Kersten’s School Daze

One of the few effective and newsworthy themes Katherine Kersten consistently digs out in her Strib column is the use of the public schools to advance various cultural and religious agendas, notably ones with which she disagrees.

For those of us on the left or center who are skeptical of the idea that colleges are hotbeds of intolerant one-way thought and that the public schools are laboratories of dysfunction and social engineering, the Minneapolis Public Schools’ “Welcoming Schools” curriculum, as described by Kersten, is further evidence that urban public schools have passed the point of nuance and are into blatant social advocacy. I can’t vouch for Kersten’s accuracy, but in broad strokes, as a public school parent, it rings true.

Welcoming Schools is a curriculum developed by a DC-based GLBT advocacy organization, the Human Rights Campaign. MPS is testing the curriculum in three schools as an “anti-bullying” effort.

Now I have no problem with the values Welcoming Schools pushes, namely that families headed by gay and transgender parents are normal and acceptable. We can debate whether they are optimal, but if you believe as I do that homosexuality isn’t a choice and that there are many kids out there in need of good homes, same-sex households with children are helping society, not hurting it.

But I have real qualms about using public school classrooms with kids as young as six years old to so blatantly engage in efforts to shape values that many in our society don’t accept. Not because I want to validate homophobes or endorse parents’ right to be intolerant but because it puts the schools on a slippery slope and ties them to a social movement that on its fringes goes beyond tolerance and understanding to forms of advocacy that even some liberals don’t agree with.

Such advocacy also feeds perceptions on the right that schools have become an instrument of the left, making community, state, or national consensus harder to achieve about funding levels, teacher qualifications, and ongoing evaluation of school effectiveness.

A small digression: My kid is winding down fourth grade at an MPS school. Based on my anecdotal feedback, he has had more classroom instruction about Martin Luther King, Jr. than any other historical figure. MLK was and is important, but his disproportionate salience to the public schools is part of its agenda to empower African-American kids. If the effort is having any success, more power to them I guess, but if it isn't, then my kid’s education has been put secondary to an ineffectual social agenda that is irrelevant to his needs.

My point here is that the right wing’s perception that the public schools are being used to indoctrinate kids in values steeped in multiculturalism and social engineering seems more accurate than not. Multiculturalism has taken on the dogma and emphasis of a religion in academia—it doesn’t take a lot of digging to discern that.

I want my kids to be educated. I hope they learn values in the home by watching us, in religious school by listening to the rabbis and teachers, and in regular school by the enforcement of respect and tolerance.

The problem is many parents have lost confidence in the public schools’ basic efficacy. The Welcoming Schools effort causes me to question whether the schools believe that they now must function as parent and church as well—my guess as to why this curriculum is being tested. (The alternative, pure ideological indoctrination, is frightening, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.)

And if the schools must now be parent and church, whose values rule? What then of the kids who don’t need or whose parents don’t want an edgy values curriculum? And what are our kids missing in all that classroom time spent validating?

Disgusting, Disgraceful, Demeaning

I watched the first forty-five minutes of the two-hour ABC Democratic debate tonight then turned off the TV. The exchanges encapsulated everything wrong with the American news media as Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos spent the time peppering Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with an unending litany of gotcha questions rooted in meaningless campaign contretemps.

Rev. Wright, the flag pin, the Bosnia exaggeration, the Weather Underground guy . . . belch.

I know what ABC will say after the hammering they are surely taking all over the blogosphere: Democrats are concerned about electability, and these questions explored how these controversies affected the candidates’ electability.

And it’ll be a self-serving lie like it always is.

Bloggers might be drunk on their own influence, but it is only the validation and incessant repetition from the mainstream media that legitimize this crap and mutes discussion of real issues. I know the campaigns surreptitiously push these controversies in the press’s face, but George and Charlie don’t have to bite.

But they’re bored with the issues and in love with the horserace. They are in their own insider bubble, out of touch with what’s afflicting this country and the change in tone Americans crave—even the Americans who are too simple-minded or vulnerable to resist these hot-button manipulations.

So they devote the most-watched portion of a debate capping the unending PA campaign to a recitation of vomit that demeans the election process, disgusts and wearies voters, and turns politics into a cesspool.

Here’s my vow: I will not watch an ABC news or politics program through the remainder of the election cycle. It’s the only way I have to express my disgust at its trivialization of the most important American election in four decades. I urge you to do the same. 

Panic Mode

There’s a really interesting analytical article in the current Rolling Stone by political writer Matt Taibbi (articulating better than anything I’ve read or heard) about how the media, with its preoccupation with manufactured controversies, distorts the political process, particularly in the current Democratic race for president.

(Taibbi also appears regularly on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, which is must-viewing for its candor and willingness to hold pols and the media to account.) His prose and commentary is rife with juvenile profanities, which will turn some people off, but look past it because this is, in a nutshell, the story of our culture right now.

“Through scandal after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom . . . keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian contest. . . .

“What we’re getting with all of these scandals isn’t a sober exchange of ideas but more of an ongoing attempt to instill in the public a sort of permanent fear of uncomfortable ideas, and to reduce public discourse to a kind of primitive biological mechanism, like the nervous system of a squid or a shellfish, one that recoils reflexively from any stimuli.”

Taibbi seems to be in Obama’s camp, but this is not merely about Rev. Wright and “God Damn America.” Taibbi also has no patience for the Geraldine Ferarro contretemps and the uproar over John McCain’s end-of-days preacher. And that’s the point—it’s a game all the campaigns play to because they know the media can’t resist.

Taibbi is appropriately critical of the public and the campaigns, but this is a media-driven trend, uniquely exacerbated by talk radio and cable TV networks with hours of “news programming” to fill and no budget to do any real journalism.

Ultimately, our plethora of choices has degraded the discourse, not improved it.

Watching the Women

I am puzzled by the apparent interest in women’s basketball and hockey. Not the interest in playing but in viewing it. I don’t think anyone out there would claim the quality of play is equal to the men’s sport at the same level, whether it’s preps, college, or the pros.

The Star Tribune covers Gopher women’s ball as a sort of Affirmative Action project. It’s so equal to the men’s coverage that you often have to read into the story to figure out which team they’re talking about. Obnoxious.

And we’ve made big local heroes of Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville (I could not bring myself to even skim the profile of McCarville we ran in our magazine, not that I’d react any differently to one about Spencer Tollackson, who I’d imagine can outplay Janel.). They now are in the WNBA, I believe. The WNBA is a joke.

Now, this isn’t some sort of misogynist rant. I fully support most of the Title IX stuff and have no objection to men’s athletics profits funding women’s at the U, for example. I just don’t understand why any of the rest of us are supposed to care about the games. For the same reason I don’t understand why people claim to care about the St. Paul Saints.

The Saints are a yuppie social club, by and large. And that’s fine, and no one who goes to their games claims otherwise. Throughout the years, media coverage of them has eroded as it has become clear that’s the case. But that’s not the situation with women’s athletics.

If I am going to spend my dollars and time watching athletic competition, I want to watch the best. College sports makes my cut because they play a more exciting, less predictable brand of football and basketball than the pros. But watching the Gopher men’s b-ballers collapse to Indiana this week reinforced how hard it is to watch and care about demonstrably inferior talent week in, week out.

I’ve listened to WCCO’s Don Shelby go on and on about women’s ball. I know he has daughters and did some coaching. I will go watch my daughter play prep or college sports, if that’s her thing. And I understand why other people do the same. I have friends who insist the standard of play in women’s volleyball is equal to men’s, and they have season tickets to see the UC Berkeley team play.

But I am wondering if the increasing media attention and interest in women’s ball is a function of the vast stretches of time cable TV has to fill and the great liberal, egalitarian underpinnings of the print media and academia. Cause it ain’t about the ball.

A friend of mine took his kids and mine to a Gopher women’s hockey game. “Why?” I asked him. “It wasn’t bad,” he replied. My point exactly.

Minnesota’s Night to Shine!

So it has come to this. Now, I’m not one of those locals who wants to see the local-boys-and-girls-made-good fail, but after a quarter century in these parts, I never cease to marvel over why a story’s connection to us is still the most important aspect of the story?

Why do we only hear about the elephant mauling in Thailand if an ex-Minnesotan was mauled? Why do so many of us see the attention we receive from out-of-town media or celebrities as validating our worth rather than noblesse oblige, which it more often is? Why are so may of us so indifferent to our region investing in dreaming big, competing with other cities, and making a national splash yet then so obsessed with it when it happens?

The Chicago Tribune did not lead Monday’s paper with “ex-Chicagoan Diablo Cody . . .” in a headline nor was the fact that Cody grew up in suburban Lamont mentioned until the thirteenth paragraph—though her connection with Chicago is no different than the Coens’ with Minnesota (grew up here, parents here, visit irregularly).

And what makes the matter more ironic is that neither Cody nor the Coens claims this place as their home. Minnesota is somewhere they left and ain’t coming back to. Fargo told you everything you know about how the Coens’ view Minnesota. It set the Twin Cities back about a generation in how the country perceives us: as a bunch of affable rubes driving Oldsmobiles in the snow.

Diablo Cody had a cup of coffee here. She did some notable work (the feather in our cap in all this, perhaps), got discovered, and split. She speaks of us affectionately.

Both the Coens and Cody are compelling stories. They stand out in Hollywood because they are nonconformists and have maintained an admirable artistic integrity. They have an interesting body of work (Cody not so much, obviously), and their Minnesota status is deserving of little more than a passing mention in the third paragraph because it is not at the heart of their success or interest.

Embedded in our fascination with the lives of our émigrés is our insularity, our provincialism, and sometimes our hubris—that sense that life and people are just better here, and now and then the world finds out. Just the sort of hothouse attitude in which creative people flourish.

My Compact: Denial Is Not Virtue

We are a nation of fanatics. How can one conclude anything else? We have to turn everything into a religion. Osama would be proud.

Consider the acolytes of the Compact, an anti-materialist venture that requires its adherents to buy nothing new for a year. (Does Internet porn count? A friend was wondering.)

One of the Compacters the Strib quoted yesterday said the $1 bins at Target she once loved now “repulsed” her. That bin filled my kids’ stockings last month I’d have her know. And she’s still buying diapers (our kids used cloth; think of the water we wasted).

It takes goofy ventures such as the Compact (or this silly young family in NYC that is going without petroleum or its offshoots for a year—no deodorant) to illustrate why liberals seem so feckless to the rest of the country.

I mean, isn’t it enough to recycle, take public transit now and then, trade in your SUV, compost, recycle your feces into handy tools and implements . . .? Sorry, got carried away—I have liberal leanings.

And I’m in the media, who are fellow travelers. The press, by and large, hates consumerism—though it’s what pays its bills. The Strib is going to follow these Compactors for a year, mind you. So it can revel in their self-denial and sense of righteousness. So it can feel righteous, too!

Throughout the years, I’ve tried to divine the contempt that so many of my peers in the local media feel for the magazine I work for. We don’t hurt anyone, we don’t take cheap shots, tear anything down. We build up, we tell stories, we recommend.

I used to think it was because earnest journalists believed that the only form of professional legitimacy was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. (Which we don’t do all that much of here.) But most journalists aren’t that stupid.

What most of them are, though, is addled with contempt for those who don’t share their values. And journalists are offended by the consumerism that lifestyle magazines are rooted in. There’s a kind of proud asceticism in writers and academics though I generally regard it as snobbery rooted in false virtue.

I wish I could go to the other side, but they’re worse albeit less smug. I mean, I’m pissed off that all these greedy bastards in banking and investing created this lending bubble that has got our economy in the tank. Canada’s economy is fine, you’ll note. So is Australia’s. Greed isn’t validated in those societies, and there are more checks and limits on it. And I have no sympathy for the rubes who took out mortgages they didn’t understand either. Own up to your own greed, I say.

There is something about people preoccupied with consumerism to the exclusion of everything else that is chilling. Perhaps it’s the abdication of a sense of responsibility for anything but yourself that nags at me. Whatever. It’s just a different kind of fanaticism. I mean, would it hurt you to read a paper or think about something besides when the next issue of Lucky arrives?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a seat in business class, a 42-inch plasma TV, a trip to New Zealand, an iPhone, and some granite countertops that I have my eyes on. But I am not so distracted by all of it that I’m paying no attention to the world around me.

There is more to life than gratifying yourself and earning more money so you can gratify some more. But why is it that so many of the people who understand that are not people you’d want to have a beer with?

Impotent, Indeed

“Dad, do you have E.D.?” my nine-year-old asked, earnestly.
“Uh, what’s E.D.?” (scrambling . . . )
“You know, that thing where your thing doesn’t work.”
“Oh, that thing. No, my thing works.”

If this conversation had happened with me as a nine-year-old in 1972, my dad could have been confident I not only didn’t understand what E.D. was but had no idea of the things my thing could one day do. But in Tila Tequila’s America, who knows? The boy does ride the bus with eighth graders.

“Could I maybe have E.D.?”
“No, I’m pretty sure you don’t have it.”

Believe it or not, this blog is not about erectile dysfunction. It’s about why my son knows so much about it. Or doesn’t, as the case may be. It’s about why we are bombarded with TV ads for Cialis, et al., during every TV sporting event.

Believe it or not, this blog is not about my son knowing all he wants to know about E.D., although I’d prefer he wait a couple years.

It’s about whether pharmaceutical companies need to charge so much for medicines. As you know, Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any First World nation and have some of the strictest patent laws protecting drug companies from generics.

Big pharma insists federal intervention in drug costs will kill their profits, thus putting an end to innovation, thus turning the world sick and impotent.

“Dad, have you ever had a heart attack?”
“No pal, I haven’t.”
“Do you take Lipitor?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Maybe you should, so you don’t have a heart attack.”

Maybe it’s just the TV shows we watch, but I can’t escape Lipitor ads either. And I don’t watch anywhere near the average amount of TV. Which leads me to believe big pharma is spending a veritable fortune advertising meds we can’t buy without convincing a doctor we need them—advertising that has only recently been legal and is not in most westernized nations.

Clearly this advertising is effective. And doctors apparently don’t like to say “no,” or there’d be no Lipitor commercials and many fewer antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Much of this advertising is to convince consumers to ask for new, patented medicines that have to compete with off-patent, cheaper generics.

I’d be a lot more sympathetic to the industry’s claim that it needs to charge us so much if it wasn’t spending sums each year on ads that would probably sustain its research for decades.

I wonder how much of a drug’s cost goes to fund marketing budgets? And I wonder what value there is, if any, in allowing prescription drug advertising to consumers? It basically assumes doctors can’t make the right decisions about what patients need without TV ads to spark patient inquiry.

Let’s save the drug companies some money and return drug advertising to where it belongs—medical journals. If the drug companies can’t get behind that, maybe it’s time to regulate prices and/or shrink the length of pharmaceutical patents.

I know I’d enjoy seeing those old Alka-Seltzer ads instead.

The Mouth That Roars—My Journalist of the Year

Later this month, when Brian Lambert joins this site, any of my future attempts at media commentary will inevitably provoke fits of outrage from his gaggle of smitten college-age hangers-on, his venomous mad-dog attorneys, and his peyote-addled new-age sycophants, so I thought I’d get one in while I still can.

A year ago I would have argued that the Star Tribune lacked a metro columnist whose work was impactful. Doug Grow is a very nice guy, but was a very quiet columnist. His role was in need of reinvention. The paper ended up forcing the issue.

Kathy Kersten, though she has improved her photo, has yet to write a word which gives me any reason to believe she is capable of philosophically independent thought (as opposed to parroting a canned ideology).

Nick Coleman seemed to be devolving into self-parody. From his high-handed railing against everyone from Carl Pohlad to Don Samuels, to his populist regular guy shtick, to an evaporation of his great biting wit, Nick seemed past his best days. (When newspapers, or any media outlet, cannot find prominent roles for new talent and fresh voices, it sows the seeds of its own irrelevance. The Twin Cities media is worse than most in this way.)

Then the bridge collapsed.

Since August 1, Nick Coleman has been the most important opinion journalist in the Twin Cities, and one of the most important journalists, period. He has almost single-handedly called to account not just the Governor, not just Lady Molnau, but the entire culture of fiscal starvation that passes for leadership in this state. And he isn’t letting up.

It’s polarizing, surely, drawn in too-broad strokes at times, but in doggedly pursuing the forces that shaped the state’s greatest public sector disaster, Coleman manifests journalism’s higher calling: not letting the big lie go uncontested.

I suspect he’s doing it at some peril to his own career. This is a newspaper that doesn’t like controversy, doesn’t like risking its access to the powerful, doesn’t like perceptions it is imbalanced. Only in its coverage of the Vikings and Timberwolves does the Strib seem to allow rank negativity to prosper.

I know some will argue that Nick has been engaged in a months-long witch-hunt when all the facts aren’t in. That he’s scapegoating figureheads who would never be expected to have a command of small details in any other walk of life. But Coleman gets the larger point: unless there was a tiny earthquake under the Mississippi last August 1, bridges don’t collapse unless something is neglected. Not willfully, but because of a philosophical approach to the public welfare.

And Coleman isn’t the only one. The paper’s primary reporters on the after-story, Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe, have been dogged as well. For all I know, there may well be a Pulitzer in it for them.

Ironic, isn’t it, that it took an unprecedented disaster to give an atrophying newspaper a reason to live?

Six Rules for MinnPost

It’s debut week for Joel Kramer’s MinnPost.com. I’m excited about the prospect of a web-based alternative to two weak local dailies and the snooze-fest that is MPR, but the sheer volume of excessed/retired Star Tribune staffers on Kramer’s masthead gives me pause.

The Strib has not been a great newspaper in my quarter-century in the Twin Cities, but one that underperformed for its size and reach. The people who made it what it was over that period are not the folks I’d hand-select to reinvent the local journalism wheel. But that’s what we’ve got, so I’d like to offer the MinnPost gang some unsolicited advice about Star Tribune tendencies they need to avoid to be truly relevant.

1) Can the Provincialism: Please, no stories about how healthy we are, how well-educated we are, or how much we love to golf. The Strib loves nothing better than some tenuous national ranking of this or that to make into page-one fodder. Especially when it allows us to wallow in self-satisfaction, something this community is frequently drowning in anyway.

2) Access Is Less Important Than Insight: Star Tribune reporters have long manifest an awful tendency to flake out in the face of fear that a corporation or elected official will limits access if he/she doesn’t like the coverage. The net result is minimal enterprise journalism, rarely taking readers behind the scenes (at the Capitol, for example), and an overall tendency to focus on only information in the public domain (see #3).

3) Grow Some: Former Stribber Eric Black’s summer revelation that he failed to report in the paper that then-Congressional candidate Michele Bachman had angrily threatened a local GOPer—because of worries that conservatives would condemn the story—confirmed many fears about the paper. This is less about Black, whose intellect I respect, than a culture of nervousness that the paper adopted under ex-editor Anders Gyllenhaal. Highly ideological people are never going to like what you do, because it will never fit their world-view.

4) Your Trip to Manhattan Is Not Newsworthy: Another recent phenomenon in the paper’s (now depleted) arts/culture pages are insidery dispatches from some editor or critic’s trip to New York. Yes, we’re impressed that you know how to use the subway, but we don’t really care how some ex-local actor that debuted at the Guthrie is being received (see #1).

5) Stifle the Social Agenda: I’m a left-leaning moderate, but I have been nonetheless shocked at how deeply steeped the paper’s local news coverage has been in a liberal social agenda. In an era of dwindling resources, celebrating multiculturalism is a waste of space, yet seemingly every Metro section covers for years had a daily story validating some ethnic or racial group. Nor is inequity, in and of itself, newsworthy. These two tropes of contemporary liberalism drove so much of the ST’s news judgment that you wondered what was being ignored to delve into the scandal that is low access to high-speed internet access among the homeless.

6) Medina School Board Update—Even Medinans Don’t Care: The latest scheme—zoned metro sections with pages of news of relevance to only a single suburb—is a desperate folly which needs no further explanation.

Public Radio: Stop the Begging!

It’s safe to turn on Minnesota Public Radio again— membership week is over. I’ve only been a MPR member for one or two of my twenty-six years in the Twin Cities. I listen most every day, though, especially to The Current.

I’m a member of Twin Cities Public Television, and I probably watch two hours of TPT programming a week. Not much. But I just sent them $50. It’s worth it just to have the program guide. And I want to support Frontline, which is the best journalism on TV. But I’ll never send a check during TPT’s horrendous fund drives, packed with programming diametrically different from what it normally airs. It seems like bait-and-switch, and I have no idea why it works.

But TV is generally appointment viewing, so the fund drives are merely an annoyance. Whereas radio is not. You expect radio to be there when you need it. Which is why I find the begging so much more irritating on MPR. If it is the price we pay for the service being “non-commercial” then we’re better off with ads.

One day I’m going to produce a transcript of a KNOW pledge break. I’m sure it would be as painful for Gary Eichten or Cathy Wurzer to read as it is for us to listen to. It’s only a bit more subtle than back in the eighties, when cranky Marilyn Heltzer would scold KSJN listeners: “This programming isn’t free, you know,” she’d screech.

My classical music friends tell me that KSJN (like most classical music stations) is largely a greatest-hits-of-the-eighteenth-century service; while my ears tell me that MPR’s (locally originated) news and information programming is conventional, establishment-oriented, predictable, and lacking in creative spark. There’s nothing alternative about it. But Bill Kling did not want to create a news service that was true to the mission of public radio. He wanted to create something big and safe that suited his mission of a public broadcasting conglomerate. He succeeded.

Minnesota Public Radio (oops, its programming arm, American Public Media) would never produce a show like This American Life. Something edgy, quirky, personal, and unconventional. Instead it mines the zeitgeist and creates soft, conventional programming designed to attract underwriting dollars. Remember Sound Money? It’s hard to imagine our local boys green-lighting A Prairie Home Companion if something similar came along today.

And I wonder what MPR will do without the Star Tribune to guide its morning news coverage? As big and as authoritative as KNOW has gotten, too many days I hear a story lineup that hews way too similarly to the metro section of the paper. And MPR may not have it around much longer.

So, imagine my surprise with The Current. I know there are music-heads who beef about its flaws, but it’s truly a smart, innovative, and unconventional (though polished) take on popular music radio. It’s the antithesis of the MPR ethos, and perhaps it’s taught the Klingons something about creative risk. It’s a lesson lost on PBS thus far.

But I can’t abide the begging. So I turn MPR off, in all its venues, for weeks out of the year. Say what you will about MPR’s many for-profit subsidiaries, its preoccupation with national expansion, and the sums its executives earn (I know it doesn’t need my money). If it’d merely find a way to end the beg-a-thons, I’d join up. The Current is that good, and I still hold out hope for the newsroom. And at that point, the check’s in the mail.

(Conflict of interest note: A subsidiary of MPR publishes Minnesota Monthly, a competitor of Mpls.St.Paul.)

Tommy B and the Indians

I got to know Tom Barnard back in the late eighties/early nineties, in my days at the Twin Cities Reader. For those of you who remember, he was a straight-shooting voice of candor in a sea of make-nice “good neighbor” or contrived celebrity-pablum radio. Tom broke a lot of content barriers to become the most successful broadcaster in modern Twin Cities history.

Over the years he’s become embroiled in controversies for evoking a death wish for certain liberals (the great Paul Wellstone) and taking after minority groups, most recently American Indians. Right now, nothing fascinates me more than what drives a guy who has it all to risk his position. In that sense, Tom is still breaking barriers.

Tom’s ratings are so high, his lifestyle so secure, that he does not need anybody anymore, and has not submitted to a wide-ranging media interview in at least a decade. If I remember correctly, he’s a North Side kid from a tough background who worked for everything he’s earned.

The Barnard I knew, back when, was not the bombastic ideologue of today, but a complicated guy with his own insecurities and demons who tired of all the B.S. inherent in being a radio personality. He still, I suspect, fashions himself as a truth-teller, but he is an outsider only in that he does not travel in local media/celebrity circles. Many days, he does his radio show from a studio in his home.

I’ve been saddened over the years to see Tom make a name among non-listeners as a bigot and a bully, because that’s not the guy I knew. But Tom has evolved in a fairly typical way for a self-made, up-from-nothing guy, in that there’s little that seems to offend him more than people who don’t show the same gumption and work ethic or who get something for nothing.

Barnard’s is the worldview of the little man, which endears him to his broad middle-class audience. It’s genuine, but much of it does not go down well coming from a guy whose life is so privileged. There is truth even among the mangled facts and suppositions in his disdain for Indian casino monopolies, racial activists who seem more focused on press conferences than solving problems, people who won’t work, or raise their kids properly, or victimize others and want to live off the fruits of those of us who don’t.

But there’s also a painful lack of nuance to his worldview. Many of the Hmong immigrants his show once mocked have raised kids who are class valedictorians. And there are people whose lives are too sad to be made the butt of jokes from a guy earning millions of dollars a year.

Barnard is an enormously influential figure among his listeners (which is why politicians leech off him and cozy up to him). But I fear he is not merely making take-no-prisoners social commentary, but sowing a fundamentally divisive worldview among people without a very diverse set of information sources.

I don’t know if Tom Barnard fancies himself as an entertainer or philosopher these days. I haven’t had a serious conversation with him in a decade. But he’s a smart guy who clearly uses his show to serve an intellectual agenda as well as an entertainment one. In that sense, he’s stayed true to what he started. In that sense, I wish he’d bring something deeper to the table these days. Being best known as the guy who was always willing to bash the wretched is not the legacy he deserves, but it may be the one he earns.

Abandoned By the Watchdog?

Many of us have been waiting to see if this year’s staff purges at the Star Tribune would diminish the newspaper’s role as community watchdog. The answer is becoming clearer, and it’s not good news.

The best recent example is the I–35W bridge design coverage. Globally renowned architect Santiago Calatrava wanted to design the bridge, a coup which would have resulted in a design that honored the victims of the collapse, brought even more architecture-driven tourism to the Twin Cities, and created a lasting monument of beauty for Twin Citians to enjoy every day of the year.

Spend some time on Calatrava’s site (click on “Projects,” then “Past” or “Recent Projects”), examine his bridges, and ask yourself if what we are getting is even a fraction as compelling.

Calatrava was consulted on a hastily assembled design by Walsh Construction/American Bridge, but the extent of his involvement in the proposal is unclear. Of the four options offered to MnDOT, the (selected) Flatiron and (rejected) Walsh proposals were the best of an underwhelming group. Had the process allowed the state and city to actually engage Calatrava, the result could have been momentous.

The Strib bought out longtime architecture reporter/critic Linda Mack earlier this year (she will be writing for Joel Kramer’s Minn-Post.com when it debuts). She did pen an important commentary for the paper in August on the new bridge, but the newspaper’s ongoing coverage was limited to articles by metro reporters and transportation writer Jim Foti, and seemed to lose track of the question.

There was never a coordinated effort to explore the process and its unfriendliness to a great design, or to have MnDOT and the governor justify shunning the greatest living bridge designer. The paper’s meek after-the-fact editorial about the design neglected to even mention Calatrava.

Had Linda Mack still been on staff, the topic would have been followed in proper context, and Mack’s credibility would have allowed the paper to galvanize discussion around the issue.

Make no mistake, I blame MnDOT for this mess, and, of course, Governor No, not the paper. But the largest newspaper in the region needs a staffer who can write with expertise about design and architecture. The Star Tribune’s death by a thousand cuts is making it ever less useful, and increasingly irrelevant.

Al Franken Is Not Funny!

I wrote a sarcastic post a couple weeks ago. I thought it was pretty obvious and people would get the point. I intended to mock gossip columnist CJ chasing down sex scandals among TV anchors who haven’t worked in Minnesota in years and nobody remembers anyway. I mean, if CJ can’t find a good TV anchor sex scandal in town, is she really worth the $100K or so the Strib devotes to her in an era of plummeting resources? But it hardly seemed worth explaining, so I went the sarcasm route.

I asked, ironically, whether anyone would want to bother with Joel Kramer’s MinnPost.com when such sterling stuff was coming out of the Strib. Yesterday, a reader questioned why I would slag Kramer’s fledgling effort.

Humor or sarcasm is apparently tough to relate the way you intend it. That’s why so much beloved humor is silliness and pratfalls. And that perhaps explains why Al Franken, if you believe the Strib’s Minnesota Poll, has such high negatives.

I like wit and sarcasm. Sometimes that’s all a topic deserves. And humor makes life far more interesting. But a lot of people don’t get or like it. The president of my company equates Bill Maher with Ann Coulter. The two couldn’t be more different. Maher is a trenchant social commentator without rigid political alliances who is willing to make unpopular points. Coulter is a dogmatic bomb-thrower who exists to outrage and call attention to herself.

But Maher is irreverent. He mocks when he could merely feign outrage. He demeans when he could be offering a white paper. That means his point is lost to a lot of people. And I think that’s what Franken may be suffering from. (Though I would argue most of the Franken coverage to date has been the media pushing a GOP talking point: Franken is angry, irreverent, disrespectful. Is he electable?)

We live in strange times. Our president is a draft-dodger who trumped up a war that has cost thousands of American lives and may yet bankrupt the country. Our senator who represents him is a political chameleon who postures and preens but appears to have no core values. To me, Al Franken looks like a guy of real substance: smart, passionate, well-informed. You’re entitled to disagree with him, but not because he made jokes for a living twenty years ago.

So he called Rush Limbaugh a “big, fat, idiot.” So he called Norm Coleman Bush’s “butt-boy.” That’s the same crap all of us say at the office or the gym or the bar. Why is it we say we want candidates who keep it real and then vote for the phonies? Why is it that we say we want politicians who believe in something but become uncomfortable when they manifest that passion (see Howard Dean). And why is it that humor is the currency that makes life interesting but politicians who use it are always pilloried?

Reverence, as Jesse the Body would say, is for the weak-minded.

Another Journalistic Triumph for the Strib

Some are saying that recent purges and buyouts have left the Star Tribune lacking institutional memory. That there are no longer enough reporters who know where the bodies are buried or have the time to find out. Think again, I say.

Now, losing publisher Par Ridder is going to hurt, no doubt. But the newspaper’s ability to prioritize, to focus on the people and events that matter—right here, right now—is going to keep the newsroom strong and productive.

It’s comforting to know that despite months of turmoil and the predicted “death by a thousand cuts,” the newspaper has its priorities straight.

Good luck finding an audience, Joel Kramer.

Radar Love

I was watching the finale of Hell’s Kitchen earlier this week when FOX9 chief meteorologist of the month, Ian Leonard, interrupted to present news of the latest round of deadly storms approaching. I was taken with the colorful high-tech radar Ian showcased. TITAN 3D is its name, and the link reveals its power to stunning effect. Apparently while your house is being pelted with hail and your basement floods, TITAN can show you what it looks like 35,000 feet above. Bravo, gentlemen! A TITAN, indeed.

KARE-11 used to have VIPIR, which was an exciting radar that gave you a feeling of confidence. It was the “don’t f**k with me” of radars, to my mind. But from what I can see from Sven Sundgaard’s page (I don’t find him as sexy as many of you, I might add), I think Ken Barlow took it with him to Boston, because Sven boasts nothing but the sorry-ass SkyScan 11. I believe it scans eleven miles. Sorry, Lakeville, you’re on your own.

Sven’s blog has pictures of cute dogs, pictures of Sven (OK, he’s pretty sexy), and a countdown to the Twin Cities marathon. His bridge-collapse posting ends on a positive note, with pictures of his mom’s new dog and of Sven at a marathon. Scrolling down, there are pictures of a goat called Lady Abagail, grandparents, and more marathons. OK, Sven’s not looking like a dude with a lot of existential angst.

KSTP boasts Skymax 5, which sits high above University Avenue in the aging and smelly Hubbard complex. Dave Dahl is a global warming skeptic, which is certainly unique among people with advanced scientific degrees. And he doesn’t seem to age, so if he’s wrong, he’s going to take a lot of heat in about fifty years.

At WCCO-TV, Paul Douglas, who writes for this magazine’s print edition, is apparently spending too much time on his literary efforts, because the 'CCO device is simply known as “LIVE RADAR.” There used to be an attraction on the North Shore called Live Bear, which I believe was a black bear in a pen or cage, just up the road from Betty’s Pies. Perhaps 'CCO’s radar could be renamed “THE BEAR,” which I think would thematically wipe the floor with either TITAN or VIPIR. (No charge, homes.)

We’re all a bunch of pikers though, compared to the protective power of ABC7 Los Angeles. It has gone out and bought itself LIVE MEGA DOPPLER 7000 HD, which scans the entire Southland at 7000 degrees (C). In case you were wondering, it is dry right now in the Antelope Valley.

Ripoffs, Pizza, and Bad TV

OK, enough bridge talk. On to other matters of great importance.

+ Are prices for soft drinks, and especially iced tea, out of control in restaurants? I mean, $3.75 for a glass of flavored water? I think restaurants are using our thirst to cover their losses on rising meat and commodity costs. And while we’re at it, if you price your wine at $14 a glass, you’re not selling any to me.

+ Pat Reusse doesn’t get enough credit. He’s the best sports columnist in town by a mile.

+ If you want to read an insightful piece on how one pundit went from pro-Iraq war to anti-, check out Michael Ignatieff’s essay in last Sunday’s New York Times. It’s a bit long and abstract, but the comments about how Bush’s lack of real-world failures lead him to imagine himself infallible seem right on.

+ The Cubs’ surprising drive to win the NL East must fail. As a born-and-bred Chicagoan and Cubs fan, the most fitting record the Cubs should hold is to go a full century without a title. They are the embodiment of failure and perseverance. Win it all, and they’re just another bunch of short-term heroes. This is year 99, if I’m counting right.

+ If you’re headed to LA anytime soon, don’t miss a meal at Nancy Silverton (La Brea Bakery) and Mario Batali’s new Pizzeria Mozza. Killer. Makes Punch seem like Pizza Hut, and I love Punch.

+ HBO’s Entourage has lost me entirely. Does anyone care about the characters or find the show the least bit fresh or original? How quickly it went stale. If you want fresh and original, tune in at 9:30 p.m. Sundays for Flight of the Conchords. It’s smart and not the least bit crass, which is Entourage’s stock-in-trade.

+ While I’m on the subject of TV, there’s an awful lot of good stuff this summer. Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America (Can Fox’s version this fall be anywhere near as good?); Damages and Rescue Me on FX; Mad Men on AMC; this hilarious new reality show Flipping Out on Bravo about an obsessive-compulsive house flipper in LA. My only reservation is that it’s summer. Run these shows when it’s cold, not when we want to be outside.

+ Who do you think won the Zimmern/Bourdain battle of New York this week on Travel Channel? Andrew’s clearly the better dresser. And he tells me his ratings were better. You will find over time that my TV recommendations are far better than Zimmern’s.

+ Can we all agree that websites that play music when you land on the homepage are a plague that must be snuffed out? Yes, that’s you, Via.

+ I have not given money to Minnesota Public Radio in a long while. I’m just not a big fan. But I’m considering writing a check because The Current (89.3 FM) just gets better and better. Could they start a similar station for all the great music that’s more than two years old that never gets any airplay?

+ Spent last weekend in San Diego, a metro area that’s about the size of ours. Want to know what life is gonna be like here in a decade if we don’t invest faster in roads and transit? It’s gonna be gridlock seven days a week. Traffic in San Diego is so bad, so much of the time, that it’s actually a deterrent to visiting. And that 75 and sunny every day really wears on you.

+ Finally, one more bridge item. The Strib’s cutesy headline after the collapse—“Buckling and Swaying, Then Down, Down, Down”—was tacky. Just as the headline “Terrorized” was after 9/11. I don’t know what consultant told them that factual headlines don’t work after big news events, but the cutesy crap trivializes it.

In Shelby’s Defense

During the bridge-collapse coverage, inevitably my TV ended up tuned to WCCO-TV. I’m old school, and it’s the brand whose news values I trust most. And inevitably, anchor Don Shelby began intoning about structural engineering and physics.

My wife groaned. “This guy . . . .”

I know, Don is a showboat, but we are better off with him than without him. I can’t claim to be a confidant or a friend, but I know Don well enough to tell you he is one of the most intellectually curious guys around. He legitimately knows a lot about a lot of things. So he comes by it honestly.

With the exception of Cyndy Brucato, who knows politics and the state political game from her years inside it, I can’t think of another local TV anchor who has the intellect to actually add insight to a news story simply from what’s in his or her head.

Don suffers from our cynicism about TV news, which we come by honestly. It is a business that is shallow and cynical, and its values are not substantive ones, at least not anymore.

So give Don a break. He is legitimately the conscience of local TV news. And if you question his intellect, listen to his radio show on ‘CCO Radio each afternoon. Between the crushing commercial load, you’ll realize he knows bass fishing, he knows blues, he knows basketball, and he kind of knows bridges.

Random Thoughts on a Tragedy

Like most of you, I’m still trying to process my thoughts about what’s happened in Minneapolis. I’m going to avoid jumping to conclusions until a little more is known, but here is what I’ve been thinking and some questions I’ve been asking.

This Doesn’t Happen Here: When I moved to Minnesota in 1981 we were the state that got it right. We maintained our infrastructure, invested in our public facilities, and most of all had a sense of communal well-being that would not allow a bridge to deteriorate to the point of collapse. Louisiana and Minnesota were at opposite ends of the Mississippi and the universe. A massive bridge collapse is something that happens in states that fail to fund vital functions adequately. Someone convince me that this isn’t just another sign that Minnesota is regressing to the mean.

Are the Watchdogs Out There? In highly politicized times, where various government agencies manifestly fudge the truth, we need independent watchdogs. I seriously doubt the FOX9 Investigators are up to telling us why the bridge collapsed. Are there enough journalists left at the Star Tribune to get to the bottom of this? And if there aren’t, is it their fault, or ours? Some of both, I imagine.

The Good Guys: That said, one of the few truly independent federal agencies has long been the National Transportation Safety Board, whose findings are often ignored by the government agencies who have to implement the fixes the NTSB proscribes. If there’s anybody I trust to tell us why this bridge collapsed, it’s them.

The Farm Bill: I know there are a lot of hard-working, knowledgeable pros at the state Department of Transportation. But please convince me Minnesota has been well-served for the last five years with Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau, a Chaska farmer and anti-spending/anti-tax advocate, as the state’s DOT boss.

You Get What You Pay For: We hear week after week on the national, state, and local level that our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling and under-maintained. Is it irresponsible to wonder if the chickens of Minnesota’s refusal to fund roads, bridges, and transit adequately for two decades are coming home to roost?

What Now? Highway 280 is a surprisingly elegant and proximate alternative to I–35W. But 280 has half 35’s capacity and the stretch of I-94 that you need to detour over to access it is congested all day long. Metro Transit noted that it had twenty-five extra buses at its disposal. Let’s see, 140,000 cars a day on the bridge, detour routes near capacity already, and twenty-five buses are all that stands between us and three years of gridlock. If time has value, this is going to be a very expensive next few years for folks who live or work north of the river.

Economic Victims: If there are any plusses to this tragedy, it is that the adjacent commercial nodes to the bridge, Dinkytown and the East Hennepin district, have numerous access points and largely rely on local traffic for customers. But it’s guys like Restaurant Alma’s Alex Roberts that I am concerned about. The University Avenue exits from 35W were how his far-flung customers accessed his restaurant. And the way many will get to his new Brasa on East Hennepin. They are closed for years. Twin Citians are notoriously weak-willed when it comes to inconvenience. After we’ve grieved and buried the dead, don’t forget to make a special effort to visit Alma and the many other great local businesses who now find themselves isolated from far-flung customers. We don’t need any more unintended victims.

Stripping the Strib

I was a media critic in my twenties, from 1986 to 1994 at the Twin Cities Reader. I had some sporadic successors in town, but the beat ultimately languished for over a decade until Brian Lambert took it up at The Rake. The local press is just too powerful and influential (fracturing though it is) to work without scrutiny.

Media criticism is not going to be the stock-in-trade of this blog, but I will dabble, and I stumbled upon an article on the July 23 Strib Metro cover which is a textbook example of how the façade of objectivity subverts attempts to separate news from innuendo and opinion.

Mike Kaszuba, one of the paper’s more veteran reporters, delivered what’s probably regarded at Portland Ave. as an enterprise piece regarding the U’s hot-and-cold quest to get Robert Sabes, former owner of Schieks, to donate a cool mil for the new Gophers stadium. (The “enterprise” aspect being the disclosure from public data of the proposed donation.)

The longish story lacks a thesis—either a sign it’s been edited heavily or the writer is dancing around something he/she can’t quite say without displaying a point of view. We’re told Sabes owned Schiek’s strip club, was involved in legal gambling and other (legitimate) businesses, has attracted notoriety, is admired by some, and is giving away much of his wealth. There’s a third-party quote saying he lacks “a bad bone in his body” (which implies the point is in question) and a reference to a 1993 magazine article where Sabes complained about being linked by gambling regulators to organized crime.

The piece is not hostile, and there is nothing beyond the suggestion of impropriety—no criminal record or accusation of illegality or violations of University policy. But it goes on and on, airing Sabes’s life’s laundry, with the U declining comment. I was left scratching my head, until the light went on.

The Metro section has always been the place where the ideology and presumptions of the paper’s writers and editors leaked through most starkly in story selection, perhaps because it’s the only locally written section that does not mingle opinion in the news copy. The Sabes article may be liberal (or conservative) Puritanism at work—stripping is exploitive (or immoral) and gambling exploits those least equipped to lose to benefit those with the most (or is immoral). Those associated with either are thus unclean.

Or, it could be a gotcha piece. We journalists love the gotcha—disclosing something that no one is really hiding, but that will embarrass a pillar of the establishment such as the U. Controversial exploiter of the weak-minded involved in controversial endeavor to build expensive stadium on the backs of the taxpayers.

Can’t the paper just show its cards and ask: Is it appropriate for a taxpayer-funded institution to benefit indirectly from stripping and gambling?

Exotic dancing and gaming, to use their marketing labels, are legal activities in this state—one is even sanctioned by it. Katherine Kersten’s column begs my question on the very same page as Kaszuba’s story—for those of you who still read the print edition.

Like any other informed and engaged person, I am a ball of opinions. And try as I might, I can’t keep them from coloring my worldview and perception of the news of the day. So I don’t pretend I can. Newspapers are still trying. The Strib has typically been one of the less agile.

Keeping It Real

Last week, Rep. Keith Ellison all but apologized for using a Nazi analogy to put in context his take on the Bush Administration’s assault on civil liberties post-9/11. He was predictably jumped on . . . you always get slapped for anything that appears to some to minimize or trivialize the Holocaust or Nazism.

I tend to side with Ellison’s use of the analogy on multiple levels. I like to see our elected representatives owning what they believe instead of just saying what’s broadly palatable. Historical analogies are an effective way to illustrate abstract arguments. I don’t think making an analogy from a lesser evil or ill constitutes minimizing Nazism or the Holocaust. (I’m speaking as a practicing American Jew.) And most of us knew what he meant. Even Ellison’s pal Glenn Beck.

What concerns me is our penchant as a culture to place topics off-limits, as the protectors of my faith would do with Nazi analogies. You couldn’t question the war five years ago and be regarded as patriotic. You can’t question the value of race-based preferences and not be regarded by many as racist. You can’t ask whether religion has done more bad than good in the world without being considered hostile to people of faith. There are sundry other public speech no-go zones as well. And we are poorer as a nation and community for most of them.

I support Keith Ellison’s right to make a sincere point. Not because I agree, but because it’s worth talking about. Which gets me back to square one.

The purpose of this blog is to discuss life in the Twin Cities beyond the realm of consumer culture that define most mspmag.com blogs. Some days it will be heavy, some days it will be trivial, some days it will be macro, some days micro. Hopefully it will always be interesting or entertaining, and occasionally meaningful. And when relevant, I’d like to use it as a forum to earnestly raise impolitic questions with the goal of improving the conversation. I’ll try to post a couple times each week.

And I encourage you to chime in. But we have some rules for that:

Comments must be approved. If you put your first and last name with them (for publication), I will be reluctant to hit delete even if you suggest I must have been picked last for kickball in school. If you prefer to go by a web handle or need to protect your identity for good reason, we will only print your comments if they advance the debate or make an interesting point. Personal attacks and witty rejoinders don’t qualify. My goal is to eliminate much of the clutter and obnoxiousness that litters the blogosphere, even though many serial commenters believe it to be their birthright.

As for me, my politics are best described as eclectic and pragmatic; I am wary of ideology. I’m a Chicago native with more than a quarter-century of history in the Twin Cities. I lord over this site’s restaurant coverage, much of our news and issues coverage, and the print magazine’s City Limits section. I’ve got a wife who works for Target Corp. and two kids with single-digit ages. We live in Minneapolis.