral certainty and then change it so soon afterward.

If I were Desmond Tutu, I would be tempted to tell Fr. Dease that he and St. Thomas could shove off. But since archbishops should be made of more forgiving stock than I am, maybe he will give the folks at St. Thomas a visit.

Father Dease's letter [excerpted below] is on the St. Thomas web site

One of the strengths of a university is the opportunity that it provides to speak freely and to be open to other points of view on a wide variety of issues. And, I might add, to change our minds.

Therefore, I feel both humbled and proud to extend an invitation to Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak at the University of St. Thomas.

I have wrestled with what is the right thing to do in this situation, and I have concluded that I made the wrong decision earlier this year not to invite the archbishop. Although well-intentioned, I did not have all of the facts and points of view, but now I do.

PeaceJam International may well choose to keep the alternative arrangements that it has made for its April 2008 conference, but I want the organization and Archbishop Tutu to know that we would be honored to hold the conference at St. Thomas.

Tutu the Third Time

From a letter from Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director to Father Dennis Dease of St. Thomas

While Archbishop Tutu is not a friend of Israel, we do not believe he is an anti-Semite. As you rightly point out in your letter, his words have often stung the Jewish community. However, while he may at times have crossed the line, we believe that he should have been permitted to speak on your campus.

This is probably all I will be saying about this, but I'll leave the news bar on the right set to news about the archbishop for a while.

I do not write the rules. I just play the game. [Cleanup Dept.]

For twenty years now the City has been funding District Councils to conduct district cleanups in spring and/or autumn. While some neighborhoods had operated cleanups with money raised in other matters, a moderate winter had left the city with money unspent on snow plowing and authorized a round of cleanups. These early cleanups were done with one-time money. Funding for future years was neither assured nor reasonable assumed. Of course, after a few years of one-time money, District Councils started to think of it as an entitlement and indeed it has become one in fact, if not in theory.

I helped plan and worked on the first Payne/Phalen cleanup in October 1987 and was the District Council president when what was probably the biggest cleanup in the city’s history took place the next autumn – a combined District 2-Distirct 5- Ramsey County Hazardous Waste Cleanup was held in the outer parking of the Phalen Shopping Center parking lot. Traffic was tied up for a mile or so in several directions. I’ve worked on many since, partly because my district runs them twice a year. I haven’t been involved in the planning, just in the doing, but I have great respect for those who put these things together.

And I acknowledge that properly done they do allow for a lot of “community building” and do get a lot of stuff out of the neighborhoods.

But I still wonder if this is the best way to go about things.

And for what it's worth to anybody reading this, this next Saturday [10/13] there is a combined cleanup for Highland Park and Macalester-Groveland and one for Payne/Phalen. The relevant cleanups probably need volunteers and clients. I imagine that you can contact the relevant District Councils.

Congrats, A L Brown AND Tutu the Second Time

It was nice to see an op-ed piece from A. L. Brown in today’s DPP. He also addressed the St. Thomas–Archbishop Tutu matter in a little different way than I had here. The paper identified him as a KSTP talk show host, but did not say when his show is on. Wonder why?

Maybe because the Hubbards just seem to use him as fill-in [and never for Soucheray]. They used to give him Sunday afternoons which has to be the worst spot available [which had once been made available to somebody else they would consider to be strangely radiclib, Nick Coleman – not the real Nick Coleman, but his son who shuttles his very ordinary predictable pablum between newspapers like Elizabeth Taylor was shuttling between husbands forty years ago] , but they made other programming choices and forced him out of that.

KSTP used to have more diverse minds on its air. Remember Barbara Carlson [who by herself sometimes coujld be a year’s quota of diversity in just a few hours of the morning]? Dick Pomerantz? Michael Jackson [no, not that one – the white guy from South Africa who actually challenged apartheid amid all his show-biz sycophancy but was dumped for the Missouri Mouth]? The Mayor of Brooklyn Park, James Janos? Or Turi Rider? Are your ears still ringing from that last one?

Back to Mr. Brown’s comments. I did not go into things like why Ann Coulter was allowed to speak there. It is indeed strange when somebody who seems so void of fact or world perspective is allowed and a Nobel Prize winning bishop is not, but that’s their business. I was focusing forward. If Tutu is not allowed, disinvited even, who will be tolerated? I suggested that the students and constituency of the Merriam Park-based semi-Catholic university [named after a man noted for his intellect] can accept banning the good bishop that they ought to be ready to mobilize to see to it that nobody else similarly opinionated [whether of similar opinions or contrary] be permitted an audience there either. It would leave a lesser university, but it would be consistent.

And I do wonder if Archbishop Tutu were a Catholic bishop if the action would have been the same.

Comments on others' CP concerns

There has been a flurry of comment on the state our city’s Citizen Participation system lately. As the next WSCO election approaches, I suspect that we will hear more.

Some people seem unable to accept the turnover at Highland District Council and see some evil influence there. They may be right and the influence may indeed be evil, but I haven’t seen that anybody broke any rules doing it.

I was at last year’s WSCO election along with about 700 others, most of whom [unlike I] had a sufficient West Side connection [as determined by the organization’s working documents] and were participating in the meeting. I was a little disappointed that some people I know of who have good West Side Credentials were not chosen, but it wasn’t my district or my choice and I am already living with a lot of disappointment.

The biggest ongoing problem the Citizen Participation system seems to have now is a sense of blind coolness from city. This comes both from elected officials as well as bureaucrats and my guess as one who hasn’t worked is that it is largely from the latter, although things are never the same in every district and every ward.

A more immediately ominous sign for people in every district ought to be the forced merger in District 13. This was brought on by the elected officials.

When District Council boundaries were established, some boundaries were drawn pretty much on natural factors and others had to be [or at least were] somewhat more arbitrarily. My district [Payne/Phalen, District 5] had pretty natural boundaries. To get into the populated portion from another district in the city, you pretty much had to go under or over a bridge. The West Side was even more naturally defined.

District 13 seems to have been established when the line drawers found that they needed some place to put the stuff which was too far south for Saint Anthony Park or Hamline-Midway, too far west for Summit-University, and too far north for Mac-Groveland. Merriam Park was already fairly well defined and was certainly large enough compared to Saint Anthony Park or Summit Hill to be a District itself, but Merriam Park didn’t cover the whole area and making Merriam Park a District in its own right would leave a parcel too small to be considered a District by itself. So from that situation the three councils in one District system was established.

It looked inefficient to those of us across town, but it seemed to work. But after three decades it seems that the folks in Merriam Park looked to the northwest and the southeast and wondered. A change in how Councils were being funded probably helped inspire this look.

I am not an expert in District 13 things. I have probably simplified this more than I should have. It may well be that in a few years that all will conclude that the new organization has worked wonders for all.

But questions will remain about this hard hand of the city. What will happen when the city decided that it might take less money to have all of the East Side in one District? Or that all of the more-or-less “Midway” area [Districts 11, 12, 13, and the western portion of 10 should be one district and the eastern part of D10 attached to the North End? And to a lot of the city, there really is not much difference between Highland and Macalester-Groveland.

Maybe one or more of these areas would be able to resist, but it would not be a good situation.

Welcome to Minnesota?? [Nothing is allowed division

In today’s Mpls. paper there is a story about where Minnesota people can now smoke, since their own state continues to assault their basic human freedoms [see October 1^st post].

They suggest Hudson. I haven’t been there for a while, but may need to make a trip soon. I assume that MnDot still has the sign on west-bound I-94 just west of the St. Croix which welcomes people to our state. I live here,
but I wonder if I will really feel welcome when I see it.

Welcome to Minnesota?? [Nobel division]

This blog is primarily about local matters so this piece is perhaps a little misplaced, but it does involve local universities.

Being awarded a Nobel prize has to be some kind of personal accreditation in whatever one is doing. I do not agree all the time with who gets them and nobody reallyl cares about that. And, of course, they don’t ask me ahead of time abut whom they shuold tap for the honor. But most of them seem to make a fair amount of sense.

So it seems a little surprising that a local semi-Catholic university which has expanded beyond its Merriam Park roots would deny a chance for a bishop, a successor of the apostles, somebody who has been given the Nobel prize for peace to speak on its campus next year. Metro State will extend a welcome instead.

Bishop Tutu’s primary offense to the Merriam Park educational institution seems to be suggesting that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians might not be the fault of just one side and the both sides are unequally represented in various governments’ power structures, including the United States. Since few conflicts are ever just one person’s or group’s fault and power structures are never evenly balanced, this hardly seems like a radical opinion.

The administration of St. Thomas is undoubtedly free to invite, not invite, or disinvite pretty much whomever it wishes. But students and patrons might want to continually monitor who does and does not get invited there in the future. When a Nobel laureate bishop doesn’t pass muster, we wonder who can. Likely these students and patrons are going to end up disappointed.

And I trust that the good bishop will get the welcome on the East Side that Merriam Park cannot give.

Chaos on the Streets [Mpls version] OR Pedal Pusher Update

From a piece from Katherine Kersten in today's Star-Journal. [emphases mine]

How true.

[Of course, we know that bicyclists are more civically holy than almost anybody else]

If Critical Mass riders just wanted to celebrate bikes, they could refrain from serial law-breaking and ride at a time that doesn't provoke rush-hour drivers. But that won't do. Their antics are more about power -- "I'll make you wait while I ride by" -- and self-dramatization than making the world a better place.

Minneapolis authorities eventually will discover what parents learn when they allow petulant children to break the rules "just to keep the peace." You don't get peace. You just open the door to bigger trouble.

Sputnik +50

Fifty years ago today the Russians launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik [later Sputnik I]. Westerners didn’t see t he actual launching. Russians didn’t see it either. The Soviet regime waited until the thing was successfully up before they told the world. But word got around. I remember going out in the back yard a few days later with my father and brother and looking for and watching it to go by. I also remember that there were stories about how its radio signals had opened some garage doors. Suddenly it seemed necessary for everybody to learn math and science. [It is worth noting that the first U.S. satellite was up a few months later, so we couldn’t have been THAT far behind. I remember making a model of that first American satellite later.]

I guess that some people thought the Soviets were winning the Cold War. Somehow it seems strange looking at it now. They did get the first satellite up and they did put the first man in space and brought him back alive [Yuri Gagarin, 1961 – and they waited until they got him back before they told anybody] but we are still the only country which has actually sent anybody out of the planet’s gravity and we haven’t done that in the lifetime of most people living now.

The Soviet Union is gone. Satellites have brought us satellite dishes, cell phones, and radio and television from almost anywhere instantly. Without them we wouldn’t have credit cards at gas pumps, GPS systems, or the internet. [And without Sputnik Mickey’s wouldn’t have a name for its specialty burger.]

The Commies may have gotten the first thing up, but it sure looks like capitalism has won that war.

Congratulations, Saints

I neglected to do it at the time, but I do wish to extend congratulations to the Saints for another good season. [For those of you who may not have known it – and if there were a lot of you reading this, there likely woudl be a lot of you given the stinginess of local media ink and air budgets – the local team won the American Association Northern division and went the maximum five games in the AA championships.]

I miss the old stadium on the other side of Snelling Avenue where earlier Saints played in an earlier American Association [and which later hosted the Norsemen in professional slow-pitch, Vikings practices, a bunch of amateur games, and some concerts] but the new Midway Stadium is still a great place for a game, especially if it is not raining. It would have been nice if they had put a cover over the fan seating area, but you can’t have everything.

I know that the Mpls team plays in a higher-ranked league and plays a longer schedule with more hoopla from various media, but wouldn’t it be nice if the DPP and other media could give them a little more coverage? And it would also be nice if the Saints could land a radio deal with a station which could be heard in Saint Paul.

But thanks to all for a good 2007.

And congratulations to the Fort Worth Cats for their second consecutive championship. I imagine that they probably have some of the same handicaps we have here, being based in a major city with a larger city nearby and a MLB team a few miles away.

Self-absorption over piety?

This is just a warning for people who traverse our city on Sundays. We’ve got another TC marathon coming up on Sunday. The only way to get from one side of Summit Avenue to the other will be the Short Line. It will be World Communion Sunday, but if your church is on Summit Avenue, good luck.

Just wondering. Does this show that self-absorption triumphs over piety?

Free?

Well, are we all feeling safer and healthier today?

The mislabeled “Freedom to Breathe” Act has taken effect. I imagine that the Tobacco Taliban is now trying to figure out how to get what little smoking is still allowed outlawed now. How people can have so little use for our rights to religious toleration, freedom of association, personal choice, and property is probably no big question. But what is wrong with the bulk of our populace, those who have allowed our basic rights of choice, association, property and toleration to be taken.

We keep hearing that smoking bans are popular. So what? Since when was majority opinion a factor in establishing human rights?

Dave Thune has said that he introduced the Gay Rights Ordinance because, even though it was controversial, it was the right thing to do. Now he says he introduced our local tobacco ban for the same reasons. He is wrong on both counts. Not only is the ban popular, it is the WRONG thing to do.

There are people who will continue to support the Tobacco Taliban-supported politicians at all levels of government even though smoking bans it are the wrong thing to do They say they can’t be “one issue” people.

Single issue??

> human rights?

> freedom of choice?

> freedom of association?

> property rights?

> religious toleration?

Which of these rights is a single issue?

Wake up America!